Letizia Moratti – politician and businesswoman

First woman to be Mayor of Milan and head of RAI

Letizia Moratti was a government minister
and the first female Mayor of Milan

Letizia Moratti, one of Europe’s best-known businesswomen and a successful politician, was born on this day in 1949 in Milan.

Married to the oil magnate Gianmarco Moratti, she was chair of the state television network RAI between 1994 and 1996, a minister in former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s second and third administrations and Mayor of Milan between 2006 and 2011.

Born Letizia Maria Brichetto Arnaboldi, her antecedents are the Brichetto family from Genoa, who founded the first insurance brokerage company in Italy, and the noble Arnaboldi family from Milan.  Her grandmother, Mimona Brichetto Arnaboldi, was a society hostess in the 1930s and an outspoken opponent of Fascism.

Letizia attended a private school in Milan and had classical dance classes at the Carla Strauss Academy in the Brera district.  She attended the University of Milan and graduated in political science.

At around the same time, she met Gianmarco Moratti, an oil contractor whose brother, Massimo, a petrochemicals tycoon, is the former chairman of Internazionale.

With funding from the Moratti family, Letizia launched her first business at the age of 25 when she founded GPA, an insurance brokerage which eventually became a subsidiary of the Moratti Group.  In 1990 she joined the board of the Italian Commercial Bank.

Moratti with the president Giorgio Napolitano on
the occasion she was honoured by the state

It was during Silvio Berlusconi’s first administration, in 1994, that she became the first woman to be chair of RAI. During her two years in the role, she supervised radical internal reorganization turned losses into a significant profit.

Moratti joined Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party and served as Minister for Education, Universities and Scientific Research from 2001 to 2006, during which time she introduced reforms in the Italian schools system and in university teaching.

After leaving national government she stood for mayor of her home city in 2006 and won with a 52 per cent share of the vote, which opened the way for her follow her own ideals, particularly in terms of the environment.

The first woman to be elected mayor of the city, she introduced measures to encourage Milanese citizens to ride bicycles, increasing the number of secure places to leave bicycles and making available 5,000 bicycles to rent, and to discourage the use of cars by introducing a congestion charge based on emissions.

During her period in office, she also made a successful bid to have Milan host Expo 2015.

Moratti has been a fervent campaigner
against drug abuse

Moratti failed to win a second term, losing to a left-wing candidate who, ironically, was supported by her brother-in-law, Massimo, who could never quite reconcile his support for his sister-in-law with his opposition to Berlusconi, owner of Inter’s city rivals, AC Milan.

Away from politics, Moratti has been a fervent anti-drugs campaigner. Since 1996 she has been a member of the steering committee of Rainbow - the International Association Against Drugs – and in March 2000 she was appointed Civic Ambassador of the United Nations against Drugs and Crime.

She is the founder of the San Patrignano Foundation, which aims to help drug users find a different path.

Since February 2012, Moratti has been developing microcredit projects aimed at helping disadvantaged people who do not qualify for traditional bank loans.

In January 2014 she was awarded the honour of Grande Ufficiale al Merito della Repubblica Italiana.

She has two children, Gabriele and Gilda, and is currently chair of the management board of UBI Banca.

A typical narrow street in the trendy Brera
district of Milan

Travel tip:

The Brera district of Milan is so named because in around the ninth century, for military purposes, it was turned into a ‘brayda’ – a Lombardic word meaning ‘an area cleared of trees’.  Today, it is one of Milan’s most fashionable neighbourhoods, its narrow streets lined with trendy bars and restaurants, and has been home to artists and writers traditionally, giving it a Bohemian feel that has brought comparisons with Montmartre in Paris.  The Brera is home to the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and the Brera Art Gallery.

Bicycles to rent are a feature of Milan today

Travel tip:

Visitors to Milan by car should note that access to the centre of the city is subject, like London and other major cities, to a congestion charge, introduced during Letizia Moratti’s time as mayor.  The area covers about 8.2 square kilometres and is controlled by entry gates with cameras.  Charges vary for residents and non-residents and the vehicle’s pollution rating. Whereas hybrid and electric cars have benefitted from exemptions, some diesel vehicles are banned.  There are a number of out-of-town car parks with transport access to the centre, where many visitors take advantage of the bicycle rental scheme, also introduced by Letizia Moratti.

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Bud Spencer – swimmer-turned-actor

Competed at two Olympics before turning to screen career

Bud Spencer (right) with Terence Hill in the 1974
comedy Watch Out, We're Mad!

The actor known as Bud Spencer was born Carlo Pedersoli on this day in 1929 in Naples.

He was best known for the series of so-called Spaghetti Westerns and comedies he made with another Italian-born actor, Terence Hill.

Hill was from Venice and his real name was Mario Girotti.  They began their partnership in 1967 in a Spaghetti Western directed by Giuseppe Colizzi called God Forgives…I Don’t! and were asked to change their names so that they would sound more American.

Pedersoli came up with Bud Spencer because his movie idol was Spencer Tracy and his favourite American beer was Budweiser.   The two would go on to make 18 movies together, with westerns such as Ace High (1968) and They Call Me Trinity (1970) winning them box office success.

As Carlo Pedersoli, he had already achieved a measure of fame as a swimmer, the first Italian to swim the 100m freestyle in less than one minute.  He represented Italy at the Olympics in Helsinki in 1952 and Melbourne four years later, on each occasion reaching the semi-final in the 100m freestyle.

He also played professional water polo, winning an Italian championship with SS Lazio and a gold medal at the 1955 Mediterranean Games in Barcelona.

Bud Spencer in 2015

In a rich and varied life, Pedersoli also learned how to fly jets and helicopters, ran his own airline and, at the personal invitation of Silvio Berlusconi, stood as a Forza Italia candidate in regional elections in Lazio in 2005, although he was not elected.

Born in the Santa Lucia area of Naples, Pedersoli showed an aptitude for swimming from an early age.  His family moved to Rome when he was 10 and he began to swim competitively while attending high school.  He attended Rome’s Sapienza University from the age of 17, studying chemistry, but was forced to give up his course when his family moved again, this time to South America.

For two years, he worked at the Italian consulate in Recife, Brazil, and became fluent in Portuguse.

Back in Rome, he made his debut in international swimming competition in 1949 and, after his 59.5 sec 100m freestyle in 1950 he swam for Italy in the European championships in Vienna.  After a silver medal at the 1951 Mediterranean Games in Alexandria (Egypt), he was called up for the Italian Olympic squad.

At the same time, Pedersoli was studying law and taking his first tentative steps in the movie business, landing a part as a Praetorian Guard in in the 1951 MGM epic Quo Vadis, filmed in Italy.

There was no overnight rise to fame.  He married Maria Amato, daughter of the Italian film producer Giuseppe Amato, in 1961, but his career did not take off until that Spaghetti Western offer in 1967.  A distinctive figure, heavily built and with a thick black beard, he quickly became a favourite, particularly for the way his character would end on-screen fights by slamming his fist down on the head of his opponent.

Before he found fame as Bud Spencer the movie star,
Carlo Pedersoli was a Olympic swimmer

He decided he would learn to fly after appearing with Terence Hill in a 1973 adventure comedy called All The Way Boys, in which Colizzi took his two Spaghetti Western characters and placed them in a modern context, as bush pilots in South America, where they made money by faking aircraft crashes for insurance scams.

By 1984, with a licence to fly jets and helicopters, Spencer had set up Mistral Air, an air-mail handler which also flew Catholic pilgrims to sacred religious sites.  He later sold the airline to Poste Italiane, who also operate commercial passenger flights.

Spencer had a number of starring roles on television in the 1990s and continued to make films until well into his 70s.  He died in Rome in 2016, aged 86.  His movies with Terence Hill are still regularly shown on television and he retains an enthusiastic following in several countries around Europe, notably Germany and Hungary.

Via Santa Lucia leads from the Royal Palace
to the waterfront at Castel dell'Ovo

Travel tip:

Santa Lucia is the area of central Naples that can be found between the Royal Palace and Borgo Marinari, the small island on which stands Castel dell’Ovo.  The first settlement there was established by the Greeks and the Roman general Lucullus was so taken with the views across the bay that he built a sumptuous fortified villa, Castellum Lucullanum, that would eventually become the home in exile of the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus.  Nowadays, the area is a mix of grand hotels, sailing clubs and many fine fish restaurants.

Castel dell'Ovo with the yachts and harbourside restaurants
of Borgo Marinari in the foreground

Travel tip:

Castel dell’Ovo was built on the site of the Castellum Lucullanum, which was demolished in the 9^th century. The castle was built by the Normans in the 12^th century and remains the oldest fortified structure in Naples.  It took its name from a legend about the Roman poet Virgil, who in medieval times was thought to have mystical powers.  The legend had it that Virgil placed a magical egg – ouvo in Italian – in the foundations, and that had the egg ever broken then the castle would be destroyed that Naples would suffer a series of catastrophes.

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Antonio Di Pietro – magistrate and politician

Former policeman who led Mani Pulite corruption investigations

Antonio Di Pietro led his own political
party, called Italy of Values

The politician and former magistrate Antonio Di Pietro, who uncovered wide-ranging corruption in the Italian government in a scandal that changed the landscape of Italian politics, was born on this day in 1950 in Molise.

Di Pietro was the lead prosecutor in the so-called Mani Pulite trials in the early 1990s, which led to many politicians and businessmen being indicted and to the collapse of the traditional Socialist and Christian Democratic parties.

The Christian Democrats had been the dominant force in Italian politics since the formation of the Italian Republic at the end of the Second World War but after several high-profile arrests and resignations and poor results in the 1992 general election and 1993 local elections the party was disbanded in 1994.

The Italian Socialist Party was dissolved in the same year following the resignation of party secretary and former prime minister Bettino Craxi, who was the most high-profile casualty in the corruption scandal. It was also known as Tangentopoli, which can be roughly translated as “Bribesville”.

Di Pietro was born into a poor rural family in Montenero di Bisaccia, a hill town in the province of Campobasso in the Molise region.

Ex-PM Bettino Craxi was the major
casualty of the Mani Pulite probe

Eager to better himself, he travelled to Germany as a migrant worker after leaving school, working in a factory in the mornings and a sawmill in the afternoons so that he could save enough money to study law at night school in Italy.

He graduated in with a degree in 1978, becoming first a police officer before joining the judiciary as a prosecuting magistrate, a job in the Italian legal system that is part lawyer and part detective.

Di Pietro was one of a team set up to investigate corruption following the arrest in 1992 of Mario Chiesa, a Socialist politician and hospital administrator in Milan, after he was accused of accepting a bribe from a young entrepreneur in return for awarding his company a cleaning contract.

The three magistrates – Di Pietro, Gherardo Colombo and Pier Camillo Davigo – were dubbed Mani Pulite – “Clean Hands” by the media. Di Pietro soon became the most prominent of the trio. Chosen as the spokesman for the investigating team, he became an instantly recognisable for his strong regional accent and his evident passion for his work.

The investigation became a high-profile news item for a considerable time after Chiesa’s evidence implicated many others on both sides of the Italian political divide, yet critics say it ultimately achieved very little.

Antonio Di Pietro became a famous face in the 1990s

More than half of the 3,000 politicians and businessmen arrested ultimately escaped punishment through legal technicalities. Some walked free after their trials were cancelled because they did not begin within a statutory time limit.

Corruption charges brought against former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi had to be dropped because the statutory time period elapsed.

And while the collapse of the Christian Democrats and Socialists was a seismic event in Italian politics, the individuals involved simply regrouped and rebranded themselves. Analysts say corruption is still rife today.

Di Pietro himself made many enemies, to the extent that he found it necessary to have a personal protection team after threats were made against his life.  Accusations of corruption began to be levelled against him and although none was proved his reputation suffered.

Although around 1,200 convictions resulted from the work of Di Pietro and his team, Mani Pulite eventually petered out and Di Pietro launched his own political career. Building on the experience he gained after the centre-left prime minister Romani Prodi made him Minister for Public Works in 1996, he was elected to the Senate.

He formed his own party, Italia dei Valori (“Italy of Values”) in 2000, standing against corruption, and served in government as Minister of Infrastructures when Prodi was elected again in 2006.

Di Pietro continued under the Italia dei Valori banner until 2014, since when he has been an independent. He was elected a member of the European Parliament in 1999.

Montenero is perched on a hill in Molise

Travel tip:

Montenero di Bissacia is a small town perched on top of a hill in Molise, which is probably the least well known of all Italy’s 20 regions, characterised by a narrow coastal plain – about 15km (9 miles) from Montenero – and a rugged and sparsely populated interior. Campobasso, with around 50,000 inhabitants and about 70km (43 miles) to the south, is the largest population centre in the region, worth visiting for the remains of the 15th century Castello Monforte and a number of interesting churches.  The coastal resort of Termoli, about 23km (14 miles) east of Montenero, has sandy beaches and a walled old town, yet is little known to foreign tourists.

The cathedral at Trivento

Travel tip:

One town in Molise worth visiting for a glimpse of an Italy that no longer exists in many parts of the country is the well-preserved town of Trivento, which features a wide staircase – the Scalinata di San Nicola - of 365 steps linking the new town with the old.  The town is full of narrow alleyways, often decorated with pots of brightly coloured flowers, at the heart of which is the Chiesa di Santi Nazario, Celso e Vittore – Trivento Cathedral – built in the 11^th century.

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Umberto Bossi - politician

Fiery leader of separatist Lega Nord

Umberto Bossi founded Lega Nord in 1991

Controversial politician Umberto Bossi was born on this day in 1941 in the town of Cassano Magnago in Lombardy.

Until 2012, Bossi was leader of Lega Nord (Northern League), a political party whose goal was to achieve autonomy for northern Italy and establish a new independent state, to be called Padania.

With his distinctive, gravelly voice and penchant for fiery, sometimes provocative rhetoric, Bossi won a place in the Senate in 1987 representing his original party, Lega Lombarda. He was dismissed as an eccentric by some in the political mainstream but under his charismatic leadership Lega Nord became a force almost overnight.

Launched as Alleanza Nord in 1989, bringing together a number of regional parties including Bossi’s own Lega Lombarda, it was renamed Lega Nord in 1991 and fought the 1992 general election with stunning results.

With an impressive 8.7% of the vote, Lega Nord went into the new parliament with 56 deputies and 26 senators, making it the fourth largest party in Italy.

By 1996 that share had risen to 10% and Bossi had become a major figure in Italian politics.

Three times he was Silvio Berlusconi’s key ally, helping the former prime minister win power in 1994, 2001 and 2008 - and lose it in the first instance, when his withdrawal of support for Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia-led coalition brought about the government's collapse.

Bossi had a reputation for provocative speeches

Despite that, Bossi served in the next two Berlusconi governments as a minister. In time, he accepted that a secession from Italy was an unrealistic ambition, but he continued to press for greater autonomy for the northern regions and extracted promises from Berlusconi in return for his support.

He was Minister for Institutional Reforms and Devolution from 2001 to 2004 and Minister of Federal Reforms from 2008 to 2011.

Bossi may well have become an even bigger figure on the Italian political stage had he not suffered a serious stroke in 2004, a setback from which he ultimately recovered but which cost him considerable momentum.  Shortly before the illness, he had become a member of the European Parliament.

He resigned as general secretary in 2012, having become embroiled in a financial scandal, with accusations levelled at him by prosecutors that he misappropriated funds directed to Lega Nord through the Italian tax system.

Bossi had become interested in politics while at the University of Pavia, where he studied medicine, through a meeting with Bruno Salvadori, leader of the centre-left Valdostan Union party.  During this time he also had a brief flirtation with a music career, performing as a singer-songwriter under the name of Donato.

Advancing years and the effects of a stroke
did not stop Bossi campaigning

His own political motivations were quite narrow, driven by the perception that the rich north is burdened with subsidising the poorer south.  In 1982, the autonomist Lega Lombarda was born.  Lega Nord emerged from alliances made with similar movements in Veneto and Piedmont, driven by calls to break away from Rome and build a new country called Padania.

Most of Bossi’s firebrand speeches at the time depicted the south of Italy and the capital, Rome – which he dubbed ‘Roma ladrona’ or ‘thieving Rome’ – as a black hole of corruption and waste, relentlessly eating up the taxes of hard-working, decent northerners. He and his fellow Lega Nord politicians brazenly pandered to the pockets of old-fashioned contempt for southerners that still existed in the north of the country.

Apart from southerners, targets for Bossi’s ire included the European Union, which he once described as a "the Soviet Union of the West”, while his outspoken comments on homosexuality and immigration provoked at times fierce reactions.

Married with four children, Bossi voluntarily stepped down as leader during the 2012 investigation, claiming he was doing so “for the good of the party”.  He was immediately made Lega Nord’s honorary president.

Lega Nord supporters gathered in Venice as Bossi made his
1996 'declaration of independence' from a floating pontoon

Travel tip:

Despite the sense of theatre attached to as Umberto Bossi’s symbolic ‘declaration of independence’ for Padania at a rally of green-shirted supporters in Venice in 1996, the ‘country’ of Padania has never existed as anything other than a geographical or socio-economic term to describe the area that encompasses Val Padana – the Po Valley.  There is some evidence also that Padanian was a term once used to group languages spoken by population groups north of a line linking La Spezia in Liguria with Rimini on the Adriatic coast.  Bossi’s Lega Nord tended to define Padania as a broad area of northern Italy consisting of Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria.

A view over the rooftops of Cassano Magnago

Travel tip:

Bossi’s home town of Cassano Magnago is situated about 20km (12 miles) south of Varese in Lombardy, adjoining the city of Gallarate and close to the Valle del Ticino national park.  The area is said to have been populated since around 500BC and there is evidence that it held a strategic position and was the scene of a battle during the Roman conquest of Milan in 225BC. Apart from being Bossi’s birthplace, it is the home of the 18^th century sculptor Giovanni Battista Maino and the two-times Giro d’Italia winner Ivan Basso.

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Romano Prodi – politician

Il Professore became prime minister and European Commission president

Romani Prodi was twice Italy's prime minister

Romano Prodi, who has twice served as prime minister of Italy, was born on this day in 1939 in Scandiano in Emilia-Romagna.

A former academic, who was nicknamed Il Professore by the Italians, Prodi was also president of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004.

Prodi graduated from the Catholic University in Milan in 1961 and studied as a postgraduate at the London School of Economics.

After moving up to become professor of economics at Bologna University, Prodi served the Italian government as minister for industry in 1978.

In 1996 after two productive stints as chairman of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, Prodi set his sights on becoming Italy’s prime minister and built a centre-left base of support known as the Olive Tree coalition.

While Silvio Berlusconi used television to campaign, Prodi went on a five-month bus tour round Italy, calling for more accountability in government. His approach appealed to the voters and his coalition won by a narrow margin.

Prodi was appointed prime minister of Italy for the first time on May 17, 1996.

Silvio Berlusconi twice lost out to
Prodi in Italian elections

He remained prime minister for two years and four months, during which time he privatised telecommunications and reformed the government’s employment and pension policies. He significantly reduced the budget deficit to facilitate the country’s acceptance into the European Monetary Union, a task that had seemed impossible before he took office.

When he lost support from left-wing members of his coalition following disputes over the country’s proposed budget, he had to resign in October 1998.

The following year Prodi was appointed president of the European Commission after the entire 20-member commission was forced to resign following charges of widespread fraud and corruption.

During his five-year term, the EU expanded beyond its western European roots to include Malta, Cyprus and eight other countries.

After his term as president of the European Commission ended in 2004, Prodi returned to Italian politics and campaigned to become prime minister again in 2006, pledging to improve the country’s ailing economy and withdraw troops from Iraq.

Prodi with his wife, Flavia Franzoni

Prodi’s centre-left coalition won a narrow victory over Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right group. Berlusconi initially contested the results but resigned in May 2006.

Prodi’s second term in office lasted one year and eight months until he resigned in January 2008 after losing a confidence vote.

Later that year, Prodi was selected to become president of the African Union-UN peace keeping panel. He is currently serving as the UN Special Envoy for the Sahel.

Prodi has received 20 honorary degrees from institutions in Italy and throughout the rest of the world.

Prodi shares his home town of Scandiano with the biologist
Lazzaro Spallanzani, whose statue in the main square

Travel tip:

Scandiano, where Romano Prodi was born, is in the province of Reggio Emilia in Emilia-Romagna. The town was founded in 1262 when a defensive castle was built and houses later developed round it. Scandiano was ruled by the princes of Este between 1645 and 1796. The current holder of the title of Marquis of Scandiano is Prince Lorenz of Belgium, Archduke of Austria-Este, who is also the Duke of Modena. Since the 1960s the town has been an important centre for the production of tiles.

Travel tip:

Romano Prodi and his wife, Flavia, had two sons, Giorgio and Antonio. The family still lives in Bologna, where Prodi used to teach at the University. Bologna has the oldest university in the world, which was established in 1088 and attracted popes and kings as well as students of the calibre of Dante, Copernicus and Boccaccio. The oldest university building, the Archiginnasio, is open to the public from Monday to Saturday between 9 am and 1 pm, and is admission free.

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Indro Montanelli – journalist

Veteran writer who cast a critical eye on Italian politics and society

Indro Montanelli, in the offices of Corriere della Sera, working
from an improvised chair made from a pile of books

A writer and journalist regarded as one of the greatest of 20th century Italy, Indro Montanelli, died on this day in 2001 in Milan.

The previous year he had been named as one of 50 World Press Freedom Heroes by the International Press Institute.

Montanelli had been a witness to many of the major events of the 20th century. He was in Danzig when Hitler rejected the ultimatum from Britain and France in September 1939. He was in the streets of Budapest in 1956 when Soviet tanks rolled in and he was shot in the legs by Red Brigades terrorists on an Italian street in 1977.

Montanelli was born Indro Alessandro Raffaello Scizogene Montanelli in 1909 at Fucecchio near Florence.

He studied for a law degree at the University of Florence in the early 1920s and began his journalistic career by writing for the Fascist newspaper, Il Selvaggio.

Montanelli in Ethiopia in 1936

He then worked as a crime reporter for Paris Soir before serving as a volunteer with Italian troops in the Eritrean Battalion in Ethiopia - Abyssinia as it was then - where he wrote war reports which later formed the basis for the first of his 40 books. 

It was a book that honestly conveyed what Montanelli had seen, some of which caused him to change his mind about Benito Mussolini, the Fascist leader. It was a little too honest for the Fascist oligarchy, however, and, after his similarly objective reporting on the Spanish civil war did not meet with Fascist approval, his press accreditation was withdrawn.

Despite this, he continued to write, the Corriere della Sera getting around the ban on his working as a journalist by hiring him as a ‘collaborator’, in which capacity he sent back reports from Scandinavia and the Baltic States, the Balkans and Greece.

After witnessing the disastrous Italian invasion of Greece, Montanelli decided to join the partisan movement against the Fascist regime.

During the Nazi occupation of Italy he was arrested and narrowly avoided being executed. His reprieve was thanks to the intervention of some influential admirers who put pressure on the Germans.

His prison experiences inspired him to write a novel, Il Generale della Rovere, based on his meeting in prison with a German spy posing as an Allied military commander, which was later filmed by Roberto Rossellini and won the Venice Golden Lion in 1959.

Montanelli pictred in Milan in 1992

After the war, Montanelli co-edited a magazine called Il Borghese, which tried to cater for what remained of right-wing cultural tastes in a country divided between the Communists and Christian Democrats.

His increasing anger at the Communists was to eventually win the approval of media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, who backed the right-leaning newspaper, Il Giornale, which Montanelli had founded in 1973 after breaking away from Corriere following a change in the paper's political direction.

Montanelli remained as the editor until 1994 when he fell out with Berlusconi after criticising his entry into politics.

The journalist was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 1995.

It was Gianni Agnelli, then proprietor, who persuaded Montanelli to return to Corriere, where he commented on prominent Italians in editorials and on a letter’s page entitled Montanelli’s Room.

He spent his last years vigorously opposing Silvio Berlusconi’s politics.

Montanelli also wrote a series of successful history books, including one about Rome, which became a regular textbook used in schools.

Towards the end of his life, Montanelli lived in an apartment overlooking Piazza Navona in Rome.

He died at the age of 92 after a prostate cancer operation at a clinic in Milan.

The day after his death, Corriere della Sera published a letter he had written on its front page, ‘Indro Montanelli’s farewell to his readers’.

The journalist had also left instructions for his ashes be placed in an urn above his mother’s tomb at Fucecchio.

Montanelli's reputation was tarnished by his admission that he bought a 12-year-old Ethiopian girl to be his wife during Mussolini’s campaign in Ethiopia, in common with other Italian soldiers, who took advantage of local laws that made such marriages legal. Asked about the marriage on a television interview in 1969, Montanelli refused to apologise. 

The house in Piazza Garibaldi in Fucecchio, near
Florence, where Montanelli was born

Travel tip:

Fucecchio, where Indro Montanelli was born, is a municipality  of Florence. One of the major sights in the town is the Abbey of San Salvatore which was built in the upper part of Fucecchio in the 11th century. The town is mentioned frequently in the 1917 opera Gianni Schicchi by Giacomo Puccini.

Travel tip:

Indro Montanelli was among many distinguished Italian writers who worked for Corriere della Sera, a daily newspaper founded in 1876 in Milan. The newspaper’s headquarters have been in the same building in Via Solferino in the centre of Milan since the beginning of the 20th century.

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Franca Rame – actress, writer and politician

Artistic collaborator and wife of Dario Fo

Franca Rame in a publicity shot from a
brief but unsuccessful movie career

The actress and writer Franca Rame, much of whose work was done in collaboration with her husband, the Nobel Prize-winning actor, playwright and satirist Dario Fo, died in Milan on this day in 2013 at the age of 83.

One of Italy's most admired and respected stage performers, her contribution to Dario Fo’s work was such that his 1997 Nobel prize for literature probably should have been a joint award. In the event, on receipt of the award, Fo announced he was sharing it with his wife.

Rame was also a left-wing militant. A member of the Italian Communist Party from 1967, she was elected to the Italian senate in 2006 under the banner of the Italy of Values party, a centre-left anti-corruption grouping led by Antonio di Pietro, the former prosecutor who had led the Mani Pulite (“Clean Hands”) corruption investigation in the 1990s.

Later she was an independent member of the Communist Refoundation Party.  Her political views often heavily influenced her writing, in which her targets tended to be the Italian government and the Roman Catholic Church.  She was also an outspoken champion of women’s rights.

Her politics made her some enemies, however.  In 1973, she was kidnapped at gunpoint on a Milan street by a group of neo-Fascist men who raped and tortured her. When she was released, the group said it was revenge against her and Fo for their political activism.

Franca Rame in 1952, when she began her relationship
with Dario Fo after they met through work

Born in Parabiago, a town of almost 30,000 people in the north-western quarter of the Milan metropolitan area, Rame was the daughter of an actor and a militant socialist father and a strict Catholic mother. She was almost born on the stage, appearing in a performance with her mother when she was only eight days old.

At the age of 18, and with the photogenic looks of a 1950s blonde bombshell, she began a theatre career in Milan. She met Dario Fo when they were members of the same company. Fo was smitten from an early stage and to his surprise and delight the attraction was mutual. They married in 1954 and their son Jacopo, now himself a writer, was born in 1955.

Rame had a brief but only modestly successful movie career before switching her focus to the theatre. As a professional partnership, she and Fo's first hit, Gli Arcangeli non Giacano a Flipper – Archangels Don’t Play Pinball – played at the Odeon theatre in Milan in 1959, where they were subsequently invited to write and perform a new play every year. 

Subsequent successes included Isabella, Tre Caravelle e un Cacciaballe – Isabella, Three Sailing Ships and a Con Man – set in Spain in the early years of the inquisition, in which Rame played Queen Isabella.

Dario Fo with Franca Rame and their son Jacopo

In time, however, they gave up commercial theatre in favour of forming co-operative groups and in 1970 founded their own militant theatre group, La Comune, based at the Palazzina Liberty, an abandoned pavilion. It was there that Rame starred in Fo’s acclaimed Non Si Paga! Non Si Paga! (Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!) and that she wrote and performed in a one-woman show Tutta Casa, Letto e Chiesa (It’s All Bed, Board and Church).

Their relationship was turbulent at times and at one stage she announced their separation. Yet they patched up their differences and even sent themselves up in a play, Coppia Aperta (The Open Couple).

Rame and Fo were particularly despairing of Italy’s support for Silvio Berlusconi when the country shifted to the right in the 1990s, even more when he was granted a return to power in 2001. Their play L’Anomalo Bicefalo (The Two Headed Anomaly), a satire about a political rally in Sicily which features an assassination attempt on Berlusconi and the Russian leader Vladimir Putin, infuriated Berlusconi when Rame’s performance in a comic scene as his wife, Veronica, was praised by Veronica herself.

Her opposition to Berlusconi was part of her motivation for joining forces with Di Pietro, for whom Berlusconi’s scorn had been undisguised during the Mani Pulite trials, prior to her election to the senate.

Rame is buried at the Monumental Cemetery in Milan.

The Prepositurale church in Parabiago

Travel tip:

Parabiago grew as an industrial centre in the 1960s, when its footwear industry, established in the late 19^th century, enjoyed a boom. It became known as The City of the Shoe. Notable churches include the Prepositurale church dedicated to saints Gervasio and Protasio, built in 1610 on the orders of the Bishop of Milan, San Carlo Borromeo. The neoclassical façade, added between 1780 and 1781, was designed by Giuseppe Piermarini. Parabiago is also home to Villa Maggi-Corvini , or simply Villa Corvini, located at the beginning of the historic Via Santa Maria. The villa is part of the Parco Corvini municipal park, which is open to the public.

The Palazzina Liberty used to be the cafeteria-restaurant
at the Verziere market in Milan

Travel tip:

The Palazzina Liberty in Milan’s Parco Vittorio Formentano, on the eastern side of the city centre, was built in 1908 to house the cafeteria-restaurant in the Verziere fruit and vegetable market but fell into disuse when the market moved to a different location. Dario Fo took it over in the 1970s and in 1980 it became home to Milan’s civic orchestra before being renovated in 1992 and opened as a cultural and recreational facility for the city, hosting orchestral concerts, film festivals and poetry events among other things.

More reading:

Enrico Berlinguer - the politician who put Italian Communism on the map

How Dario Fo put the spotlight on corruption in Italian government

Books of Leonardo Sciascia put spotlight on corruption in Sicily

Also on this day:

1926: The birth in Italy of English TV personality Katie Boyle

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Andrea Pirlo - footballer

Midfielder who won multiple honours with AC Milan and Juventus

Andrea Pirlo made 119 career appearances for the
Italian national team

The footballer Andrea Pirlo, who some commentators bracket with Roberto Baggio as one of the two best Italian footballers of the last 25 years, was born on this day in 1979.

The midfielder, who left Italy to join the Major League Soccer team New York City, has played in six Italian championship-winning teams and is a double winner of the Champions League among a host of honours as a club player.

In international football he has a World Cup winner’s medal as a member of the 2006 Italian national team that lifted the trophy in Germany.  The fulcrum of the Azzurri midfield, he scored one goal and was credited with the assist for three other goals during the tournament.

One of those assists resulted in the crucial opening goal for Italy scored by Fabio Grosso in the classic semi-final against the host nation.  He was also one on Italy’s successful penalty takers during the shoot-out that decided the final against France.

He was named man of the match three times in the tournament, more than any other player.  He matched that achievement six years later at Euro 2012, when Italy were beaten in the final.

In all he won 119 caps for his country, the fourth highest total of all Italian internationals. Fellow players nicknamed him l’architetto – the architect – for his ability to design and construct attacking moves.

Although he began his career as an attacking midfielder or sometimes even a second striker, Pirlo excelled as a deep-lying central midfielder, a playmaker with wonderful vision and the ability to hit accurate passes over any distance.

Pirlo won three Serie A titles with Juventus

He also acquired renown as a free kick specialist, capable of curling the ball into the net beyond the reach of the goalkeeper. He claims he honed his technique by watching Baggio train at Brescia, the club at which Baggio wound down his career and Pirlo began his.

Pirlo was born in Flero, Italy, in the province of Brescia and began his career with the Flero youth side. He joined Brescia in 1994 and made his debut in Serie A in May the following year at the age of 16, although it took him a further 18 months to win consistent selection for the senior side.

When he did, Brescia won the Serie B title and with it promotion to Serie A in 1998. It won him a move to Internazionale of Milan but could not break into the first team permanently and was loaned to Reggina for the 1999-2000 season and then back to Brescia in 2000-01, where he played alongside Baggio, his childhood idol.

Because Baggio occupied the attacking midfield position for Brescia, manager Carlo Mazzone decided to deploy Pirlo in the deep-lying playmaker role that he would make his own. Years later, Pirlo still described the moment he delivered a long pass that enabled Baggio to score against Juventus as one of the high spots of his career.

After three seasons on Inter’s books, Pirlo was sold to city rivals AC Milan for 33 billion Italian lire – just over 17 million euro – in June 2001.

Pirlo's brilliance as a playmaker emerged
under Carlo Ancelotti at AC Milan

It was at Milan, in particular under Carlo Ancelotti, where Pirlo at last began to realise his talent and became a world class player.

Recalling Mazzone’s use of him at Brescia, Ancelotti decided to position Pirlo just in front of his defence, which allowed him more time on the ball to pull the strings in terms of setting up attacks, where he could use his, anticipation, imagination and inventiveness to best effect.

He was a key player in a period of consistent success as Italian football became dominated by Silvio Berlusconi’s AC Milan and MassimoMoratti’s Inter.

Milan won two Champions Leagues (2003 and 2007), two UEFA Super Cups (2003 and 2007), two Serie A titles (2004 and 2011), a FIFA Club World Cup (2007), a Supercoppa Italiana (2004), and a Coppa Italia (2003) during Pirlo’s time.

Baggio himself sang his praises. “Andrea can visualise and anticipate plays before everyone else. His vision, what he can do with the ball, and what he's able to create, make him a true superstar,” he said.

After Ancelotti left to become Chelsea manager in 2009, soon failing with a bid to take Pirlo with him, Pirlo remained with Milan for a further two seasons, winning the scudetto again in 2011, but new coach Massimiliano Allegri used him differently and his final season was restricted to 17 appearances for Serie A, which prompted him to seek a change of direction.

Pirlo left Juventus to join MLS
club New York City

But Milan’s loss turned out to be Juventus’s gain after the so-called Old Lady of Italian football, without a trophy since 2003 after two Serie A titles in 2005 and 2006 were stripped from them over the match-fixing scandal, signed him on a free transfer.

Under coach Antonio Conte he added three more Serie A titles (2012, 2013, 2014), as well as two more Supercoppa Italiana titles (2012 and 2013). When Conte left to become national manager, Pirlo again worked with Allegri but more successfully this time, playing his part in a league and cup double in 2015 before leaving for New York.

His final appearance was in the Champions League final – his fourth – in which Juventus were beaten 3-1 by Barcelona.

One of two children – he has a brother Ivan – Pirlo was married for 13 years to Deborah Roversi, with whom he had two children, Niccolò and daughter Angela.

His father founded a metal trading company in Brescia in 1982 called Elg Steel, in which Pirlo has a stake. A wine connoisseur, he also runs his own vineyard.  In 2013, his autobiography, Penso Quindi Gioco - I Think, Therefore I Play) – became a bestseller.

Travel tip:

Flero, where Andrea Pirlo was born, is a town in Lombardy of just under 9,000 residents, situated a few kilometres south of Brescia in the flat plain of the Po Valley, although close enough to the Italian pre-Alps for snow-capped mountains to be visible on clear winter days.  Lake Garda and Lake Iseo are a short distance away.  Flero itself is a typical northern Italian commuter town, orderly and clean with a couple of churches and a few modern shops.

Travel tip:

The city of Brescia tends not to attract many tourists compared with nearby Bergamo or Verona, partly because of the counter-attraction of the lakes.  Yet it has plenty of history, going back to Roman times, and many points of interest, including two cathedrals – the Duomo Vecchio and its neighbour, the Duomo Nuovo – and the attractive Piazza della Loggia, with a Renaissance palace, the Palazzo della Loggia, which is the town’s municipal centre.  The Torre dell’Orologio clock tower bears similarities to the one in St Mark’s Square in Venice.

More reading:

The genius of Roberto Baggio

Fabio Grosso - a career defined by one goal

How Antonio Conte led Juventus back to the top

Also on this day:

1946: The birth of actor Michele Placido

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Massimo Moratti - business tycoon

Billionaire chairman oversaw golden era at Internazionale

Massimo Moratti followed his father, Angelo, in
becoming chairman of Internazionale of Milan

The billionaire tycoon and former chairman of the Internazionale football club, Massimo Moratti, was born on this day in 1945 in Bosco Chiesanuova, a small town in the Veneto about 20km (12 miles) north of Verona.

His primary business, the energy provider Saras, of which he is chief executive, owns about 15 per cent of Italy’s oil refining capacity, mainly through the Sarroch refinery on Sardinia, which has a capacity of about 300,000 barrels per day.

Moratti is estimated to have net wealth of about €1.28 billion ($1.4 billion) yet is said to have spent close to €1.5 billion of his personal fortune on buying players during his chairmanship of Inter, which lasted from 1995 until 2013 and encompassed a period of unprecedented success.

Between 2005 and 2011 Inter won the Serie A title five times, the Coppa Italia and the Supercoppa Italiana four times each, the Champions League once and the FIFA World Club cup once.

The five Scudetti came in consecutive seasons from 2006 to 2010, equalling the league record.

The only comparable period was the 1960s, when Massimo's father, Angelo, was chairman and Inter won three Scudetti and the European Cup, forerunner of the Champions League, twice, with the team known as Grande Inter – ‘the great Inter’.

Moratti is a billionaire businessman who made his fortune
from the family's energy company, Saras

Moratti would go to any lengths to sign the best players. His most famous purchase was the Brazilian striker Ronaldo – then considered the best player in the world – from Barcelona in the summer of 1997, but two years later he paid a then world-record €48 million for Lazio striker Christian Vieri.

Other superstars who wore the famous blue and black stripes in his time included Roberto Carlos, Hernán Crespo, Roberto Baggio, Zlatan Ibrahimović, Luís Figo and Patrick Vieira.

Yet he was notorious for hiring and firing coaches. In his time in office there were 15 changes of coach. Even during the years of success, he ditched Roberto Mancini for José Mourinho.

Mancini won three consecutive Serie A titles, the Coppa Italia twice and the Supercoppa Italiana twice, yet failed to win in Europe, which is where Moratti found him wanting.

Moratti was vindicated when, under Mourinho, Inter won the Champions League in 2010.  In fact, the Portuguese coach led the team to an unprecedented treble that season, winning Serie A and the Coppa Italia as well.

The fourth son of industrialist Angelo, who founded Saras, Moratti was born in the family villa in Bosco Chiesanuova. He graduated from Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli with a master's degree in political science.

On his father's death in 1981, he inherited his shares in the Saras Group, whose main business is the refining of petroleum.

Moratti is also the owner of Sarlux, based in Cagliari, which focuses on the production of electricity from waste oil. He has another company involved in generating electricity from alternative sources such as wind energy.

Members of the Inter team that won the Scudetto five
times between 2006 and 2011

In fact, he is married to the environmental activist Emilia Moratti (née Bossi), with whom he has have five children. Moratti is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador.

As Inter chairman he had a long-time rivalry with SilvioBerlusconi, the owner of AC Milan, which even extended to him supporting the left-wing candidate Giuliano Pisapia in a bid to oust his sister-in-law, Letizia, as Mayor of Milan.

Letizia had served in Berlusconi’s Forza Italia government as Minister of Education between 2001 and 2006 and was elected Mayor of Milan in 2006 under the flag of another of Berlusconi’s parties, the centre-right alliance Casa della Libertà (House of Freedoms).

In May 2011, however, Moratti put his weight behind the former communist Pisapia, who emerged as a surprise winner.

Moratti scaled back his interest in Internazionale in November 2013, when International Sports Capital took control of 70 per cent of the club. Indonesian businessman Erick Thohir, a part-owner of that company, was elected chairman, with Moratti in the role of honorary chairman.

In June 2016, he sold the remainder of his stake in the club to Thohir's Nusantara Sports Ventures HK Limited for €60 million. Thohir then resold those shares to Zhang Jindong's Suning Holdings Group.

The family connection remained through Moratti's wife, Emilia, who had a place on the club’s advisory board, but Massimo Moratti himself ceased to be involved.

The Piazza Chiesa in Bosco Chiesanuova

Travel tip:

Bosco Chiesanuova, part of a picturesque area known as Lessinia, offers visitors a range of outdoor activities from summertime nature walks and horse riding to skiing and ince skating in the winter months. The town’s beautiful squares are notable for balconies overflowing with geraniums and roof-tops groaning under the weight of snow, depending on the season. In the attractive Piazza Chiesa is the beautiful church of San Benedetto and San Tommaso Apostolo.

Pula in Sardinia has many Roman ruins such as this arch
in the centre of the town

Travel tip:

The Sarroch refinery in Sardinia is close to Pula, about 25km (15 miles) south of Cagliari, which is renowned as ‘the prettiest town in southern Sardinia’, famous for relaxing beaches and a spectacular coastline, but also for its history.  The beach at nearby Nora has a Roman amphitheatre right by the sea, which stages concerts during the summer. Another beach, at Porto d’Agumo, is guarded by two Spanish watchtowers. The town fans out from a beautiful central piazza full of interesting restaurants, gelateria and bars.

More reading:

Internazionale - birth of a football superpower

How Roberto Mancini coached Inter to a record three consecutive Serie A titles

Luigi Riva - the prolific striker who slipped through Inter's net

Also on this day:

1974: The birth of singer-songwriter Laura Pausini


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