10 May

William II - Sicily’s last Norman king

Young monarch who enjoyed prosperous reign

William II, the last Norman king of Sicily, succeeded his father, William I, as the island’s monarch on this day in 1166.  The succession was brought about by the death of his father. William II was only 12 years old at the time and was placed under the regency of his mother before ruling in person from his 18th birthday in 1171.  History does not remember him as a particularly effective ruler, certainly not able to arrest the decline of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, but he became known posthumously as William the Good on account of the peace and prosperity that the kingdom enjoyed during his 23-year reign.  This was largely a result of his policy of clemency and justice toward the towns and the barons, in contrast with his father’s time, when the rebellious barons across Sicily grew more powerful and demanded greater autonomy from the crown.  Read more…

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Ettore Scola - screenwriter and film director

Master of dark comedy and social drama

The screenwriter and director Ettore Scola, whose films encompassed elements of commedia all’italiana and neorealism, was born on this day in 1931 in Trevico, a mountainous village in Campania.  Scola, regarded by some as the last in the line of brilliant postwar Italian filmmakers, is best remembered for his 1977 drama Una giornata particolare (A Special Day), starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, which won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film in 1978.  A Special Day was also nominated for an Academy Award as were three other films that Scola directed or co-directed during a career that spanned more than 60 years.  Scola made his first movie as a director in 1964 with the comedy Se permettete parliamo di donne - Let’s Talk About Women - which starred Vittorio Gassman. Read more…

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Antonio Ghirelli - journalist

Neapolitan writer specialised in football and politics

Antonio Ghirelli, a patriarch of Italian journalism, was born on this day in 1922 in Naples.  As passionate about football as he was about politics, Ghirelli was equally at home writing about both. At different times he edited the three principal Italian sports daily newspapers, La Gazzetta dello Sport, Tuttosport and Corriere dello Sport, but also wrote with distinction in the editorial and opinion pages of such respected titles as L'Unità, Paese Sera, Avanti!, Corriere della Sera, Il Mondo and Il Globo.  Sandro Pertini, who was President of Italy from 1978 to 1985, so respected his wisdom that he invited him to be head of the Quirinale press office. His politics were in line with those of the Socialist Pertini, as they were with Bettino Craxi, Italy’s first Socialist prime minister, for whom he was principal press officer during Craxi’s two spells in office.  Read more…

Miuccia Prada – fashion designer

Talented businesswoman studied politics and mime

Miuccia Prada, the businesswoman behind the fashion label Prada, was born Maria Bianchi on this day in 1949 in Milan.  The youngest granddaughter of the fashion firm’s founder, Mario Prada, she took over the family business in 1978 having previously been a mime student and a member of the Italian Communist Party.  Since then the company, which is famous for its luxury goods, has gone from strength to strength and taken over other labels. Prada has been listed as the 75th most powerful woman in the world, worth an estimated $11 billion.  After graduating with a PhD in political science from the University of Milan, Maria Bianchi trained at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano in mime and was a performer for five years.  As a member of the Italian Communist party she became involved in the women’s rights movement.  Read more…

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Antonio Priuli - Doge of Venice

Doge clamped down on Spanish ‘spies’

Antonio Priuli, who was the 94th Doge of Venice, was born on this day in 1548 in Venice.  He took office in 1618 in the midst of allegations that the Spanish were conspiring to invade Venice. He immediately began a brutal process of ferreting out individuals suspected of plotting against La Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic of Venice.  The so-called ‘spy war’ did not end until 1622 and resulted in the imprisonment and deaths of many innocent people.  Priuli was the son of Girolamo Priuli and Elisabetta Cappello. He grew up to enjoy a successful career as a sailor and a soldier and married Elena Barbarigo, with whom he had 14 children.  In 1618 Priuli was appointed provveditore, a type of governor, of Veglia, an island in the Adriatic, which now belongs to Croatia.  That same year, following the death of Doge Nicolo Donato, Priuli was recalled from Veglia to become the next Doge.  Read more…

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Carlo Filangieri - military general

Brilliant soldier who served several masters

The military general Carlo Filangieri, who fought for both the Napoleonic and Bourbon leaders of Naples in the 19th century and is best known for his suppression of the Sicilian uprising of 1848, was born on this day in 1784 in Cava de’ Tirreni in Campania.  Filangieri was a key strategist for Joachim Murat, the flamboyant cavalry leader Napoleon had made King of Naples, achieving a major victory at personal cost in Murat’s ultimately failed campaign against Austria in 1815.  When Murat was defeated and the Bourbon monarch Ferdinand IV was reinstated as King of Naples, Filangieri was retained, going on to serve his successor, Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, under whose orders he put down the revolution of 1848.  Filangieri was from a noble family in Naples, the son of Gaetano Filangieri, a celebrated philosopher and jurist who had the title of Prince of Satriano, a town in Calabria, which Carlo would inherit.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Sicily: A Short History, from the Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra, by John Julius Norwich

The stepping stone between Europe and Africa, the gateway between the East and the West, at once a stronghold, clearing-house and observation post, Sicily has been invaded and fought over by Phoenicians and Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans, Goths and Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, Germans, Spaniards and the French for thousands of years. It has belonged to them all - and yet has properly been part of none.  John Julius Norwich was inspired to become a writer by his first visit in 1961 and Sicily: A Short History is the result of a fascination that has lasted over half a century. In tracing its dark story, he attempts to explain the enigma that lies at the heart of the Mediterranean's largest island.  This vivid short history covers everything from erupting volcanoes to the assassination of Byzantine emperors, from Nelson's affair with Emma Hamilton to Garibaldi and the rise of the Mafia. Taking in the key buildings and towns, and packed with fascinating stories and unforgettable characters, Sicily is the book he was born to write.

John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, CVO, also known as John Julius Norwich, was an English popular historian, writer of widely read travel books, and television personality.

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5 May

The Expedition of the Thousand

Garibaldi's Spedizione dei Mille launched from Genoa

The Expedition of the Thousand, the military campaign to unite Italy led by the soldier and revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, was launched on this day in 1860.  The campaign, in some ways the climax of the Risorgimento movement, began in response to an uprising in Sicily, when Garibaldi set sail from Genoa, with a makeshift army of volunteers, hoping his support would enable the rebels to overthrow the Bourbon rulers of the island.  The greater purpose, though, was to achieve another step towards his ultimate goal, which he shared with his fellow nationalist revolutionary, Giuseppe Mazzini, and which was supported by King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia-Piedmont and his prime minister, Camillo Benso di Cavour, that of creating a united Italy.  The revolutionary leader in Sicily, Francesco Crispi, had all but guaranteed that substantial numbers of Sicilians would fight on the side of Garibaldi’s troops. Read more…

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Giovanni Gaeta - composer and songwriter

Post Office worker whose songs became famous

The poet, composer and lyricist Giovanni Gaeta, whose classic Neapolitan songs brought him fame under his pseudonym E A Mario, was born on this day in 1884 in Naples.  Gaeta’s compositions as E A Mario, such as Santa Lucia luntana and Balocchi e profumi, were performed by some of the world’s greatest voices, from Enrico Caruso to Luciano Pavarotti, and became staples in the repertoire of Neapolitan song specialists such as Peppino di Capri, Mario Abbate and Bruno Venturini.  He was also responsible for La canzone del Piave - the Song of the Piave - which he wrote to commemorate the bravery of Italian soldiers in repelling an attempt by the Austrian imperial army to inflict a decisive victory on the Piave front in northeast Italy in 1918, a show of resistance that hastened the end of the First World War.  Read more…

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Mudslides in Campania

Towns and villages destroyed in natural disaster

A series of mudslides brought devastation in Campania on this day in 1988, destroying or badly damaging more than 600 homes and killing 161 people. Almost 2,000 people were left with nowhere to live.  The mudslides were set off by several days of torrential rain and blamed on the increasingly unstable landscape caused by the deforestation and unregulated construction of roads and buildings.  Torrents of mud coursed down mountainsides in several areas between Avellino and Salerno to the east of Naples.  The town of Sarno bore the brunt of the damage but the villages of Quindici, Siano and Bracigliano were also badly hit.  The accumulation of large quantities of volcanic ash deposited by historic eruptions of the nearby Mount Vesuvius is thought to have made the mudslides particularly fast moving and the affected communities were quickly overwhelmed. Read more…

Francesco Bussone da Carmagnola – condottiero

Adventurous soldier lived on in literature

The soldier of fortune, Francesco Bussone da Carmagnola, who has been featured in poetry, books and an opera, was executed on this day in 1432 in Venice.  The military leader had been seized, imprisoned and brought to trial for treason against La Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic of Venice, and was beheaded between the columns of San Marco and San Todaro at the entrance to the Piazzetta.  Francesco Bussone had been born at Carmagnola near Turin into a peasant family. He began his military career at the age of 12, serving under the condottiero, Facino Cane, who was in the service of the Marquess of Monferrat at the time, but later fought for Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan.  After the death of Gian Galeazzo, the duchy was divided up, but his son Filippo Maria was determined to reconquer it by force. Read more…

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Montagna Longa air disaster

Italy’s deadliest plane crash

Italy was in shock on this day in 1972 after an Alitalia Douglas DC-8 en route from Rome to Palermo crashed into a mountainside on its approach to the Sicilian airport.  Alitalia Flight 112, which was carrying 115 passengers and crew, was 5km (3 miles) from touching down at Palermo International Airport at around 10.24pm when it struck a 935m (1,980ft) crest of Montagna Longa, part of the Monti di Palermo range.  The aircraft slid along the ground for some distance but broke up after striking rocks, spreading burning kerosene over a wide area. Witnesses described seeing the aircraft on fire before it crashed.  The crash remains Italy’s deadliest accident involving a single aeroplane. Only the 2001 disaster at Milan’s second airport, Linate, when an airliner and a business jet collided on the ground, killing 114 passengers plus four people on the ground, claimed more casualties.  Read more…

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Book of the Day:  Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, by Lucy Riall

Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian revolutionary leader and popular hero, was among the best-known figures of the 19th century. This book seeks to examine his life and the making of his cult, to assess its impact, and understand its surprising success. For 30 years Garibaldi was involved in every combative event in Italy. His greatest moment came in 1860, when he defended a revolution in Sicily and provoked the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy, the overthrow of papal power in central Italy, and the creation of the Italian nation state. It made him a global icon, representing strength, bravery, manliness, saintliness, and a spirit of adventure. Handsome, flamboyant, and sexually attractive, he was worshipped in life and became a cult figure after his death in 1882. Lucy Riall shows that the emerging cult of Garibaldi was initially conceived by revolutionaries intent on overthrowing the status quo, that it was also the result of a collaborative effort involving writers, artists, actors, and publishers, and that it became genuinely and enduringly popular among a broad public. Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero demonstrates that Garibaldi played an integral part in fashioning and promoting himself as a new kind of “charismatic” political hero. It analyses the way the Garibaldi myth has been harnessed both to legitimise and to challenge national political structures. And it identifies elements of Garibaldi’s political style appropriated by political leaders around the world, including Mussolini and Che Guevara.

Lucy Riall is an Irish historian. She was a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, and is currently a professor in the Department of History and Civilisation at the European University Institute in Florence. Her publications include The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society and National Unification and Sicily and the Unification of Italy: Liberal Policy and Local Power (1859-66).

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11 March

Franco Basaglia - psychiatrist

Work led to closure of mental hospitals by law

The psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, whose work ultimately led to changes in the law that resulted in the closure and dismantling of Italy’s notorious psychiatric hospitals, was born on this day in 1924 in Venice.  As the founder of the Democratic Psychiatry movement and the main proponent of Law 180 - Italy's Mental Health Act of 1978 - which abolished mental hospitals, he is considered to be the most influential Italian psychiatrist of the 20th century.  His Law 180 - also known as Basaglia’s Law - had worldwide impact as other countries took up the Italian model and reformed their own way of dealing with the mentally ill.  Basaglia was born to a well-off family in the San Polo sestiere of Venice. He became an anti-Fascist in his teens and during the Second World War was an active member of the resistance in the city. Read more…

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Rigoletto debuts at La Fenice

Verdi opera staged after battle with censors

Giuseppe Verdi's opera Rigoletto was performed for the first time on this day in 1851 in Venice.  It enjoyed a triumphant first night at the Teatro La Fenice opera house, where the reaction of the audience was particularly gratifying for the composer and his librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, after a long-running battle to satisfy the censors.  Northern Italy was controlled by the Austrian Empire at the time and a strict censorship process applied to all public performances.  Verdi, who had accepted a commission to write an opera for La Fenice the previous year, knew he was likely to risk falling foul of the Austrians when he chose to base his work on Victor Hugo's play, Le roi s'amuse, which provoked such a scandal when it premiered in Paris in 1832 that it was cancelled after one night and had remained banned across France ever since.  Read more…

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Mantegna frescoes reduced to rubble

Precious works of art damaged by Allied bombing

One of the heaviest losses to Italy’s cultural heritage during World War Two occurred on this day in 1944 in Padua in the Veneto region when 15th century frescoes painted by the artist Andrea Mantegna were blown into thousands of pieces by bombs.  A raid on the city was carried out by the Allies, hoping to hit Padua’s railway station and an adjoining marshalling yard, as well as a building where the occupying Germans had established their headquarters. But the bombs landed on Padua’s Chiesa degli Eremitani instead, causing devastating damage to frescoes created by the young Mantegna in one of the side chapels.  It was one of the worst blows inflicted on Italy’s art treasures during the war, as Mantegna’s frescoes, which had been painted directly on to the walls of the church, were considered a major work.  Read more…

Torquato Tasso – poet

Troubled Renaissance writer came back to Sorrento

Torquato Tasso, who has come to be regarded as the greatest Italian poet of the Renaissance, was born on this day in 1544 in Sorrento.  Tasso’s most famous work was his epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered or The Liberation of Jerusalem), in which he gives an imaginative account of the battles between Christians and Muslims at the end of the first crusade during the siege of Jerusalem.  He was one of the most widely read poets in Europe and his work was later to prove inspirational for other writers who followed him, in particular the English poets Spencer and Byron.  The house where Tasso was born on 11 March, 1544 is in Sorrento’s historic centre, a few streets away from the main square, Piazza Tasso, in Via Vittorio Veneto.  It now forms part of the Imperial Hotel Tramontano.  Read more…

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Sidney Sonnino – politician

Minister who pushed Italy to switch sides in World War One

Sidney Sonnino, the politician who was Italy’s influential Minister of Foreign Affairs during the First World War, was born on this day in 1847 in Pisa.  Sonnino led two short-lived governments in the early 1900s but it was as Foreign Affairs Minister in 1914 that he made his mark on Italian history, advising prime minister Antonio Salandra to side with the Entente powers – France, Great Britain and Russia – in the First World War, abandoning its Triple Alliance partnership with Germany and Austria-Hungary.  His motives were entirely driven by self-interest. A committed irredentist who saw the war as an opportunity to expand Italy's borders by reclaiming former territory, he reasoned that Austria-Hungary was unlikely to give back parts of Italy it had seized previously.  Instead, he sanctioned the secret Treaty of London with the Entente powers, which led Italy to declare war on Austria-Hungary in 1915.  Read more…

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Etna’s biggest eruption

Sicily volcano spewed lava for four months

The largest eruption of the Mount Etna volcano in recorded history began on this day in 1669.  After several days of seismic activity in the area, a fissure measuring two metres wide and about 9km (5.6 miles) long opened up on the southeastern flank of the Sicilian mountain in the early hours of 11 March.  The lava that was spewed out of the enormous gash continued to flow for four months until the eruption was declared to be over on 16 July, a duration of 122 days.  Although stories of 20,000 deaths as a result of the eruption have been dismissed as myth, with no recorded evidence of any casualties, an estimated 15 towns and villages were destroyed as well as hundreds of buildings in the city of Catania, and some 27,000 people are thought to have been made homeless.  Mount Etna is situated in the northeastern vertex of the triangular island of Sicily.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care, by John Foot

In 1961, when Franco Basaglia arrived outside the grim walls of the Gorizia asylum, on the Italian border with Yugoslavia, it was a place of horror, a Bedlam for the mentally sick and excluded, redolent of Basaglia’s own wartime experience inside a fascist gaol. Patients were frequently restrained for long periods, and therapy was largely a matter of electric and insulin shocks. The corridors stank, and for many of the interned the doors were locked for life. This was a concentration camp, not a hospital.  Basaglia, the new Director, was expected to practise all the skills of oppression in which he had been schooled, but he would have none of this. The place had to be closed down by opening it up from the inside, bringing freedom and democracy to the patients, the nurses and the psychiatrists working there. Basaglia’s seminal work as a psychiatrist and campaigner in Gorizia, Parma and Trieste substantially contributed to the national and international movement of 1968. In 1978 a law was passed (the ‘Basaglia law’) which sanctioned the closure of the entire Italian asylum system. The first comprehensive study of this revolutionary approach to mental health care, The Man Who Closed the Asylums is a gripping account of one of the most influential movements in 20th-century psychiatry, which helped to transform the way we see mental illness. Basaglia's work saved countless people from a miserable existence, and his legacy persists, as an object lesson in the struggle against the brutality and ignorance that the establishment peddles to the public as common sense.

John Foot is Professor of Modern Italian History in the School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol. He has published books on sports subjects and contemporary Italian history.

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6 February

Amintore Fanfani - politician

Former prime minister who was Kennedy's inspiration

Amintore Fanfani, a long-serving politician who was five times Italy’s prime minister and had a vision of an Italy run by a powerful centre-left alliance of his own Christian Democrat party and the socialists, was born on this day in 1908.  A controversial figure in that he began his political career as a member of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, he went on to be regarded as a formidable force in Italian politics, in which he was active for more than 60 years. Throughout his career, or at least the post-War part of it, he was committed to finding a “third way” between collective communism and the free market and became a major influence on centre-left politicians not only in Italy.  The American president John F Kennedy told colleagues that it was reading Fanfani’s book, Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism, that persuaded him to dedicate his life to politics.  Read more…

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Beatrice Cenci - Roman heroine

Aristocrat's daughter executed for murder of abusive father

Beatrice Cenci, the daughter of an aristocrat whose execution for the murder of her abusive father became a legendary story in Roman history, was born on this day in 1577 in the family's palace off the Via Arenula, not far from what is now the Ponte Garibaldi in the Regola district.  Cenci's short life ended with her beheading in front of Castel Sant'Angelo on 11 September, 1599, with most of the onlookers convinced that an injustice had taken place.  Her father, Francesco Cenci, had a reputation for violent and immoral behaviour that was widely known and had often been found guilty of serious crimes in the papal court. Yet where ordinary citizens were routinely sentenced to death for similar or even lesser offences, he was invariably given only a short prison sentence and frequently bought his way out of jail.  Read more…

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Ugo Foscolo – poet

Revolutionary who expressed his feelings in verse

Writer Ugo Foscolo was born Niccolò Foscolo on this day in 1778 on the island of Zakynthos, now part of Greece, but then part of the Republic of Venice.  Foscolo went on to become a revolutionary who wrote poetry and novels that reflected the feelings of many Italians during the turbulent years of the French revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and Austrian rule. His talent was probably not sufficiently appreciated until after his death, but he is particularly remembered for his book of poems, Dei Sepolcri - Of the Sepulchres.  After the death of his father, Andrea, who was an impoverished Venetian nobleman, the family moved back to live in Venice.  Foscolo went on to study at Padova University and by 1797 had begun to write under the name Ugo Foscolo.  While at University he took part in political discussions about the future of Venice and was shocked when Napoleon handed it over to the Austrians in 1797.  Read more…

1783 Calabria Earthquakes

Series of powerful tremors killed at least 35,000

The Calabrian peninsula of southwest Italy was waking up to the unfolding horror of a sequence of five deadly earthquakes on this day in 1783.  A major tremor destroyed the town of Oppido Mamertina in what is now the province of Reggio Calabria on 5 February, killing almost 1,200 residents, followed by another just after midnight on 6 February, setting off a tsunami that claimed still more lives.   The effects of the first quake  - which has been classified at an estimated 7.0 on the Richter magnitude scale - were felt over a much wider area, however, with countless land and rockslides.  The whole of the island of Sicily is said to have shaken.  In total, it is thought some 180 villages were effectively destroyed, with far more buildings reduced to rubble than remained standing. The city of Messina, on the northeast tip of Sicily, was seriously hit and many casualties were reported there also.  Read more…

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Girolamo Benivieni – poet

Follower of Plato, Dante and Savonarola

The poet Girolamo Benivieni, who turned Marsilio Ficino’s translation of Plato’s Symposium into verse, was born on this day in 1453 in Florence.  His poem was to influence other writers during the Renaissance and some who came later.  As a member of the Florentine Medici circle, Benivieni was a friend of the Renaissance humanists Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano, commonly known as Politian.  Ficino translated The Symposium in about 1474 and wrote his own commentary on the work.  Benivieni summarised Ficino’s work in the poem De lo amore celeste - Of Heavenly Love. These verses then became the subject of a commentary by Pico della Mirandola.  As a result of all these works, Platonism reached such writers as Pietro Bembo and Baldassare Castiglione and the English poet, Edmund Spencer.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, by Amintore Fanfani

Amintore Fanfani belonged to the long tradition of Italian Social Catholicism, a movement shaped by papal social teaching and concerned with the moral and social consequences of modern capitalism. This tradition questioned the moral individualism of capitalist society, emphasised the social duties of economic life, and sought to articulate a Catholic alternative to both laissez‑faire capitalism and Marxist socialism. In Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism - originally published in Italy in 1935 as Cattolicesimo e protestantesimo nella formazione storica del capitalismo - Fanfani set out to examine: the essence of capitalism; how religious doctrines shaped economic behaviour, and why Protestant regions historically aligned more closely with capitalist development; and why Catholic teaching traditionally resisted certain capitalist assumptions, especially regarding profit, usury and moral obligations. He argued that capitalism was not simply an economic system but a mentality - a way of viewing work, profit, and society - that Catholic doctrine historically discouraged, emphasising communal welfare and moral limits on economic activity.

Amintore Fanfani was an Italian politician and statesman who served as 32nd prime minister of Italy for five separate terms. He was one of the best-known Italian politicians after the Second World War.

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12 January

John Singer Sargent - painter

Celebrated portraitist had lifelong love for Italy

The painter John Singer Sargent, who was hailed as the leading portraitist of his era but was also a brilliant painter of landscapes, was born on this day in 1856 in Florence.  Although he became an American citizen at the first opportunity, both his parents being American, he spent his early years in Italy and would regularly return to the country throughout his life.  At his commercial peak during the Edwardian age, his studio in London attracted wealthy clients not only from England but from the rest of Europe and even from the other side of the Atlantic, asking him to grant them immortality on canvas.  His full length portraits, which epitomised the elegance and opulence of high society at the end of the 19th century, would cost the subject up to $5,000 - the equivalent of around $140,000 (€122,000; £109,000) today.  Read more…

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Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies

Despotic ruler presided over chaos in southern Italy

The Bourbon prince who would become the first monarch of a revived Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was born in Naples on this day in 1751.  Ferdinando, third son of King Carlos (Charles) III of Spain, was handed the separate thrones of Naples and Sicily when he was only eight years old after his father’s accession to the Spanish throne required him to abdicate his titles in Spanish-ruled southern Italy.  In a 65-year reign, he would preside over one of the most turbulent periods in the history of a region that was never far from upheaval, which would see Spanish rule repeatedly challenged by France before eventually being handed to Austria.  Too young, obviously, to take charge in his own right when his reign began officially in 1759, he continued to enjoy his privileged upbringing, alternating between the palaces his father had built at Caserta, Portici and Capodimonte.  Read more…

Charles Emmanuel I – Duke of Savoy

Rash ruler who led catastrophic attack on Geneva 

Charles Emmanuel I, who developed a reputation for being hot-headed, was born on this day in 1562 in the Castle of Rivoli in Piedmont.  Renowned for his rashness and military aggression in trying to acquire territory, Charles Emmanuel has gone down in history for launching a disastrous attack on Geneva in Switzerland.  In 1602 he led his troops to the city during the night and surrounded the walls. At two o’clock in the morning the Savoy soldiers were ordered to dismount and climb the city walls in full armour as a shock tactic.  However the alarm was raised by a night watchman and Geneva’s army was ready to meet the invaders.  Many of the Savoy soldiers were killed and others were captured and later executed.  The heavy helmets worn by the Savoy troops featured visors with the design of a human face on them. Read more…

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Revolution in Sicily

January revolt meant the beginning of the end for the Bourbons

The Sicilian uprising on this day in 1848 was to be the first of several revolutions in Italy and Europe that year.  The revolt against the Bourbon government of Ferdinand II in Sicily started in Palermo and led to Sicily becoming an independent state for 16 months.  It was the third revolution to take place on the island against Bourbon rule and signalled the end for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.  Naples and Sicily had been formally reunited to become the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1815. Back in medieval times they had both been part of a single Kingdom of Sicily.  The 1848 revolt was organised in Palermo and deliberately timed to coincide with King Ferdinand’s birthday.  News of the revolt spread and peasants from the countryside arrived to join the fray and express their frustration about the hardships they were enduring.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: John Singer Sargent: His Life and Works in 500 Images

An American who spent most of his life in Europe, a portraitist who painted landscapes, a family man who never married, and an accomplished pianist who often entertained his sitters, John Singer Sargent (1856 to 1925) was one of the most influential portrait painters of his time, but he is also an enigma. Despite his huge body of work, we know little about Sargent the man. Truly international, he was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, and was close friends with many of the leading artists, writers, actors and musicians of his generation. Over the course of his career, Sargent created roughly 900 oil paintings, more than 2,000 watercolours and a vast number of sketches and charcoal drawings. He travelled extensively, to Venice, the Tyrol, Capri, Corfu, Spain, France, England, Holland, the Middle East, Canada and across America. Sargent was in constant demand for his portraits, and during his lifetime he was perceived as a far more significant artist even than contemporary avant-garde painters such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin. Yet during his life, as well as attracting acclamation from across Europe and America, he also provoked both scandal and condemnation. The first part of John Singer Sargent: His Life and Works in 500 Images explores the life of Sargent and the times he lived in; the second part is a magnificent gallery of his work, with details about each painting and its context. 

Susie Hodge, MA, FRSA, is an award-winning author, art historian, artist and journalist. After teaching in secondary, further and higher education, she now writes books, magazine articles, web resources and booklets for museums and galleries, runs workshops, and gives talks and lectures at schools, universities, museums, galleries, businesses, festivals and societies around the world including the V&A, the Museum of London, Tate and the Royal Academy.

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3 December

Matilde Malenchini – painter

The tempestuous life of a talented Tuscan artist

The painter Matilde Malenchini was born on this day in 1779 in Livorno in Tuscany. She was well-known for her paintings of church interiors but turned to portrait painting later in life to make money to help her survive after her long relationship with Belgian writer Louis de Potter ended. Matilde was born into the Meoni family and married the painter and musician Vincenzo Francesco Malenchini at the age of 16. Although they soon separated, she kept his name for the rest of her life.  In 1807 she went to study at the Accademia di Belle Arte in Florence under the guidance of Pietro Benvenuti. To earn money and practise her art, she copied the works of old Italian and Dutch masters in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.  After being given a four-year annual stipend by Elisa Bonaparte, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, in 1811, Matilde went to Rome to study at the Pontificia Accademia romana delle belle arti di San Luca.  Read more…

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Nino Martoglio - writer and film director

Journalist and playwright whose films inspired post-war neorealism 

The journalist, playwright and theatre and film director Nino Martoglio was born in Belpasso, a town in the foothills of volcanic Mount Etna in eastern Sicily, on this day in 1870.  Martoglio is widely considered to be Sicily’s finest dialect playwright and by some to be the founder of Sicilian theatre.  He was also an acclaimed poet, basing a good deal of his verse on the everyday conversations of working class Sicilians, written to amuse. His collection, Centona, is still sold today.  Later in a career that was ended abruptly by his death in an accident, Martoglio directed a number of silent films, the style of some of which prompted critics to describe them as forerunners of the post-war neorealism movement.  The son of a journalist and a school teacher, Martoglio studied sailing as a young man and obtained a captain’s licence.  Read more…

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Carlo Oriani - cyclist and soldier

Giro winner died in World War One

The champion cyclist Carlo Oriani, winner of the 1913 Giro d’Italia, died on this day in 1917 in the aftermath of the Battle of Caporetto in the First World War.  The battle was a disastrous one for the Italian forces under the command of General Luigi Cadorna, with 13,000 soldiers killed, 30,000 wounded and 250,000 captured by the victorious army of Austria-Hungary. Countless other Italian troops fled as it became clear that defeat was inevitable.  Oriani, who had previously served his country in the Italo-Turkish War in 1912, was a member of the Bersaglieri, the highly mobile elite force used by the Italian army as a rapid response unit. He had joined in part because of his skill on a bicycle, which had replaced horses as one of the means by which the Bersaglieri were able to be mobile.  The Battle of Caporetto took place from October 24 to November 19, near the town of Kobarid on the Austro-Italian front. Read more…

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Nino Rota – composer

Musician and teacher composed soundtrack for The Godfather 

Giovanni ‘Nino’ Rota, composer, conductor and pianist, was born on this day in 1911 in Milan.  Part of a musical family, he started composing with an oratorio based on a religious subject at the age of 11, but he was to go on to produce some of the best-known and iconic music for the cinema of the 20th century.  Rota studied at the Milan Conservatory and then in Rome before he was encouraged by the conductor, Arturo Toscanini, to move to America, where he studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.  When he returned to Milan he took a degree in Literature and then began a teaching career. He became a director of the Liceo Musicale in Bari in 1950 and kept this post until his death. Orchestra conductor Riccardo Muti was one of his students.  Rota wrote film scores from the 1940s onwards for all the noted directors of the time, including Franco Zeffirelli and Luchino Visconti. Read more…

Nicolò Amati - violin maker

Grandson of Andrea Amati produced some of world's finest instruments

Nicolò Amati, who is acknowledged as the greatest in the line of Amati violin makers in the 16th and 17th centuries, was born on this day in 1596 in Cremona.  The grandson of Andrea Amati, who is credited by most experts with being the inventor of the violin in its four-stringed form, Nicolò followed his father, Girolamo, and uncle, Antonio, into the family business.  Girolamo and Antonio went their separate ways in around 1590, Antonio setting up a different workshop, which was thought to specialize in lutes.  Initially, Nicolò made instruments that were very similar to those created by Girolamo but later began to add refinements of his own, the most significant of which came between 1630 and 1640 when he created the Grand Amati design.  This model, slightly wider and longer than the violins his father had produced, yielded greater power of tone. Read more…

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Angela Luce – actress

Film star and singer was born in Spaccanapoli

Neapolitan actress and singer Angela Luce was born Angela Savino on this day in 1937 in Naples.  She has worked for the theatre, cinema and television, is well-known for singing Neapolitan songs, and has written poetry and song lyrics.  At 14 years old, Angela took her first steps towards stardom when she took part in the annual music festival held at Piedigrotta in the Chiaia district of Naples, singing the Neapolitan song, Zi Carmeli.  Her cinema career began in 1956, when she was only 19, when she appeared in Ricordati di Napoli, directed by Pino Mercanti. Since then she has appeared in more than 80 films and has worked for directors including Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mario Amendola, Luigi Zampa and Pupi Avati.  Angela won a David Donatello award for L’amore molesto directed by Mario Martone. Read more…

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Mario Borghezio – controversial politician

Lega Nord MEP renowned for extremist views

Mario Borghezio, one of Italy’s most controversial political figures whose extreme right-wing views have repeatedly landed him in trouble, was born on this day in 1947 in Turin.  Borghezio was a member of Lega Nord, the party led by Umberto Bossi that was set up originally to campaign for Italy to be broken up so that the wealthy north of the country would sever its political and economic ties with the poorer south.  He has been a Member of the European Parliament since 1999 and has served on several committees, including Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs and the Committee on Petitions.  He was even undersecretary to the Ministry of Justice from 1994-95.  Yet he had regularly espoused extremist and racist views, to the extent that even the right-wing British party UKIP, with whom he developed strong links, moved to distance themselves from him. Read more…

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Book of the Day: Ottocento: Romanticism and Revolution in 19th Century Italian Painting, by Roberta J M Olson

The Ottocento (literally "eight hundred"), or the 19th century, witnessed the creation of a united Italy. This century, which was the age of nationalism throughout Europe, gave birth to modern Italy as a definable political entity after a long period of regional fragmentation and foreign domination. The political struggle for unification was known as the Risorgimento, meaning to rise up again (evoking similar powerful alliterative like renaissance and resurrection). The term was chosen because Italians hoped that their land might overcome internal political divisions and regionalism to regain the prominent place in Western Civilization it had enjoyed during the Roman and Renaissance times. The Ottocento was an epoch of major upheavals and drastic changes, or revolutions, in the fabric of Italian thought and society, not least in the area of the arts, especially painting. Ottocento:  Romanticism and Revolution in 19th Century Italian Painting, originally published to accompany an exhibition of the same name, is a landmark study covering Italian painting from 1797 to 1900, which places Italian art within the broader European context and highlights lesser‑known Italian masters.

Roberta Olson is an American historian of art. She is the author of many books on art history and is known for her work on Italian art. She taught at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts for 25 years; after retiring as professor emerita, she became curator of drawings at the New-York Historical Society.

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11 November

Luca Zingaretti - actor

Found fame as TV detective Inspector Montalbano

The actor Luca Zingaretti, best known for his portrayal of Inspector Montalbano in the TV series based on Andrea Camilleri's crime novels, was born on this day in 1961 in Rome.  The Montalbano mysteries, now into a 15th series, began broadcasting on Italy's RAI network in 1999 and has become a hit in several countries outside Italy, including France, Spain, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.  Zingaretti has played the famously maverick Sicilian detective in all 37 feature-length episodes to date, each one based on a novel or short story collection by the Sicilian-born author Camilleri.  Although he had established himself as a stage actor and had appeared in a number of films, it was the part of Montalbano that established Zingaretti's fame.  Yet he had hoped to become a star on another kind of stage as a professional footballer. Read more…

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Victor Emmanuel III

Birth of the King who ruled Italy through two world wars

Italy’s longest reigning monarch, Victor Emmanuel III (Vittorio Emanuele III di Savoia), was born on this day in Naples in 1869.  The only child of King Umberto I and Queen Margherita of Savoy, he was given the title of Prince of Naples. He became King of Italy in 1900 after his father was assassinated in Monza.  During the reign of Victor Emmanuel III, Italy was involved in two world wars and experienced the rise and fall of Fascism.  At the height of his popularity he was nicknamed by the Italians Re soldato (soldier King) and Re vittorioso (victorious King) because of Italy’s success in battle during the First World War. He was also sometimes called sciaboletta (little sabre) as he was only five feet (1.53m) tall.  Italy had remained neutral at the start of the First World War but signed treaties to go into the war on the side of France, Britain and Russia in 1915. Read more…

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Filippo Buonarroti – revolutionary conspirator

Writer paved the way for the 1848 revolutions in Europe

Filippo Buonarroti, whose political writing inspired many other famous socialists, including Karl Marx, was born on this day in 1761 in Pisa.  Sometimes referred to as Philippe Buonarroti because he spent many years living in France, working to further the cause of the revolution there, the writer was born into a noble family. His father was a direct descendant of the brother of the artist Michelangelo Buonarroti.  Filippo Buonarroti studied Law at the University of Pisa, where he founded what was seen at the time as a subversive newspaper, the Gazetta Universale. It is thought that he joined a Masonic Lodge at about the same time.  Although he was kept under surveillance by the authorities in Italy, Buonarroti expressed support for the French Revolution and travelled to Corsica to spread the revolutionary message through a newspaper, Giornale Patriottico di Corsica. Read more…

Alessandro Mussolini - socialist activist

Father whose politics were Fascist leader’s early inspiration

Alessandro Mussolini, the father of Italian Fascist founder and leader Benito Mussolini, was born on this day in 1854, in Montemaggiore di Predappio, a hamlet in Emilia-Romagna, then still part of the Papal States in pre-unification Italy.  A blacksmith by profession, he was a revolutionary socialist activist who had a profound influence on his son’s early political leanings.  Although his embrace of nationalism was not as full as that of his son, Mussolini senior nonetheless greatly admired Italian nationalist figures such as Carlo Pisacane, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Giuseppe Garibaldi, whom he perceived as having socialist or humanist tendencies.  Regularly in trouble with the police for acts of criminal damage and sometimes violence against opponents, Alessandro was eventually held under house arrest and granted his release only when he announced he wished to marry his girlfriend, a local schoolteacher who was a devout Catholic.  Read more…

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Andrea Zani – violinist and composer

Musician who ushered in the new classical era

Andrea Teodora Zani, one of the earliest Italian composers to move away from the Baroque style, was born on this day in 1696 in Casalmaggiore in the province of Cremona.  Casalmaggiore was a breeding ground for musical talent at this time and Zani was an exact contemporary of Giuseppe Guarneri, the most famous member of the Guarneri family of violin makers in Cremona, and only slightly younger than the composers  Francesco Maria Veracini, Giuseppe Tartini and Pietro Locatelli.  Zani’s father gave him his first violin lessons and he later received instruction from Giacomo Civeri, a local musician, and Carlo Ricci, who was at the time court musician to the Gonzaga family at their palace in Guastalla.  After Zani played in front of Antonio Caldara, capellmeister for the court of Archduke Ferdinand Charles in Mantua, he was invited to go to Vienna. Read more… 

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Germano Mosconi – sports writer and presenter

Short-tempered journalist who became the news

Germano Mosconi, who became a well-known television personality, was born on this day in 1932 in San Bonifacio in the Veneto.  Mosconi became notorious for his short temper and swearing on air and was regarded as a bit of a character on local television. But he became known all over Italy and throughout the world after a sweary video of him someone posted anonymously on the internet went viral.  In the 1980s Mosconi delivered sports reports on Telenuovo in Verona and in 1982 he received the Cesare d’Oro international award for journalistic merit.  But he later became known for his excessive swearing and blaspheming. The anonymous video showed his irate reactions to various problems he encountered while broadcasting, such as people unexpectedly entering the studio, background noises and illegible writing on the news sheets he received.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Inspector Montalbano: The first three novels,  by Andrea Camilleri 

Inspector Montalbano: The first three novels from Andrea Camilleri's bestselling Inspector Montalbano series features: The Shape of Water: On a waste ground in Vigàta, the Sicilian town's dark underbelly flourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes plying their trade. But when the body of Silvio Luparello, one of the local movers and shakers, is discovered there, Inspector Montalbano must investigate; and despite pressure from his commissioner, a local judge and bishop - he is determined to unearth the truth; The Terracotta Dog: When two lovers, dead for over 50 years, are discovered in a mountain cave watched over by a life-size terracotta dog, Inspector Montalbano's investigation will take him on a journey through Sicily's past and into a family's dark heart amid the horrors of World War II; The Snack Thief: When an elderly man is stabbed to death in an elevator and a crewman on an Italian fishing trawler is machine-gunned by a Tunisian patrol boat off Sicily's coast, only Inspector Montalbano suspects a link between the two incidents.

Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series, which has sold over 65 million copies worldwide, has been translated into thirty-two languages and was adapted for Italian television, with Luca Zingaretti in the lead role. Camilleri died in Rome in 2019.

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