Showing posts with label San Miniato. Show all posts
Showing posts with label San Miniato. Show all posts

20 December 2018

San Leonardo da Porto Maurizio

Franciscan monk canonized in 1867


Leonardo survived a life-threatening  illness to devote his life to preaching
Leonardo survived a life-threatening
illness to devote his life to preaching
San Leonardo da Porto Maurizio, whose feast day is celebrated on November 27 each year, was born Paolo Gerolamo Casanova on this day in 1676 in Porto Maurizio, which is now part of the port city of Imperia in Liguria.

Leonardo recovered from a serious illness developed soon after he became a priest and devoted the remaining 43 years of his life to preaching retreats and parish missions throughout Italy.

He was one of the main propagators of the Catholic rite of Via Crucis - the Way of the Cross - and established Stations of the Cross - reconstructions in paintings or sculpture of Christ’s journey to the cross - at more than 500 locations. He also set up numerous ritiri - houses of recollection.

Leonardo was a charismatic preacher who found favour with Popes Clement XII and Benedict XIV, who helped him spread his missions, which began in Tuscany, into central and southern Italy, inspiring religious fervour among the population.

The son of a ship’s captain from Porto Maurizio, the young Paolo was sent to Rome at the age of 13 to live with a wealthy uncle and study at the Jesuit Roman College.

He studied the humanities, rhetoric and philosophy at the Gregorian University and intended to follow a career in medicine. However, while studying he met some Observant Franciscans who lived at the Convent of San Bonaventura al Palatino - known also as the Riformella - and decided to join them.

Leonardo was a charismatic personality whose preaching persuaded many Italians to devote their lives to faith
Leonardo was a charismatic personality whose preaching
persuaded many Italians to devote their lives to faith
His uncle was not happy, but his father approved and, at 21, Paolo entered the novitiate at Ponticelli Sabino in the Sabine Hills, north of Rome, taking the name of Fra Leonardo - Brother Leonard.

Leonardo completed his studies at San Bonaventura and, after his ordination, he remained there as a professor. It was at that stage that he fell ill, with what has been described as a bleeding ulcer. He was sent back to his home town on the basis that the Ligurian climate might give him a better chance of recovery. Eventually, after being cared for at a monastery of the Franciscan Observants, he was restored to health, although it took four years.

He began to preach in Porto Maurizio and the vicinity before being sent to the monastery of San Miniato near Florence, called Monte alle Croci, shortly after Cosimo III de' Medici had handed it over to the members of the Riformella.

His missions to the people in Tuscany produced startling results, with a large number of conversions, and it was as a means of keeping alive the religious fervour he had awakened that he promoted the Stations of the Cross.

The Convent of San Bonaventura al Palatino, where Leonardo died, had been a constant in his life
The Convent of San Bonaventura al Palatino, where Leonardo
died, had been a constant in his life
In 1710 he founded the Convento dell’Icontro - the first of his ritiri - on a peak in the mountains about 7km (4 miles) outside Florence, where he and his assistants could retire from time to time after missions, and devote themselves to spiritual renewal.

By 1720, he was taking his celebrated missions into Central and Southern Italy, after which Clement XII and later Benedict XIV asked him to work in Rome.

Benedict XIV, in fact, gave him several difficult diplomatic assignments, in volatile Genoa and Corsica - then part of the Republic of Genoa - Lucca and Spoleto. In all cases, citizens expecting a rich cardinal as the papal emissary were taken aback that a humble, shoeless friar should be the man sent to help resolve their differences.

Leonardo was also at times employed as spiritual director by Maria Clementina Sobieska of Poland, the wife of James Stuart, the Old Pretender.

Amid rumours of his failing health, in November 1751 Benedict XIV recalled Leonardo from Bologna, where he was preaching, to return to Rome. He arrived at the monastery of San Bonaventura al Palatino on the evening of November 26 and died a few hours later.

His remains lie under the high altar there. Pope Pius VI beatified him in 1796 and Pope Pius IX canonised him in 1867. Nowadays, he is the patron saint of those who preach parish missions.

In 1873, one of the first Catholic churches in the United States to be built by Italian immigrants, in Boston, Massachusetts, was named in his honour.

Mist filling the valleys around Collevecchio, one of many beautiful towns in the Sabine Hills in Lazio
Mist filling the valleys around Collevecchio, one of many
beautiful towns in the Sabine Hills in Lazio
Travel tip:

The Sabine Hills around the city of Rieti, about 80km (50 miles) north of Rome, remains generally an unspoiled rural area, with characteristic rolling hills covered by olive groves and fruit orchards and dotted with medieval hilltop villages and castles.  Among the most beautiful of those medieval villages, all of which have impressive defensive walls, ornately decorated renaissance palaces and churches and picturesque piazzas are Toffia, Fara Sabina, Farfa, Bocchignano and Montopoli.  The area is famous for its extra virgin olive oil, the first in Italy to receive the DOP denomination (Protected Designation of Origin).


The shoreline of Porto Maurizio in Liguria, where Leonardo was born Paolo Casanova in 1676
The shoreline of Porto Maurizio in Liguria, where Leonardo
was born Paolo Casanova in 1676
Travel tip:

Porto Maurizio, where San Leonardo was born, lost its identity somewhat in 1923 when Mussolini created the city of Imperia by combining Porto Maurizio and Oneglia, towns on the Riviera Poniente separated by the Impero river, with several surrounding villages.  Imperia’s economy is mainly based on tourism and the food industry, as a producer of olive oil and pasta. Porto Maurizio was originally a Roman settlement, Portus Maurici. Napoleon Bonaparte stopped for a night in Porto Maurizio during the Napoleonic Wars.  The town has a classical cathedral, dedicated to San Maurizio, which was built by Gaetano Cantoni and completed in the early 19th century. The Convent of Santa Chiara was first established in 1365.


More reading:

Pope Clement XII and the competition that resulted in the Trevi Fountain

Bendict XIV - the intellectual pope

Luigi Guido Grandi - monk and mathematician

Also on this day:

1856: The death of Sicilian patriot Francesco Bentivegna

1947: The birth of singer Gigliola Cinquetti

1948: The birth of Giuliana Sgrena, war reporter


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8 November 2018

Paolo Taviani - film director

Half of a successful partnership with brother Vittorio


Paolo Taviani has been active in Italian cinema for more than 60 years
Paolo Taviani has been active in Italian
cinema for more than 60 years 
The film director Paolo Taviani, the younger of the two Taviani brothers, whose work together won great acclaim and brought them considerable success in the 1970s and 80s in particular, was born on this day in 1931 in San Miniato, Tuscany.

With his brother Vittorio, who was two years his senior and died in April of this year, he wrote and directed more than 20 films.

Among their triumphs were Padre Padrone (1977), which won the Palme d’Or and the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) prize at the Cannes Film Festival, La notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982), which won the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes, and Caesar Must Die (2012), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.

The brothers famously would work in partnership, directing alternate scenes, one seldom criticising the other, if ever. The actor Marcello Mastroianni, who starred in their 1974 drama AllonsanfĂ n, is said to have addressed the brothers as “Paolovittorio.”

They were both born and raised in San Miniato by liberal, anti-Fascist parents who introduced them to art and culture. Their father Ermanno, a lawyer, would take them to watch opera as a reward for getting good grades at school.

Paolo Taviani (right) with his brother Vittorio. They  worked as a partnership until the latter's death in 2018
Paolo Taviani (right) with his brother Vittorio. They
worked as a partnership until the latter's death in 2018
After the Second World War, in which San Miniato suffered badly at the hands of the occupying Germans, they both attended university in Pisa, where Paolo studied liberal arts and Vittorio read law.

While there, they saw Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist picture Paisan, about the Allied liberation of Italy. Its portrayal of what they described as their “own tragedy” had such a profound effect on them that they vowed to be making their own films within a decade.

Indeed, their first work, a short documentary film made in 1954 entitled San Miniato, July 1944, produced with the help of one of neorealism’s most famous scriptwriters, Cesare Zavattini, was the true story of a massacre carried out by the Nazis inside the town’s cathedral in revenge for the death of a German soldier.

They worked with the Dutch director Joris Ivens on another documentary, L'Italia non è un paese povero (Italy is Not a Poor Country), before teaming up with Valentino Orsini on two feature films, Un uomo da bruciare (A Man for Burning, 1962) and I fuorilegge del matrimonio (Outlaws of Love, 1963).

Padre Padrone (1977) was one of the brothers' most successful films
Padre Padrone (1977) was one of the
brothers' most successful films
Their first film in their own right was I sovversivi (The Subversives, 1967), a story of four members of the Italian Communist Party which anticipated the unrest of 1968. They hired Gian Maria Volontè, who had starred in Un uomo da bruciare, for the lead role in Sotto il segno dello scorpione (Under the Sign of Scorpio, 1969), which had the critics comparing their work with Bertolt Brecht, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean-Luc Godard.

They won praise for their literary adaptations, including in San Michele aveva un gallo (St Michael Had a Rooster, 1972), adapted from Tolstoy’s Divine and Human, and also Kaos (1984) and Tu ridi (You Laugh, 1998), both based on stories by Luigi Pirandello. 

After Padre Padrone, their career reached another big moment with La notte di San Lorenzo, a wartime drama based in part on their own early lives and drawing on their own documentary, set in 1944 in a Tuscan village poised to be snatched away from the Germans by approaching US troops.

Some of their later work was less well received by they scored another major success with Caesar Must Die, an unorthodox adaptation of Julius Caesar shot inside Rebibbia prison in Rome and performed by hardened lifers, many of them former mafia and Camorra hitmen. The film won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2012 and was selected as the Italian entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 85th Academy Awards, although it did not make the final.

Their last work as a partnership, Una questione privata (Rainbow: A Private Affair, 2017), won an Italian Golden Globes as Best Actor for Luca Marinelli.

Still active in Italian cinema, Paolo Taviani presented a lifetime achievement award to his fellow director Martin Scorsese - at 75 some 11 years his junior - at the Rome Film Festival last month.

Crowds at San Miniato's white truffle  festival, guarded by the Tower of Federico
Crowds at San Miniato's white truffle
festival, guarded by the Tower of Federico 
Travel tip:

San Miniato, where Taviani was born, is a charming town perched on a hill halfway between Florence and Pisa. Both cities fought to control it for two centuries. With a picturesque medieval centre built around the Fortress of Federico II and views over the Arno valley, it attracts visitors all year round but one of its busiest times is November, when the annual white truffle festival fills the streets with parades, concerts and artisan vendors. The Diocesan Museum, next to the cathedral, contains works by Filippo Lippi, Jacopo Chimenti, Neri di Bicci, Fra Bartolomeo, Frederico Cardi (known as Cigoli) and Verrocchio.  The church of San Domenico has terracotta works by Luca della Robbia, a fresco attributed to Masolino da Panicale and a burial monument sculpted by Donatello.

The Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa
The Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa
Travel tip:

Pisa, once a major maritime power, is now a university city renowned for its art and architectural treasures and with a 10.5km (7 miles) circuit of 12th century walls. The Campo dei Miracoli, formerly known as Piazza del Duomo, located at the northwestern end of the city, contains the cathedral (Duomo), baptistery and famously the tilting campanile known as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, all built in black and white marble between the 11th and 14th centuries. The Scuola Normale Superiore is one of three universities in Pisa, the others being the University of Pisa and the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna.

More reading:

Roberto Rossellini - the father of neorealism

Marcello Mastroianni - the star who immortalised the Trevi Fountain

How actress Laura Betti became Pier Paolo Pasolini's muse

Also on this day:

1830: The death of Francis I of the Two Sicilies

1936: The birth of acress Virna Lisi

1982: The birth of golfer Francesco Molinari


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8 June 2018

Guido Banti – physician

Doctor was the first to define leukaemia


Guido Banti was among the first doctors to understand the disease process in leukaemia
Guido Banti was among the first doctors to
understand the disease process in leukaemia
The innovative physician and pathologist Guido Banti was born on this day in 1852 in Montebicchieri in Tuscany.

His work on the spleen led him to discover that a chronic congestive enlargement of the spleen resulted in the premature destruction of red blood cells. Closely related to leukaemia, this was later named 'Banti’s disease' in his honour.

Banti’s father was a physician and sent him to study medicine at the University of Pisa and the Medical School in Florence.

He graduated in 1877 and was appointed an assistant at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova and also as an assistant in the laboratory of Pathological Anatomy.

The ability to observe patients in bed and then carry out post mortem examinations was to prove fundamental to his work.

Within five years he had become chief of medical services. In 1895, after a five year spell in a temporary post he was appointed Ordinary Professor of Pathological Anatomy in the medical school in Florence. He remained in this post for 25 years.

Banti published the first textbook in Italy on the techniques of bacteriology in 1885.

Banti worked for a while at the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital, the oldest still-active medical institution in Florence
Banti worked for a while at the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital,
the oldest still-active medical institution in Florence
He studied and also wrote about heart enlargement, the causes of aphasia and hyperplastic gastritis. He spent three years studying cancer cells and published a study of typhoid fever.

In 1895 he wrote about endocarditis and nephritis and atherosclerosis of the kidney.

He studied enlargement of the spleen and wrote a paper describing the condition that would become known as Banti’s disease. He proposed that the enlarged spleen was the cause of red cell destruction which led to anaemia and that only removal of the spleen could stop this process. On his advice, the first splenectomy for haemolytic jaundice was carried out in Florence in 1903.

Banti’s name is still primarily connected with leukaemia and he opposed the views of other scientists about the disease. In 1913 Banti decided that leukaemias are systemic diseases arising from the haematopoietic structures, bone marrow and lymph glands and are the result of the uncontrolled proliferation of staminal blood cells. This accords closely with the modern definition of leukaemia.

Banti died in Florence in 1935 aged 72.

The Church of Santa Lucia in Montebicchieri
The Church of Santa Lucia in Montebichieri
Travel tip:

Montebichieri, where Guido Banti was born, is a village to the southwest of San Miniato in the province of Pisa in Tuscany. In the centre of the village is the 14th century Church of Santa Lucia and a tower and parts of the original walls still survive from the medieval fortifications. Many of the houses are now empty and abandoned.

The bust of Guido Banti at the Florence Institute
The bust of Guido Banti at
the Florence Institute
Travel tip:

There is a bust of Guido Banti in the Institute of Anatomy and Pathology in Florence.  The Institute, established in 1824, is famous for its collection of wax pathological models created in the 19th century, which were invaluable teaching tools in medical schools, where living examples, cadavers, and other visual aids of many pathologies were often scarce. One of the most famous pieces in the museum is the 1851 “leper” model by artist Luigi Calamai.  The museum, which was originally housed at the University of Florence, was moved to the city’s Careggi Hospital in 1859.

Also on this day:

1671: The birth of Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni

1823: The birth of Pompeii archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli

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21 September 2016

Cigoli – painter and architect

First artist to paint a realistic moon


Cigoli's fresco at the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore shows  the Madonna standing on a pock-marked crescent moon
Cigoli's fresco at the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore shows
 the Madonna standing on a pock-marked crescent moon
The artist Cigoli was born Lodovico Cardi on this day in 1559 near San Miniato in Tuscany.

He became a close friend of Galileo Galilei, who is said to have regarded him as the greatest painter of his time. They wrote to each other regularly and Galileo practised his drawing while Cigoli enjoyed making astronomical observances.

Cigoli painted a fresco in the dome of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome depicting the Madonna standing upon a pock-marked lunar orb, exactly as it had been seen by Galileo through his telescope.

This is the first example still in existence of Galileo’s discovery about the surface of the moon being portrayed in art. The moon is shown just as Galileo had drawn it in his astronomical treatise, Sidereus Nuncius, which published the results of Galileo’s early observations of the imperfect and mountainous moon.

Until Cigoli’s fresco, the moon in pictures of the Virgin had always been represented by artists as spherical and smooth.

Cigoli's Martyrdom of St Stephen is in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence
Cigoli's Martyrdom of St Stephen is in
the Uffizi Gallery in Florence
Lodovico Cardi was born at Villa Castelvecchio di Cigoli, and was therefore commonly known as Cigoli.

He trained as an artist in Florence under the Mannerist painter Alessandro Allori. But he later discarded Mannerist principles and painted to express his own feelings and ideas.

Cigoli also worked with the architect Bernardo Buontalenti in Florence and the imposing inner courtyard of the Palazzo Nonfinito in the city is believed to have been designed by Cigoli.

He painted a version of Ecce Homo for a Roman patron, which was subsequently taken by Napoleon to the Louvre in Paris. It was later restored to Florence and can now be seen in Palazzo Pitti.

Also for the Pitti Palace, Cigoli painted a Venus and Satyr and a Sacrifice of Isaac.

He became so famous and admired that when he travelled to Rome he was personally welcomed and greeted by the Florentine ambassador to the city.

For St Peter’s in Rome, Cigoli painted St Peter Healing the Lame. For the Church of San Paolo fuori le mura, he painted an unfinished Burial of St Paul. In a fresco for the Villa Borghese he painted a Story of Psyche.

Among other important Cigoli paintings are his Martyrdom of St Stephen and Stigmata of St Francis, which are both now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Just before Cigoli’s death in Rome in June 1613 he was made a Knight of Malta by Pope Paul V.

The statue of Lodovico Cardi in his home village of Cigoli in Tuscany
The statue of Lodovico Cardi in his home
village of Cigoli in Tuscany
Travel tip:

Villa di Castelvecchio di Cigoli, the artist’s birthplace, is now referred to simply as Cigoli and is a hamlet - frazione - of the town of San Miniato in the province of Pisa in Tuscany. The Bishop’s Sanctuary in San Miniato has a Baroque façade designed by Cigoli.  There is a statue of Lodovico Cardi outside the Santaurio della Madonna Madre dei Bambini. San Miniato is also famous for white truffles and during the last three weeks of November hosts a festival dedicated to the white truffle, which is harvested in the surrounding area and is more highly valued than the black truffles found in other regions of Italy.

Travel tip:

After Cigoli’s death in Rome in 1613, his remains were transferred to Florence and buried in the Church of Santi Michele Arcangelo and Gaetano da Thiene in Via de Tornabuoni. The Church is one of the most important examples of the Baroque style of architecture in the city. Cigoli’s family tomb is between the second and third chapel on the left.

(Photos of Martyrdom of St Peter and statue by Sailko CC BY 3.0)

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