Augustus - the first Emperor of Rome

Great nephew of Julius Caesar became powerful leader

A statue of Augustus by an unknown
sculptor, in the Vatican Museum in Rome

Augustus, who history recognises as the first Emperor of Rome, was born Gaius Octavius on this day in 63 BC in Rome.

He was to lead Rome’s transformation from republic to empire during the stormy years following the assassination of his great-uncle and adoptive father Julius Caesar, the dictator of the Roman Republic.

The son of a senator and governor in the Roman Republic, Octavius was related to Caesar through his mother, Atai, who was Caesar’s niece. The young Octavius was raised in part by his grandmother Julia Caesaris - Caesar’s sister - in what is now Velletri, about 40km (25 miles) southeast of Rome.

Octavius was only 17 when he learned of his great uncle’s death, although he had begun to wear the toga - a symbol of manhood - at 16 and fought alongside Caesar in Hispania (Spain), where his bravery prompted Caesar to name him in his will as his heir and successor.

When Caesar died, his allies rallied around Octavius - now known as Octavian - against Mark Antony, his rival for power, and troops loyal to Octavian defeated Antony’s army in northern Italy. However, the future emperor stepped back from seeking to eliminate Mark Antony, preferring that they formed an alliance.

In 43 BC, Octavian, Antony and Marcus Aemilus Lepidus established the Second Triumvirate. They divided Rome’s territories between them, with Antony given the East, Lepidus Africa and Octavian the West. In 41 BC, Antony began his famous romantic and political alliance with Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt.

The Battle of Actium, as depicted by the 17th century
Flemish painter Laureys a Castro

A decree of the Senate forced Antony to marry Octavian’s sister Octavia Minor, but his affair with Cleopatra continued. In 32 BC he divorced Octavia, at which Octavian declared war on Cleopatra.

The conflict culminated the following year in the naval Battle of Actium, in which Octavian’s fleet, under his admiral Agrippa, defeated Antony’s ships. Cleopatra sent her navy in support of her lover before the two fled, returning to Egypt, where both in turn committed suicide.

With Lepidus already ousted from the Triumvirate some years earlier, Octavian was now Rome’s undisputed ruler.

It was expected he would follow Caesar's example and make himself dictator, but instead, in 27 BC, Octavian founded the Roman Principate, a monarchy-type system of government, the head of which held power for life. He took the name Augustus, meaning 'lofty' or 'serene'.

He controlled all aspects of the Roman state, with the army under his direct command.  The victory at Actium had enabled him to seize Cleopatra’s assets, which he used to pay his soldiers handsomely, securing their loyalty.  To keep the Senate and ruling classes onside, he kept some of the laws of the Roman Republic intact, while he won over the people by embarking on a large programme of reconstruction and social reform, which saw the city of Rome transformed with impressive new buildings.

Frescoes adorning the walls of what is accepted to have been the villa
Augustus built for himself on Rome's Palatine Hill

By creating a standing army, Augustus initiated an era of relative peace known as the Pax Romana, during which Rome avoided large-scale conflict for more than 200 years, although there were numerous smaller wars on the Empire's frontiers in a campaign of expansion designed to push back ‘barbarian’ enemies.

At home, Augustus reformed taxation, developed networks of roads, created official police and fire-fighting services for Rome and established the Praetorian Guard.

Augustus died in 14 AD. He had been married three times, first to Mark Antony’s stepdaughter Clodia Pulchra, then to Scribonia, who bore his only child, Julia the Elder. He divorced in 39 BC to marry Livia Drusilla, who had two sons, Tiberius and Drusus.

He had Tiberius briefly marry his daughter, after which, in the absence of a male blood heir, he adopted Tiberius as son and successor, his nephew Marcellus and his grandsons Gaius and Lucius having pre-deceased him.

His remains were buried in a mausoleum, the ruins of which are in the Piazza Augusto Imperatore in the Campo Marzio district of Rome, near the Tiber river.

The Corso della Repubblica in the centre of Velletri, the
town outside Rome where Augustus's family lived

Travel tip:

Velletri, from which Augustus’s family originated, is a town of around 50,000 inhabitants outside Rome in the Alban Hills. It has a fourth century cathedral, the Cathedral of San Clemente, which was originally built over the ruins of a pagan temple, but was rebuilt in the 17th century and given a Renaissance-style portal.  Once a popular place for Rome's wealthiest to build their country villas, the town suffered extensive damage during bombing raids in the Second World War, although the cathedral survived.  In the 15th century, Velletri had the dubious claim to fame of being the host to what is believed to have been the world's first pawnshop.

Roman remains at Largo di Torre Argentina in the heart of
Rome, where Julius Caesar is said to have been slain

Travel tip:

The place where Julius Caesar was killed is in a square in Rome called Largo di Torre Argentina in the Campo de’ Fiori area of the city and there are still remains from the period there. During demolition work in 1927, a marble statue was found and excavations brought to light a holy area with four temples and part of a theatre, next to which was the Curia Pompeia where Caesar was stabbed.

More reading:

The murder of Julius Caesar

The assassination of Caligula by the Praetorian Guard

The death of Nero

Also on this day:

1597: The birth of Francesco Barberini, the inquistor who refused to condemn Galileo

1943: Mussolini proclaims his Italian Social Republic

1956: The birth of World Cup hero Paolo Rossi


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Ruggiero Giovannelli – composer

Church musician wrote popular madrigals and songs

Ruggiero Giovannelli was maestro di
cappella at St Peter's for five years

Ruggiero Giovannelli, a religious composer who also wrote a surprising number of light-hearted madrigals, died on this day in 1625 in Rome.

He may have been a pupil of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, the most famous of the Roman School composers of the 16th century. Even though there is no documentary evidence to support this, there are stylistic similarities in their music.

On Palestrina’s death in 1594, Giovannelli was chosen to replace him as maestro di cappella at the Julian Chapel in St Peter’s Basilica.

Giovannelli was born in Velletri near Rome and not much is known about his life until 1583 when he became maestro di cappella at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi near the Piazza Navona in Rome. He moved on to become maestro di cappella at the Collegio Germanico, a pontifical college in Rome, in 1591.

His most important appointment was when he was chosen to replace Palestrina at St Peter’s in 1594, a position he held until 1599 when he became a singer at the Sistine Chapel, a position he held until he became maestro di cappella there in 1614.

Giovannelli was influenced by Giovanni Pierluigi da
Palestrina (above), whom he succeeded at St Peter's 

Giovannelli composed church music in the style of Palestrina, although after 1600 he experimented with innovations that reflected the beginning of the Baroque era. Manuscripts of his masses, motets and psalms are kept in the Vatican Library.

Giovannelli wrote a surprising amount of secular music, mostly madrigals and canzonettas. He wrote three books of madrigals for five voices and two books for four voices, as well as a large quantity of other secular songs. His music was reprinted in Italy and abroad, which indicates its popularity at the time.

After retiring in 1624, he died the following year. He is buried in the church of Santa Marta in Rome.

The Cathedral of San Clemente in Velletri, which dates
back to the fourth century

Travel tip:

Velletri, where Ruggiero Giovannelli was born, is a municipality outside Rome in the Alban Hills. It has a fourth century cathedral, the Cathedral of San Clemente, which was originally built over the ruins of a pagan temple, but was rebuilt in the 17th century and given a Renaissance-style portal. The town suffered extensive damage during bombing raids in the Second World War, although the cathedral survived.  In the 15th century, Velletri had the dubious claim to fame of being the host to what is believed to have been the world's first pawnshop.

Michelangelo's incredible work
on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

Travel tip:

The Sistine Chapel, where Ruggiero Giovannelli was both a singer and maestro di cappella, is in the Apostolic Palace, where the Pope lives, in Vatican City. The chapel takes its name from Pope Sixtus IV, the uncle of Pope Julius II, who had it restored during his papacy. Between 1508 and 1512, Michelangelo painted the ceiling at the request of Pope Julius II.  His amazing masterpiece is in bright colours, easily visible from the floor, and covers more than 400 square metres.



More reading:

Domenico Bartolucci - a musician who directed the Sistine Chapel choir under six 20th century popes

The tale of Carlo Gesualdo, the 16th century composer of madrigals who brutally killed his wife and her lover

Andrea Gabrieli, the father of Venetian music

Also on this day:

1655: The death of the controversial Pope Innocent X

1797: Italy's tricolore flag is hoisted for the first time

1920: The birth of actor Vincent Gardenia


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Gian Maria Volonté – actor

Brilliant talent who played ‘spaghetti western’ parts for fun

Volonté in his role as the police chief in Elio Petri's
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)

Gian Maria Volonté, recognised as one of the finest character actors Italy has produced, was born on this day in 1933 in Milan.

Trained at the Silvio D’Amico National Academy of the Dramatic Arts in Rome, Volonté became famous outside Italy for playing the villain to Clint Eastwood’s hero in two movies in Sergio Leone’s western trilogy that were part of a genre dubbed the ‘spaghetti westerns’.

However, he insisted he accepted the chance to appear in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) – in which he appeared under the pseudonym John Wells - and For a Few Dollars More (1964) simply to earn some money and did not regard the parts of Ramon and El Indio as serious.

In Italy, it was for the much heavier roles given to him by respected directors such as Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi that he won huge critical acclaim.

A person known for a tempestuous private life, he was very strong playing complex and neurotic characters, while his left-wing political leanings attracted him to roles in which he had to portray individuals from real life.

He was a particular favourite of Rosi, the neo-realist director who directed in him in five movies, including the acclaimed The Mattei Affair (1972), in which he played an oil company executive whose death in a plane crash in Sicily aroused suspicion, and Lucky Luciano (1973), in which he portrayed the Sicilian-American Mafia boss controversially released from a 30-year prison sentence in the United States in return for helping the Allies with the 1943 invasion of Sicily.

Volonté played the writer Carlo Levi in Francesco Rosi's
1979 film Christ Stopped at Eboli

Rosi also cast him as the Jewish-Italian anti-Fascist writer Carlo Levi in Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979)

Other famous roles included that of a television journalist in Swiss director Claude Goretta's Death of Mario Ricci (1983), which won him the him the Golden Palm at the Cannes International Film Festival.

Volonte also played the Italian-born anarchist Nicola Sacco in Sacco and Vanzetti, the 1971 film by Giuliano Montaldo, a courageous Sicilian judge in Fascist Italy in Gianni Amelio's 1990 movie Open Doors, which was chosen as European film of the year at Cannes, and played the Christian Democrat leader and former prime minister Aldo Moro, whose kidnapping and murder in 1978 at the hands of Red Brigade terrorists shook Italy, in Giuseppe Ferrara’s Il caso Moro (1986).

His films under Petri’s direction included  We Still Kill the Old Way (1967), which won the Grand Prix du Scenario at the Cannes Film Festival, and  Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), for which Volonte won one of his three Nastro d'Argento (Silver Ribbon) awards - the most prestigious acting award in Italy, and which won an Oscar for best foreign-language film.

The part of the kidnapped former prime minister Aldo Moro
was played by Volonté in Giuseppe Ferrara's Il caso Moro

Volonté’s politics seemed to be rooted in his upbringing. Although born in Milan, he was brought up in Turin. His father, Mario, was a Fascist militiaman who was arrested for allegedly arranging the murder of some partisans. He died while awaiting trial, leaving his family facing poverty. Volonté hated the Fascists from that point onwards.

He left school at 14 to find work so that he could support his mother.  One of the jobs he took was with a travelling theatre company, initially as a wardrobe assistant and secretary, but eventually developing a desire to act, and being granted parts.

It was the realisation that he had some talent as an actor that persuaded him to move to Rome and enrol at the Silvio D’Amico Academy.  After graduating in 1957, he worked in the theatre and television, appearing in adaptations of Dostoyevski's Idiot, Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Vittorio Alfieri's Saul.

He was soon recognised as one of the most promising of the new generation of actors and his movie debut followed in 1960.

Volonté made no apologies for his political leanings.  A member of the Italian Communist Party, he was arrested in 1971 during a demonstration by workers striking for higher wages and better working conditions and helped his friend and fellow Communist Oreste Scalzone to flee the country after he was sentenced to 16 years in jail on charges of terrorism Volonté believed were false.

He stood as a candidate for the Democratic Party of the Left in the 1992 general election.

Married twice, Volonté had a child, Giovanna, with the actress Carla Divina, his partner for 10 years, before spending the last years of his life with another actress, Angelica Ippolito, with whom he lived in Velletri, a town in the Colli Albani (Alban Hills), just south of Rome.

He died in 1994 of a heart attack while filming on location in Greece and was laid to rest at a small cemetery on the Sardinian island, Isola della Maddalena.

The Silvio D'Amico academy, where Volonté trained, is in
Via Vincenzo Bellini in Rome's Municipio II district

Travel tip:

Rome’s National Academy of the Dramatic Arts was founded in 1936 by the writer and critic Silvio D’Amico, whose name was attached to the academy after his death. After occupying a number of premises, the academy settled in a building on Via Vincenzo Bellini in the Municipio II district, just beyond the Borghese Gardens and about 10 minutes’ drive from the centre of the city.

Hotels in Rome from Hotels.com

Velletri's Porta Napoletana formed part of the city walls

Travel tip:

Velletri is traditionally a walled city. Its original walls were demolished by the Romans in 338 BC but rebuilt in the Middle Ages, giving the town the appearance of a huge castle.  The walls had six gates, the best preserved of which is Porta Napoletana, built in 1511 and which is now home to a branch of the Italian Sommelier Association.


More reading:

How neo-realism and documentary style put Francesco Rosi among greats of Italian cinema

Sergio Leone - from 'spaghetti westerns' to gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America

The tragedy of Aldo Moro

Also on this day:

1454: The Treaty of Lodi ends fighting between rival northern states

1948: The birth of veteran pop singer Patty Pravo

(Picture credits: Porta Napoletana by Deblu68 via Wikimedia Commons)

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Ugo Tognazzi - comic actor

Achieved international fame through La Cage aux Folles

Ugo Tognazzi became known for playing
suave bon viveurs in Commedia all'Italiana

Ugo Tognazzi, the actor who achieved international fame in the film La Cage aux Folles, was born on this day in 1922 in Cremona.

Renowned for his wide repertoire in portraying comic characters, Tognazzi made more than 62 films and worked with many of Italy's top directors.

Along with Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi and Nino Manfredi, Tognazzi was regarded as one of the four top stars of Commedia all'Italiana - comedy the Italian way - in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1981 he won the award for best actor at the Cannes International Film Festival for his role in Bernardo Bertolucci's Tragedia di un Uomo Ridicolo (The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man).

His work was widely acclaimed in Italy, but it was not until he was cast in the role of homosexual cabaret owner Renato Baldi in the French director Édouard Molinaro's 1979 movie La Cage Aux Folles that he became known outside Italy.   The film became in its time the most successful foreign language film ever released in the United States, with box office receipts of more than $20 million.

A publicity poster from the French film La
Cage aux Folles in which Tognazzi starred

The film spawned two sequels in which Tognazzi reprieved the role of the mincing Baldi, who in the story was the joint owner of a night club in St Tropez that specialised in drag acts.

The son of an insurance agent, Tognazzi left school at 14 to help supplement the family income, taking a job as an accountancy clerk in the Negroni salami factory in his home town.  His father had wanted him to become a musician, his mother a priest.

Although he had made his stage debut as a four-year-old child in a charity show at the Teatro Donizetti in Bergamo, he had no thoughts of an acting career until he began participating in amateur dramatics via Negroni's recreational club.

During his military service with the Navy, he became involved with putting on entertainment for his fellow sailors.  After the Second World War, he moved to Milan in search of opportunities in theatre and found work with a number of companies, but it was after he landed his first film role in 1950, in I cadetti di Guascogna, directed by Mario Mattoli.  that his career began to take off.

The following year he met his fellow comic actor Raimondo Vianello, and their collaboration led them to form a successful comedy duo for the fledgling RAI television network.  Their show Un Due Tre (One Two Three) became famous for its wry satire and was among the first to be censored on Italian television.  It ran from 1954 to 1960.

Ugo Tognazzi as Il Commissario Pepe in Ettore Scola's
1969 film of the same name 

After his first major big screen success in Il Federale (The Fascist), a 1961 film by Luciano Salce, Tognazzi became one of the leading performers of Commedia all'Italiana. 

Excelling as bon vivants, adulterous husbands and other suave individuals, he made many films with the writer-director  Marco Ferreri.  He also worked with Mario Monicelli, Carlo Lizzani, Dino Risi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ettore Scola and Pupi Avati among others.

Risi's Marcia su Roma (The March on Rome) brought him praise but it was with Ferreri that he enjoyed sustained success. Together they made films that included Una Storia Moderna: L'Ape Regina (also called The Conjugal Bed) in 1963, La Donna Scimmia (The Ape Woman) in 1964, Marcia Nuziale (Wedding March) in 1966, L'Udienza (The Audience) in 1971 and La Grande Bouffe in 1973.

As well as La Cage Aux Folles, in which he surprised critics by accepting a role so different from his usual range, he appeared before wider film audiences after Roger Vadim cast Tognazzi as Mark Hand, the Catchman, opposite Jane Fonda in Barbarella (1968).

He had children by three women - the Irish dancer Pat O'Hara, with whom he had a son, Ricky, the Norwegian actress Margarete Robsahm, the mother of his second son, Thomas Robsahm, and Franca Bettoia, an actress, with whom he settled in Velletri, near Rome, after their marriage in 1972.  They had a son, Gianmarco, and a daughter, Maria Sole.  All of his children followed him into the movie business.

Tognazzi, a passionate supporter of AC Milan and a lover of food who also put his name to a number of recipe books, died in 1990 after suffering a brain hemorrhage.

The Duomo and Baptistery in the centre of Cremona

Travel tip:

Cremona, well known for its tradition of violin making, is a prosperous city in Lombardy with a wealth of fine medieval architecture, much of it concentrated around the Piazza del Comune, including the cathedral, finished in 1107 and rebuilt in 1190 after suffering damage in an earthquake, which includes impressive frescoes - the Storie di Cristo - by Pordenone.  A chapel inside the Duomo contains what is said to be a thorn from Jesus's crown of thorns.

The Corso della Repubblica in Velletri is typical of the
narrow streets in the town near Rome where Tognazzi died

Travel tip:

Velletri, a town of 50,000 inhabitants, lies just southeast of the Castelli Romani to the south of Rome.  It was once a popular place for Rome's wealthiest to build their country villas.  It suffered considerable damage soon after the Allied landing at Anzio during the Second World War after the advancing army met resistance from German forces in and around the town.  Many monuments were beyond repair, sadly, but the town remains an attractive alternative to staying in the capital and the towns of the Colli Albani are close by, including Castel Gandolfo, the summer residence of the Pope.

More reading:

The comic genius of Alberto Sordi

Cesare Danova - from medical school to Mean Streets

Was Otto e mezzo (8½) Fellini's finest work?

Also on this day:

1919: The founding of Mussolini's Fascist Party

(Picture credits: Cremona cathedral by Jakub Halun; Velletri street by Deblu68; via Wikimedia Commons)




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