2 June

The death of Giuseppe Garibaldi

Unification hero spent last days on his island off Sardinia

The Italian revolutionary and patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi died on this day in 1882 on the Sardinian island of Caprera.  The 74-year-old former military general and left-wing politician, whose Expedition of the Thousand was a major factor in completing the unification of Italy, had spent much of the last 27 years of his life on the island.  Increasingly confined to bed because of crippling arthritis, he was living on his farm with his third wife, Francesca Armosino, when he passed away.  Knowing he was fading, in the days before his death Garibaldi had asked for his bed to be moved close to a window, from which he could gaze at the emerald and sapphire sea.  He has asked for a simple funeral and cremation, and had even nominated the place on the island where he wished his body to be burned, in an open coffin, with his face to the sun.  He had hoped his ashes would be handed over to ordinary Italians, to be mixed with the earth in a place where a garden might grow as a symbol of the new Italy.  But his wishes were ignored. His body at first remained in his four-poster bed, guarded by a soldier and a sailor, while a succession of people filed past to pay their respects.  Read more…

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Festa della Repubblica

Parades and parties celebrate the birth of the republic

Italy is today celebrating the anniversary of becoming a republic on this day in 1946. Each year the country has a national holiday to commemorate the result of the referendum which sent the male descendants of the House of Savoy into exile.  Following the Second World War and the fall of Fascism, the Italian people were called to the polls to vote on how they wanted to be governed. The result signalled the end for the monarchy.  In normal times, a grand military parade takes place in Rome, attended by the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister.  Many cities throughout Italy hold their own celebrations as the day is an official bank holiday.  In April 1944, the reigning King, Victor Emmanuel III, had relinquished many of his powers to his heir, Crown Prince Umberto.  He finally abdicated in 1946 and Umberto II ascended the throne. It had been thought that Umberto II and his Queen would be more acceptable to the people. But Umberto II has gone down in history as Il Re di Maggio, the King of May, as he reigned for only 40 days before being sent into exile.  Umberto II accepted the results of the referendum magnanimously and his family remained in exile until 2002.  Read more… 

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Roberto Visentini - cyclist

One half of the Giro d’Italia’s most controversial duel

Roberto Visentini, the Italian road racing cyclist who won the 1986 Giro d’Italia but the following year was a central figure in the most controversial race since the historic tour of Italy began, was born on this day in 1957 in Gardone Riviera.  The son of a wealthy undertaker from Brescia, Visentini had been an Italian and a world champion at junior level in 1975 and won the Italian national time-trial championship in 1977 as an amateur, before turning professional in 1978. Despite his success, he was not universally respected by his peers, some of whom felt his penchant for fast cars and a playboy lifestyle were not in keeping with what was traditionally a working-class sport.  The Giro was always his focus. Riding for the Inoxpran team, he was runner-up in the 1983 edition behind his fellow countryman Giuseppe Saronni and looked set to win the event two years later, holding the race leader’s pink jersey for nine consecutive stages to the half-way point, only to become unwell, dropping back to finish 49th overall behind the Frenchman Bernard Hinault.  In 1986, now with the Carrera team, Visentini finally claimed the prize as his own.  Read more…

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Nilde Iotti – politician

'The best President of the Republic that Italy never had'

Iotti was the first woman to be elected
president of the Chamber of Deputies

Leonilde Iotti, who was later known as Nilde Iotti and became Italy’s most important and respected female politician, was born on this day in 1920 in Reggio Emilia.

She was both the first female president of the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian parliament and the longest serving, occupying the position from 1979 to 1992. 

One of the 75 politicians who drafted the Italian Constitution, she was a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and its successor, the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) for all of her political career.

Iotti's father, Egidio, was a socialist trade unionist but he died when she was a teenager. Thanks to a scholarship, she was able to attend the Catholic University of Milan. She graduated in 1942 and joined the National Fascist Party, which she was obliged to do in order to become a teacher.

At the same time, she was an underground member of the PCI and during World War II she was an active member of the Resistance movement setting up and leading women’s defence groups.

After the war, Iotti was elected to the Constituent Assembly and was one of the 75 members who drafted the Constitution in 1946.

It was at this time that she started her relationship with the PCI leader, Palmiro Togliatti, who was 27 years older than her. They stayed together until his death in 1964.

Iotti with Palmiro Togliatti, with whom she shared
her life for many years, pictured in Russia

To begin with their relationship was kept secret but, after an attempt on his life in 1948, it became public knowledge. Togliatti was shot three times near Palazzo Montecitorio, the seat of the Italian Chamber of Deputies in Rome. He was seriously wounded and for several days it was not certain that he would survive. He eventually recovered and was able to continue as head of the party until his death.

The Italian people and members of the PCI were opposed to their relationship because Togliatti was married with a son, but the couple remained committed to each other and eventually adopted a child together, Marisa Malagoli, the daughter of a worker killed during a demonstration.

In 1948 Iotti became a member of the Chamber of Deputies and in June 1979 she was elected president, in which position she was also Speaker of the House, gaining re-election in 1983 and 1987 for an unbroken tenure of 13 years.

In 1956 she became a member of the central committee of the PCI and became an integral part of the party leadership. She focused her activity on the relevance of the female role in the workplace and on civil rights. She was particularly involved in the campaign for the 1974 divorce referendum.

Iotti (right) with Marisa Maligola, the orphan she
and Togliatti adopted as a daughter 

In 1991 she supported the transformation of the PCI to the PDS and became a leading member of the renamed party. She was elected to the Chamber of Deputies again in the 1992, 1994 and 1996 elections.

Her name was mentioned in connection with the role of President of the Republic but she was never chosen. She has been widely spoken of as the best President of the Republic that Italy never had.

When Iotti retired in November 1999 due to ill health she had served continuously in the Italian parliament for 53 years.

Nilde Iotti died in Rome in December 1999. Before her state funeral, an all-women guard of honour stood by her coffin in the hall of the Chamber of Deputies where she had spent so much of her life. She was buried in the Cimitero del Verano, next to her lover, Togliatti, which had been her last wish.

The Basilica di San Prospero overlooks
an elegant square in Reggio Emilia

Travel tip:

Reggio Emilia, where Nilde Iotti was born, is an ancient walled city in the region of Emilia-Romagna, 28km (17 miles) southeast of Parma and 32km (20 miles) northwest of Modena. It is the birthplace of the poet, Ludovico Ariosto, and there is a statue of him in the centre of the city and you can see the villa the poet was born in near the municipal building. You can also see a villa outside the town, Il Mauriziano, where Ariosto spent time while he was governing the city on behalf of the Dukes of Ferrara.  Raggio Emilia is believed to have given Italy its tricolore national flag. There are historical records that suggest that a short-lived 18th century republic, the Repubblica Cispadana, had a flag of red, white and green that was decreed in Reggio Emilia in 1797. Notable buildings in the city include the Basilica della Ghiara and the 10th century Basilica di San Prospero, which overlooks the elegant Piazza of the same name.

The Palazzo Montecitorio has housed the Italian
Chamber of Deputies since 1918

Travel tip:

Palazzo Montecitorio in Rome is the seat of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Italian Parliament. The building was originally designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for Ludovico Ludovisi, the nephew of Pope Gregory XV. Following Italian unification, the palace was chosen as the seat of the Chamber of Deputies in 1871 but the building proved inadequate for their needs, with poor acoustics and a tendency to become overheated in summer and inhospitably cold in winter. After extensive renovations had been carried out, with many Stile Liberty touches introduced by the architect Ernesto Basile, the chamber returned to the palace in 1918.

Also on this day:

1598: The death of philosopher Jacopo Mazzoni

1762: The birth of physicist Giovanni Aldini

1886: The death of physician and politician Agostino Bertani

1892: An Italian airship completes the first flight over the North Pole

1991: The Moby Prince disaster

(Basilica di San Prospero picture by Paola da Reggio via Wikimedia Commons)

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Gianni Baget Bozzo – priest and politician

Theologian moved from party to party

Gianni Baget Bozzo during a session of the
European Parliament, where he spent 10 years

Prolific writer, ordained Catholic priest, political activist and one-time MEP Gianni Baget Bozzo - often referred to as Don Gianni - was born on this day in 1925 in Savona in the northern Italian region of Liguria.  He took the name Baget from his mother, who was of Catalan origin but died when he was five, and Bozzo from the two uncles who raised him.

Baget Bozzo was known for supporting parties from both ends of the political spectrum at different times. At one time a Christian Democrat activist, Baget Bozzo was elected as a Member of the European Parliament for the Italian Socialist party in 1984, which led to him being suspended from the priesthood. He was a member of Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia party from 1994.

He wrote many books about Christianity and as a theologian was a follower of the theories of Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.

Baget Bozzo grew up in Genoa where he graduated in law. He studied at the Pontificia Universita Gregoriana in Rome, which was established by Ignatius Loyola in 1551 as a school of grammar, humanity and Christian doctrine. It was more generally referred to as the Roman College. After graduating Baget Bozzo was ordained as a priest in 1949.

Over the years he contributed to many newspapers, in particular La Repubblica and he wrote dozens of books.

Baget Bozzo made regular appearances as a
guest in televised political debates

Among them was one about the Christian Democrats, The Christian Party in Power: the DC of De Gasperi and Dossetti, 1945-1954. He also wrote Catholics and Berlinguer’s letter (Enrico Berlinguer was the leader of the Italian Communist party from 1972 until 1984).

In 1983 with Giovanni Tanassini, he co-authored Aldo Moro: A politician in Crisis 1962-1973. Moro, who was twice elected as Prime Minister of Italy, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades in 1978 and killed after 55 days in captivity.

During the early 1970s Baget Bozzo had been moving closer to the Socialist Party (PSI) and he eventually became a strong supporter of Bettino Craxi.

In 1993 he transferred his allegiance to Berlusconi and became one of his advisers and speech writers.  He had been suspended from the priesthood after becoming an MEP but was readmitted after leaving the European Parliament in 1994. He continued to write about religion and politics until 2006, by which time his output exceeded 70 titles.

Baget Bozzo died in Genoa in 2009 at the age of 84. 

A view of the harbour area in Savona, the third
largest city in maritime Liguria

Travel tip:

The third largest city in Liguria after Genoa and La Spezia, Savona used to be one of the biggest centres of the Italian iron industry, the iron works and foundries providing materials for shipbuilding and railways among other things. It also has a busy port but as well as industrial areas the city has a charming medieval centre containing architectural gems such as the Baroque Cattedrale di Nostra Signora Assunta - behind which is Italy’s other Sistine Chapel, like the Rome version erected by Pope Sixtus IV - and the Fortezza del Priamar, built by the Genoese in 1542 after their conquest of the city and later used a prison. The popes Sixtus IV and Julius II were born in the city and it was there in 1830 that the revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini was imprisoned.   Food specialities include gnocchi with nettles, bardenulla (white polenta flavored with leek and mushrooms) and tagliatelle with mushrooms.

Savona hotels from Booking.com

Il Bigo, the sculpture by Renzo Piano which is a
centrepiece of his old harbour development

Travel tip:

Genoa, wedged between the Ligurian Sea and the Apennine mountains, is a colourful port city with a vibrant character and the home of many outstanding buildings, such as the Romanesque Cathedral of San Lorenzo, with its black-and-white-striped façade and frescoed interior, the Doge's Palace and the 16th century Royal Palace.  The area around the restored harbour area offers a maze of fascinating alleys and squares, enhanced recently by the work of Genoa architect Renzo Piano, and a landmark aquarium, the largest in Italy.  The city’s Piazza de Ferrari, as well as being renowned for its bronze fountain, is surrounded by the headquarters of a number of banks, reflecting the status the city enjoyed at the end of the 19th century as Italy's financial centre, alongside Milan.  

Also on this day:

La Festa della Donna - Women’s Day

1566: The birth of controversial composer Carlo Gesualdo

1949: The birth of singer-songwriter Antonello Venditti

(Picture of Savona by Mariangela Calabria via Wikimedia Commons; Il Bigo by Mirko Bozzato from Pixabay)

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Benedetto Croce – philosopher and historian

Prolific writer opposed the Fascists and supported democracy

Benedetto Croce influenced literature,
philosophy and politics in his lifetime

Benedetto Croce, one of the most important figures in Italian life and culture in the first half of the 20th century, was born on this day in 1866 in Pescasseroli in the region of Abruzzo.

Croce was an idealist philosopher, historian and erudite literary scholar whose approach to literature influenced future generations of writers and literary critics. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 16 times.

He became a Senator in 1910 and was Minister for Education from 1920 to 1921 in the last pre-Fascist government of the so-called Giolitti era. He is also remembered for his major contribution to the rebirth of Italian democracy after World War II.

Croce was born into a wealthy family and raised in a strict Catholic environment.  However, from the age of 16 he gave up Catholicism and developed a personal philosophy of spiritual life.

In 1883, while he was still a teenager, he was on holiday with his family on the island of Ischia when an earthquake struck the town of Casamicciola Terme and destroyed the house they were staying in. His mother, father and sister were all killed, but although he was buried for a long time, he managed to survive.

Croce inherited his family’s fortune and was able to live a life of leisure, devoting his time to philosophy and writing while living in a palazzo in Naples. His ideas began to be publicised at the University of Rome by Professor Antonio Labriola.

After his appointment to the Senate, Croce was a critic of Italy’s involvement in World War I. He left Government office about a year before Benito Mussolini assumed power.

Benedetto Croce (left), with the first president of
the post-War Italian republic, Enrico De Nicola

In 1923, Croce was instrumental in relocating the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III to the Palazzo Reale in Naples.

After Giacomo Matteotti was assassinated by the Fascists in 1924, Croce was one of the signatories to the manifesto of the anti-Fascist intellectuals and he provided financial support to anti-Fascist writers.

His home and library in Naples were ransacked by the Fascists in 1926 and he was put under surveillance. No mainstream newspaper or academic publication was allowed to refer to him.

Croce kept a diary during World War II entitled ‘Quando l’Italia era tagliato in due (When Italy was cut into two)’.

He made daily entries in this diary between July 1943 and June 1944. He had left his home in Naples, Palazzo Filomarino della Rocca, and gone to Sorrento to escape the Allied air raids.

He was staying in the Villa Tritone, a clifftop residence in Via Marina Grande overlooking the sea. The Germans entered and occupied Naples during September and on 12 September the Germans rescued Mussolini - who had been overthrown by the Fascist Grand Council and held captive - from his prison on Gran Sasso in the mountains of Abruzzo with a glider-borne team.

The entrance to Villa Tritone on Via Marina Grande
in Sorrento, where Croce moved during World War II

On 13 September, Croce writes that he has been receiving anonymous threats. The following day he reports that there were lots of Fascists roaming the streets of Sorrento.

He is advised to leave the Villa Tritone immediately to avoid being taken hostage by Fascists who would use him for propaganda purposes.

The next day’s entry was written by him on Capri. Croce reports that a floating mine was found in the sea below the villa and it was thought the retreating Germans might have been planning to come and take him as they had taken other prominent Italians in Salerno.

A motorboat was sent for him and his daughters from Capri, which was at the time firmly in Allied hands. The family were able to use the stairs that led from Villa Tritone down to the beach to get away. On board were a police commissioner from Capri and an English army officer who had been tasked with rescuing him. 

The boat returned to Sorrento later to collect Croce’s wife and another of his daughters who had stayed behind to pack up their possessions. On board were the same police commissioner and Major Munthe, the son of Axel Munthe, the Swedish doctor who was a Capri resident for a large part of his life and was famous for his best-selling memoir, The Story of San Michele. The Fascist and German radio stations broadcast that ‘Croce and others’ were to be severely punished, but the Allies were able to counter this by broadcasting that the philosopher was now safely on Capri.

When democracy was restored in Italy in 1944, Croce became a minister in the governments of Pietro Badoglio and Ivanoe Bonomi.

He voted for the Monarchy in the Constitutional referendum in 1946. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly that existed until 1948 but he declined to stand as provisional president of Italy.

Croce’s philosophical ideas were expressed in more than 80 books and 40 years worth of articles in his own literary magazine, La Critica. His theories were later debated by many Italian philosophers, including Umberto Eco.

Croce was President of PEN International, the worldwide writer’s association, from 1949 until his death in Naples in 1952.

His widow and daughters established the Fondazione Biblioteca Benedetto Croce in the Palazzo Filomarino della Rocca in 1955. The street on which the palazzo stands is now named Via Benedetto Croce.

The Palazzo Reale in Naples, which houses the
Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III

Travel tip:

The Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III, a national library of Italy, now occupies the eastern wing of the 18th century Palazzo Reale in Naples as a result of efforts made on its behalf by Benedetto Croce in the 1920s. It houses nearly one and a half million printed volumes, as well as hundreds of thousands of pamphlets, manuscripts and periodicals. The library had been founded in the 18th century in the Palazzo degli Studi but after various collections were added to it, following the suggestion of Croce, the library was moved to Palazzo Reale and installed in accommodation granted to it by King Victor Emmanuel III.

Hotels in Naples from Booking.com

A plaque on the exterior wall of the
Villa Tritone commemorates Croce's stay

Travel tip:

A plaque on the exterior wall of Villa Tritone in Sorrento records the residence there during World War II of Benedetto Croce ‘when Italy was cut in two’. A villa had been built on the site in the first century AD by Agrippa Postumus, grandson of Emperor Augustus, and Ovid was said to have been a frequent visitor. This became the site of a convent in the 13th century and then the land was purchased in the 19th century by Count Labonia and the present villa was built. At the beginning of the 20th century William Waldorf Astor bought the villa and designed the garden behind it with windows cut in the high wall on the seaward side to give views of the sea and Vesuvius across the bay.

Book your stay in Sorrento with Booking.com

More reading:

How Mussolini's thugs kidnapped and murder brave politician Giacomo Matteotti

The controversial general who turned against Mussolini

Political philosopher who defined Right and Left in simple terms

Also on this day:

1626: The death of painter Enea Salmeggia

1683: The birth of pathological anatomist Giovanni Battista Morgagni

1707: The birth of playwright Carlo Goldoni

1873: The birth of opera singer Enrico Caruso

2003: The death of comic actor Alberto Sordi

(Picture credit: Palazzo Reale by Vitold Muratov via Wikimedia Commons)

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Italy elects its first parliament

1861 vote preceded proclamation of new Kingdom

Count Camillo Benso di Cavour was
named Italy's first prime minister

Italians went to the polls for the first time as a nation state on this day in 1861 to elect a parliament in anticipation of the peninsula becoming a unified country.

The vote was a major milestone in the Risorgimento - the movement to bring together the different states of the region as one country - enabling there to be a parliament in place the following month and for deputies to declare Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia as the first King of Italy in March.

The first parliament convened in Turin as Rome remained under the control of the Papal States until it was captured by the Italian army in 1870.

The body comprised 443 deputies representing 59 provinces. Some provinces, such as Benevento, near Naples, elected just one deputy, whereas the major cities elected many more. Turin, for example, chose 19 deputies, Milan and Naples 18 each.

The eligibility rules were so specific that of a population of around 22 million, only 418,696 people were entitled to vote.

In line with the procedures set down in the electoral laws of the Kingdom of Sardinia, only men could vote - women were not fully enfranchised in Italy until 1945 - and only men aged 25 and above who were literate and paid a certain amount of taxes, in most cases at least 40 lire per year. 

The new parliament proclaimed
Victor Emmanuel II as king

The election was in two stages, the voting on 27 January being followed by, where necessary, a second ballot a week later on 3 February.  A second vote took place only when no candidate received more than 50 per cent of the vote or the equivalent of one-third of the registered voters in the constituency.

Of the 418,696 who could have voted, only 239,583 actually did and 10,000 votes were declared invalid, which meant that the first government was decided by barely one percent of the population.  The turnout was not helped by the Pope demanding that Catholics take no part.

In the absence of political parties as would be recognised today, the candidates representing blocs according to their values.

The group known as the Destra Storico - the Historical Right - comprised conservatives and monarchists and was led by Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, the former prime minister of Sardinia, an experienced statesman who had been an important figure in the drive to unification.

Against the Right, the Sinistra Storica - the Historical Left - was made up of liberals and centrists, led by Urbano Rattazzi.

The election was also contested by the Historical Far Left - also known as the Partito d’Azione - the radical grouping led by the revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini and with which Giuseppe Garibaldi also alligned himself.

Mazzini and Garibaldi were also key figures in the Risorgimento, but in a different way from Cavour.  Mazzini, often described as the movement's ideological inspiration, had been behind many uprisings from the 1830s onwards as Italians rebelled against the rule of oppressive foreign powers and Garibaldi led the military campaign to unite the peninsula. Mazzini, in particular, wanted the new country to be a republic.

Mazzini's party was not
widely supported

In the event, perhaps not surprisingly given the natural political alliances of those eligible to vote, Mazzini’s group polled a mere 2.3 percent of the popular vote, which swung heavily behind Cavour’s Historical Right, which received 46.1 percent against 20.4 percent for Rattazzi’s Historical Left.

Cavour was duly elected prime minister and parliament convened for the first time on 4 March in Turin, where 13 days later they proclaimed the new Kingdom of Italy and confirmed Victor Emmanuel as the first monarch.

As King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel had appointed Cavour as prime minister of Sardinia-Piedmont. The new king’s insistence on ruling as Victor Emmanuel II - as he had called himself in Sardinia in respect of his ancestor Victor Emmanuel I - upset some factions, who felt it implied that Italy was actually ruled by the House of Savoy.

Cavour’s term in office proved to be brief, in the event, as the stress of the job, dominated by the question of how to bring Rome and Venice into the new kingdom to make it fully unified, took its toll. He succumbed to malaria and died after only 75 days in office, at the age of just 50.

Palazzo Carignano, birthplace of the King, where
Italy's first parliament met in 1861

Travel tip:

The first Italian parliament met in Palazzo Carignano in Turin, the house in which Victor Emmanuel II was born. Designed by the Piedmontese architect Guarino Guarini, the Baroque palace in Via Accademia delle Scienze dates back to 1679. It now houses the National Museum of the Risorgimento, the biggest of 23 museums in Italy devoted to the movement.  The building has a lavish interior with many frescoes, some by Stefano Legnani, a painter of the Baroque period who was known in his native Milan as Legnanino.

The medieval Grinzane Castle was Cavour's
home for 31 years until his death

Travel tip:

Camillo Benso di Cavour, Italy’s first prime minister, hailed from a background in Turin nobility. He was the second son of the fourth Marquess of Cavour and for a large part of his life lived at the 13th century castle of Grinzane Cavour near Turin, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Born in 1810, Cavour lived there from 1830 until his death in 1861. During his stays there he restored the building and improved the cultivation of the vines in the area. Today, the castle has rooms dedicated to Cavour as well as the Cavour Regional Enoteca, which showcases the best wines produced in the region.

More reading:

How Giuseppe Mazzini was the ideological inspiration for the Risorgimento

Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand

How the capture of Rome completed Italian unification

Also on this day:

98: Trajan becomes Emperor of Rome

1881: The birth of mobster Frank Nitti

1901: The death of composer Giuseppe Verdi

1962: The birth of composer and film director Roberto Paci Dalò

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Find out more:

A Concise History of Italy, by Christopher Duggan. Buy from

(Picture credit: Grinzane Castle by Sbisolo via Wikimedia Commons)

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Loredana Marcello – Dogaressa of Venice

Doge’s wife developed treatments for plague sufferers

Loredana Marcello developed 
treatments for plague in Venice

Loredana Marcello, who became a Dogaressa of Venice as she was the wife of Doge Alvise I Mocenigo, died on this day in 1572.

A scholar and writer, Loredana developed treatments to help people suffering from the horrific symptoms of the plague. These were put to good use during the deadly outbreak that brought Venice to a standstill in 1575, three years after her death.

Loredana was the daughter of Giovanni Alvise Marcello. She received a good education, along with her sisters, Bianca, Daria and Maria. They were all considered by the nobility in Venice to represent the ideal of the educated Renaissance woman.

Loredana wrote letters and poetry and also studied botany, under Melchiorre Giulandino, a custodian of the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua and the first to occupy the chair in botany at the university.

As part of her research into plants, Loredana developed formulas and recipes to help plague sufferers, but unfortunately all her written work has been lost.

She married Alvise I Mocenigo in 1533. He was elected Doge of Venice in 1570 but Loredana’s time living in the Doge’s Palace didn’t last very long as she died on 12 December 1572.

Tintoretto's painting Doge Alvise Mocenigo and
 Family before the Madonna and Child
 

According to John Edgcumbe Stayley in his book The Dogaressas of Venice: The wifes of the Doges, Loredana is remembered as being ‘remarkable for her constancy, both in the experiences of adversity and in the distractions of prosperity, judicious and discreet in the supervision of her household, reverent and charitable in her church duties, benevolent to her relatives and her dependents, in a word, she was a most virtuous and noble Princess.’

It has been suggested Loredana died from the plague herself, but this is not certain.

One of the worst outbreaks of plague in the city’s history began in the summer of 1575, nearly three years after her death, and killed a third of the city’s 170,000 inhabitants before it petered out in the middle of 1577.

The Basilica di San Giovanni e
Paolo, where Loredana is buried

Venice went into lockdown, using similar measures to the ones currently being used to stop the spread of Covid 19.

Preaching and church services were stopped, shops, inns and taverns were closed and people were not allowed to congregate in the streets.

Venice became eerily quiet with vessels going back and forth to the lazzaretti, the plague hospitals out on the islands, being the only traffic seen out in the lagoon.

Although Loredana’s research into plague treatments is now no longer in existence, it went on record that her treatments were used on plague sufferers during this outbreak.

Loredana’s husband was the first of three doges named Alvise Mocenigo.

He became severely depressed after Loredana’s death and committed suicide in 1577 by hanging himself.

He was interred in the Basilica di San Giovanni e Paolo, the traditional burial place of the doges, in a tomb alongside his wife.

The Doge's Palace occupies a position next to St
Mark's Basilica overlooking the lagoon

Travel tip:

The Doge’s Palace, where Loredana lived for the last two years of her life, was the seat of the Government of Venice and the home of the Doge from the early days of the republic. For centuries this was the only building in Venice entitled to the name palazzo. The others were merely called cà, short for casa. The current palazzo was built in the 12th century in Venetian Gothic style, one side looking out over the lagoon, the other side looking out over the piazzetta that links St Mark’s Square with the waterfront. The palace opened as a museum in 1923 and is now run by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.

The Botanical Garden of the University of Padua
is a UNESCO World Heritage Site

Travel tip:

It is possible that Loredana Marcello may have visited Padua’s Botanical Garden (Orto Botanico) as it was created in 1545. Thought to be the world’s first botanical garden, it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The garden, which still belongs to the University of Padua, is in Via Orto Botanico close to Prato della Valle, a main square where there is a tram stop. When it was founded, the garden was devoted to the growth of medicinal plants that could provide natural remedies. The garden was designed by Bergamo architect Andrea Moroni as a circle enclosing a square divided into four quadrants, in which the plants were grown. Normally the Botanical Garden is open to the public every day but it is currently closed due to the Covid 19 pandemic.

Also on this day:

1685: The birth of composer Lodovico Giustini

1889: The death, in Venice, of poet Robert Browning

1901: Marconi receives the first transatlantic radio signal

1957: The birth of novelist Susana Tamaro

1969: The Piazza Fontana bombing

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Ippolito Nievo - writer and patriot

Risorgimento novel now seen as an overlooked classic

Ippolito Nievo (above) fought with 
Garibaldi in the cause of unification

The writer Ippolito Nievo, whose posthumously published Confessions of an Italian is now considered the most important novel about the Risorgimento in Italian literature, was born on this day in 1831 in Padua.

Nievo, who was a passionate supporter of the move to unify Italy in the 19th century, drew inspiration from his participation in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Spedizione dei Mille - the Expedition of the Thousand - which sought to achieve that goal.

He died for the cause at the age of just 29, perishing in a shipwreck while transporting important documents from Palermo to Naples.

His legacy was preserved in his most famous novel, in which the central character and narrator shares Nievo’s passions. Nievo completed the work in 1858 but it was not until 1867, six years after his death, that it found a publisher.

Nievo was born into comfortable circumstances.  His father was a prominent lawyer and magistrate in Padua and his mother the daughter of a Friulian countess.  Their home in Padua was the Palazzo Mocenigo Querini, a 16th century house overlooking Via Sant’Eufemia, close to the city centre. 

They also had use of his mother’s ancestral home, a castle in Colloredo di Montalbano, a hamlet just outside the city of Udine in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and of the Palazzo Nievo in Mantua. 

Nievo was inspired by the political goals
of revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini

From 1832 to 1837, when Nievo was a small child, they lived in a house adjoining the Palazzo della Giustizia in Soave, about 60km (37 miles) from Padua, where his father was posted as a judge.  By the late 1840s, Nievo was becoming increasingly fascinated by the writings of Carlo Cattaneo and Giuseppe Mazzini, two of the central philosophical drivers of the Risorgimento.

He is thought to have taken part in a failed uprising in Mantua in 1848, a year marked by a series of insurrections inspired by Italian nationalists seeking to overthrow the Austian grip on the north of the country.  He had been inspired by conversations with his maternal grandfather, Carlo Marin, who had been a prominent official of the Venetian Republic when it fell to the Austrians in 1797.

Nievo refused to follow his father into the law as he felt it would imply submission to the Austrian government and instead pursued a career in journalism.

His political activity intensified in the late 1850s, when he joined Garibaldi’s Cacciatori delle Alpi, a brigade of volunteers fighting to liberate Lombardy, and then participated in the Expedition of the Thousand, given the number 690 in the list of 1,000 patriots.

Nievo embarked in Genoa on 5 May, 1860 setting sail for Sicily. After distinguishing himself in the battle of Calatafimi and in Palermo, he was promoted to colonel and took on administrative assignments, at the same time keeping diaries that served as a chronicle of events. 

It was in this role that he was tasked with bringing back from Sicily all the administrative documents and receipts from the expedition’s expenses. He boarded the steamship Ercole along with other members of the military administration to travel from Palermo to Naples, but during the night between March 4 and 5, 1861, the vessel ran into difficulties off the coast of Sorrento, almost within view of the Bay of Naples, and sank.  There were no survivors.

An English edition of Nievo's
most famous book

It was during the years between these periods of active support for the revolutionary cause that Nievo did the bulk of his writing.

Much of this time he spent in retreat in Colloredo di Montalbano, writing a number of novels set in the Friulian countryside, as well as volumes of short stories and poetry.

He began writing his major work at some point in the mid-1850s. The central character is an 83-year-old man, Carlo Altoviti - thought to be based at least loosely on Carlo Marin - who has decided to write down the history of his long life, from an unhappy childhood to romantic entanglements during the siege of Genoa, and fighting in the cause of revolution in Naples. 

Carlo’s twin passions are the dream of a unified, free Italy and his undying love for Pisana, the woman with whom he is obsessed. With characters ranging from drunken smugglers to saintly nuns and scheming priests, as well as real figures such as Napoleon and Lord Byron, it is an epic novel that tells the story of one man's life and the history of Italy's unification.

When Nievo’s supporters found a publisher years after Nievo’s unexpected death, the book was titled Confessioni di un ottuagenario (Confessions of an octogenarian), because Nievo’s intended title was still deemed politically sensitive.  It was changed later to reflect the author’s wishes.

Nievo’s life is commemorated in a number of locations, including Colloredo di Montalbano and Fossalta di Portogruaro, in the Veneto, where the Castello di Fratta, the scene of Carlo Altoviti’s unhappy childhood, was thought to be located.  There is a statue of him in Cordovado, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, where there is a literary park dedicated to his name.

Nievo wrote his masterpiece while in retreat
at the castle in Colloredo di Montalbano

Travel tip:

Colloredo di Monte Albano - known locally as Colloredo di Montalbano - is a small village in Friuli-Venezia Giulia situated about 14km (9 miles) northwest of Udine.  In the 11th century, it was a fief of the Viscounts of Mels, who had received it from the Counts of Tyrol. In 1420, together with all of Friuli, the hamlet was acquired by the Republic of Venice.  The village was severely damaged by the Friuli earthquake in 1976, yet the family castle remains intact.

The Caffè Pedrocchi was at the centre of life for
students and intellectuals in Padua

Travel tip:

Padua’s revolutionary movement had strong links to the city’s Caffè Pedrocchi, a meeting place for business people, students, intellectuals and writers for nearly 200 years. Founded by coffee maker Antonio Pedrocchi in 1831, the café was designed in neoclassical style and each side is edged with Corinthian columns. It quickly became a centre for the Risorgimento movement and was popular with students and artists because of its location close to Palazzo del Bò, the main university building. It briefly became a battleground when the students rose up against the armed Austrians in 1848.  You can still see a hole in the wall of the White Room inside Caffè Pedrocchi made by a bullet fired by an Austro-Hungarian soldier at the students.

Also on this day:

1466: The birth of military commander Andrea Doria

1485: The birth of poet and stateswoman Veronica Gambara

1954: The birth of actress Simonetta Stefanelli

1957: The death of opera singer Beniamino Gigli

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Gianni Vernetti – politician and writer

Ecologist who now provides support for emerging economies

Gianni Vernetti's political roots
were in the Italian Greens

Former centre-left politician Gianni Vernetti was born on this day in 1960 in Turin, the capital city of the Piedmont region of Italy.

While serving in the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian parliament he promoted initiatives on renewable energies and, after he was elected to the Senate, he served as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in Romano Prodi’s government between 2006 and 2008.

Vernetti is married to the television journalist Laura De Donato and they have four children.

In 1985, Vernetti graduated in architecture from the University of Turin and in 1989 obtained a PhD in urban ecology at the University of Milan. For 10 years, between 1985 and 1995, he worked as an architect and urban planner.

As the child of politically active parents - his father, a philosophy professor and ex-partisan and his mother, an architect, were both former members of the Italian Communist Party - it was always likely he would enter politics himself. 

Vernetti was a student protester in the late 1970s and founder-member of the anti-nuclear committee of the town of Trino Vercellese, in Piedmont, later becoming a founder-member of the Federation of Italian Greens.

Vernetti was a prominent
member of the Daisy party

He was elected to Turin city council as a Green in 1990, serving as Deputy Mayor between 1993 and 1999 in charge of public works, environment and sustainable development and urban renovation.

He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 2001 and was a member of the national steering committee of his party, Democracy is Freedom, better known as La Margherita - The Daisy.

After he was elected to the Senate and the centre-left coalition won the general election, he served in the second Prodi government from 2006 to 2008. He coordinated all the Italian initiatives in Afghanistan when Italy was taking part in the NATO military mission. He implemented aid projects in Central Asia and coordinated Italian aid to the countries affected by the 2004 tsunami.

He promoted Italy’s entrance into the Pacific Islands Forum and represented Italy on the UN Human Rights Council.

In 2008, Vernetti was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for a third term, this time on the Democratic Party list and served as a member of the foreign affairs committee and the Italian delegation to the NATO parliamentarian assembly.

Laura De Donato is a presenter
of TG3's Leonardo programme

He decided not to stand for parliament in 2013, but instead founded Geo Solar, a company supporting countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels.

Since 2018, Vernetti has been a columnist on foreign affairs for the Turin newspaper, La Stampa, and in May this year began writing for the Huffington Post.

Laura De Donato has been a journalist with Rai’s TG3 news programmes since 1999. She is a presenter of Leonardo, a show dedicated to investigating topics related to science, technology, health, environment and society.

She met Vernetti when he was 18 and she 15 and they were friends for many years before deciding to get married. They became parents for the first time in 1996.

Turin is renowned for its elegant squares and
a thriving coffee house culture

Travel tip:

The city of Turin, once the capital of Italy and traditionally the seat of the Savoy dynasty, is best known for its royal palaces and as a travel destination benefits from being somewhat overlooked by visitors to Italy, especially new ones, who flock first to Rome, Florence, Venice and Milan. Yet as an elegant, stylish and sophisticated city, Turin has much to commend it, from its many historic cafés to 12 miles of arcaded streets and some of the finest restaurants in Piedmont. Turin’s café culture is concentrated in the area around Via Po, Turin’s famous promenade linking Piazza Vittorio Veneto with Piazza Castello, and nearby Piazza San Carlo, one of the city’s main squares. In the 19th century, these cafès were popular with writers, artists, philosophers, musicians and politicians among others, who would meet to discuss the affairs of the day.

La Stampa is one of
Italy's oldest newspapers

Travel tip:

The Turin newspaper La Stampa, established in 1867 and one of the oldest newspapers in Italy, has since 2012 been produced from one of the most technologically advanced newspaper offices in the world, in Via Lugaro in the San Salvario area of the city, having been previously based for 40 years in Via Marenco . The newsroom has an open space layout in concentric rings, designed so that all the workers can see the entire news production process, from paper to digital.  Its former headquarters is now part of the University of Turin. The ground floor of the newspaper’s new headquarters is now a museum dedicated to the history of the city seen through the pages of its newspaper.

Also on this day:

8BC: The death of the Roman poet Horace

1570: The death of architect Jacopo Sansovino

1758: The death of the castrato singer Senesino

1964: The birth of football manager Roberto Mancini

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Andreotti jail sentence stuns Italy

Ex-prime minister found guilty of conspiracy to murder

Giulio Andreotti in 1979, the
year of his alleged crime

Giulio Andreotti, who was Italy’s prime minister on seven occasions and an almost permanent presence in Italian governments from 1947 until 1992, was handed a 24-year prison sentence on this day in 2002 when a court in Perugia found him guilty of ordering the killing of a journalist.

The verdict was greeted with shock and consternation across Italy given that Andreotti, by then 83 years old, had been acquitted of the charge in the same courtroom three years earlier.

The appeal by prosecutors against that acquittal had not been expected to succeed and, in contrast to the original trial, the hearing attracted only modest media interest, with only a handful of reporters present when Andreotti’s fate was announced, at the end of a six-month process.

This time the court ruled that Andreotti had, in fact, conspired with associates in the Mafia to murder journalist Carmine ‘Mino’ Pecorelli, the editor of Osservatore Politico, a weekly political magazine in Rome, who was shot dead on a street in the capital in 1979.

The charge had been based on the evidence of Tommaso Buscetta, the Mafia pentito - or supergrass - who had been the key figure in the so-called Maxi Trial a decade earlier in Palermo, which resulted in convictions for more than 300 mafiosi.

Carmine 'Mino' Pecorelli, the political journalist
Andreotti was accused of having killed

Buscetta, supported by the testimony of other pentiti, claimed that Andreotti arranged for Pecorelli to be killed to prevent the publication of a book containing information relating to the kidnap and murder of former prime minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigades terrorists in 1978 that would probably have ended Andreotti’s career.

The Perugia court also sentenced the Mafia boss Gaetano Badalamenti, then in prison in the United States over his role in the drug trafficking racket known as the Pizza Connection, to 24 years for involvement in the murder, but confirmed the acquittal of four other suspects.

The conviction of Andreotti sparked outrage among his political allies, who called for the overhaul of the justice system on the grounds that the magistrates responsible for investigating alleged crimes involving prominent figures such as Andreotti had become too politicised.

Silvio Berlusconi, who was prime minister at the time of the verdict despite himself being under investigation for alleged corruption, denounced the ruling as a political one by judges who "have tried to change the course of democratic politics and to rewrite the history of Italy."

Andreotti pictured in 2008, 
towards the end of his career

He found support within the Catholic Church, too, as a former leader of the Christian Democratic Party, which dominated Italian politics for half a century.  Cardinal Fiorenzo Angelini, a former Auxiliary Bishop of Rome, seemed to liken Andreotti to Jesus Christ when he said: "Without a doubt, at the end there will be a resurrection."

In the event, after a fashion, there was. The sentence was thrown out by the Italian Supreme Court after a final appeal hearing in 2003. 

Nonetheless, Andreotti’s former glories has faded considerably by the time his political career ended.

A long-running investigation into Andreotti's suspected links with the Mafia ended with no sentence handed down after a court in Palermo decided that, since no links could be proved after 1980, too much time had elapsed for Andreotti to be prosecuted.

And his Christian Democratic Party, whose dominance of Italian politics had run parallel with his, collapsed in 1994 after the mani pulite - clean hands - bribery investigations exposed extraordinary levels of corruption and forced the country into a political reset. 

Andreotti died in Rome in 2013 at the age of 94.

The Palazzo Chigi in Rome is the official
residence of prime ministers of Italy

Travel tip:

During the six and a half years in total that Giulio Andreotti was Italy's prime minister, his official residence was the Palazzo Chigi in Piazza Colonna, a square just off Via del Corso, about equidistant from the Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon. Originally built in 1580 for the Aldobrandini family - Ippolito Aldobrandini was Pope Clement VIII - it was bought by the Chigi family in 1659.  In 1878 it was acquired by the Austro-Hungarian empire to be the residence of their ambassador in Rome before the Italian state took ownership in 1916.

The Piazza della Repubblica is one of the
main squares in Perugia

Travel tip:

Perugia is a city of around 170,000 inhabitants built on a hill in Umbria, of which it is the regional capital.  Established in the Etruscan period, it remained an important city, always a target for invading armies because of its strategic value.  Nowadays, it is home to some 34,000 students at the University of Perugia and is a notable centre for culture and the arts, hosting the world-renowned Umbria Jazz Festival each July. It also hosts a chocolate festival – Perugia being the home of the Perugina chocolate company, famous for Baci.  The artist Pietro Vannucci, commonly known as Perugino, lived in nearby Città della Pieve and was the teacher of Raphael.

Also on this day:

1494: The death of Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

1503: The birth of the Mannerist painter Bronzino

1839: Verdi’s first opera makes its debut

1878: King Umberto I survives assassination attempt

1938: The birth of disgraced tycoon Calisto Tanzi

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