Cesare Mazzoni – lawyer and entrepreneur

Businessman turned his local spa water into a global export

San Pellegrino water has been
in production since 1905

Cesare Mazzoni, a Milanese lawyer who founded the company that produces the world-famous San Pellegrino mineral water, died on this day in 1915 in Milan.

The business Mazzoni started, in the small spa town of San Pellegrino Terme in Lombardy in northern Italy, manufactured 1.5 million bottles of the reputedly beneficial water during its first year of production in 1905 and has now become a multimillion-euro operation.

The son of an English teacher, Mazzoni was born in Milan in 1862. He studied law at the university of Pavia, a course from which he graduated with full marks. He then went to work for a railway company dealing with aspects of commercial law.

Mazzoni founded the Società Anonima delle Terme di San Pellegrino in 1899 and took over the running of the Hotel Terme and Fonte Palazzolo company, and the Hotel Milano and Fonte Salaroli company, after buying them from the local families who owned them.

He built new spa facilities and employed the architect Romolo Squadrelli to design and build a new water bottling plant in San Pellegrino, completed in Stile Liberty - Liberty style - the Italian equivalent of Art Nouveau style, between 1902 and 1904.

Within a few years of opening the plant, the 60 people who Mazzoni employed there were producing between four and five million bottles of the spa water annually to go on sale.

Mazzoni also founded the Val Brembana electric railway and joint stock company in 1904, which built the Bergamo to San Giovanni Bianco railway line, and he founded the Milanese Joint Stock Company for the salami and cheese industry of Milan in 1909.

He became president of many companies in Val Brembana and Val Camonica and was also an advisor to banks in the Bergamo area.

Cesare Mazzoni began to bottle the water from
San Pellegrino's springs in 1899

But Mazzoni was suddenly  taken ill in August 1915 and he died on August 21 that same year, aged just 53. He was buried in the Cimitero Monumentale of Milan. 

The municipality of San Pellegrino officially recognised Mazzoni as un ‘cittadino benemerito’, a ‘citizen of merit’, and in 1916 a street was named after him near the area where the thermal establishments were located.

The history of San Pellegrino water dates back to medieval times and by the early years of the 19th century, many noble people would travel to the town to ‘take the water’ because it had earned the reputation for being beneficial to people’s health.

After the company was founded in 1899 by Mazzoni, bottles of San Pellegrino water began to be shipped overseas. With the opening of the thermal facilities at the beginning of the 20th century, San Pellegrino started to thrive as a high-class holiday resort, which attracted aristocrats from all over Europe.

Also designed by Squadrelli, the Liberty-style Grand Hotel and Casino of San Pellegrino were opened in 1906 and they soon became popular haunts for international royalty and politicians. Two Queens of Italy and other members of the Italian royal family visited, along with famous people such as opera composer Pietro Mascagni, army General Luigi Cadorna and film director Federico Fellini.

As early as 1908, San Pellegrino water was being exported to Cairo, Calcutta, Shanghai, the United States, Brazil, Peru and Australia. 

The company was also the first to produce aranciata, or orangeade, in the 1930s, and they went on to produce sparkling drinks in other fruit flavours.

In 2010, more than a billion bottles of San Pellegrino water and San Pellegrino fruit beverages were sold in a single year.

The Grand Hotel and Casino at San Pellegrino
is an example of Liberty style opulence

Travel tip:

The spa town of San Pellegrino Terme is 24km (14 miles) north of the city of Bergamo and is a comune of Bergamo province, located in the Val Brembana. The name San Pellegrino has now become synonymous with its celebrated bottled aqua minerale, but for centuries it has been a place people visited, hoping for a cure for their illnesses. Leonardo da Vinci is reputedly one of the visitors who has sampled San Pellegrino’s ‘miraculous waters’, which are believed to be particularly effective against kidney stones and uric acid crystals. It is worth a visit to see the opulent Liberty-style architecture and to take a stroll along the banks of the River Brembo, imagining what San Pellegrino would have been like at the height of its popularity when it was frequented by royalty and celebrities. Viale Cesare Mazzoni is situated near the Brembo river and the thermal establishments. 

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Bergamo's Piazza Vecchia has been hailed as
the most beautiful square in Italy

Travel tip:

Bergamo is a fascinating, historic city in Lombardy with two distinct centres. The upper town, the Città Alta, is a beautiful walled city with buildings that date back to medieval times. At the heart of the Città Alta is Piazza Vecchia, which was remodelled during the Renaissance and has been hailed by architects and writers as the most beautiful square in Italy. It is surrounded by old palaces and has a 12th century bell tower that still strikes 100 times at 10pm each night to mark the ancient curfew, when the city’s gates would be closed for the night. You can walk through the archways under Palazzo della Ragione into Piazza Duomo where you will see the Duomo, the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, the Colleoni Chapel and the Battistero, all of them architectural gems. The elegant Città Bassa (lower town) grew up on the plain below and still has some buildings that date back to the 15th century. More imposing and elaborate architecture was added in the 19th and early 20th centuries and it is now a vibrant city with a wealth of shops, bars and restaurants. There are also palaces, churches, art galleries and museums, as well as a theatre, named after the Bergamo-born opera composer, Gaetano Donizetti.

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More reading:

Ernesto Basile, the architect who was a pioneer of Stile Liberty

Gaspare Campari and the aperitif that bears his name

Luigi Lavazza, the Turin grocer who became a market leader in coffee

Also on this day:

1862: The birth of adventure novelist Emilio Salgari

1943: The birth of actor Lino Capolicchio

1969: The death of footballer Giuseppe Meazza

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20 August

Jacopo Peri – composer and singer

Court musician produced the first work to be called an opera

The singer and composer Jacopo Peri, also known as Il Zazzerino, was born on this day in 1561 in Rome.  He is often referred to as the ‘inventor of opera’ as he wrote the first work to be called an opera, Dafne, in around 1597.  He followed this with Euridice in 1600, which has survived to the present day although it is rarely performed. It is sometimes staged as an historical curiosity because it is the first opera for which the complete music still exists.  Peri was born in Rome to a noble family but went to Florence to study and then worked in churches in the city as an organist and a singer.  He started to work for the Medici court as a tenor singer and keyboard player and then later as a composer, producing incidental music for plays.  Peri’s work is regarded as bridging the gap between the Renaissance period and the Baroque period.  Read more…

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Stelvio Cipriani – composer

Musician wrote some of Italy’s most famous film soundtracks

Stelvio Cipriani, an award-winning composer of film scores, was born on this day in 1937 in Rome.  One of his most famous soundtracks was for the 1973 film, La polizia sta a guardare (also released as The Great Kidnapping). The main theme was used again by Cipriani in 1977 for the film, Tentacoli, and also featured in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof in 2007.  Although Cipriani did not come from a musical background, he was fascinated with the organ at his church when he was a child.  His priest gave him music lessons and then Cipriani went to study piano and harmony at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome at the age of 14.  His first job was playing in a band on a cruise ship and then he became the accompanist for the popular Italian singer, Rita Pavone.  Stelvio wrote his first movie soundtrack for the 1966 spaghetti western, The Bounty Killer. Read more…

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Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel – poet and revolutionary

Noblewoman who sacrificed her life for the principle of liberty

A writer and leader of the movement that established the Parthenopean Republic in Naples, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel was hanged on this day in 1799 in a public square near the port.  A noblewoman, she would have expected her execution to be carried out by beheading, but had given up her title of marchioness when she became involved with the Jacobins, founded by supporters of the French Revolution, who were working to overthrow the monarchy.  Pimentel had asked to be beheaded anyway, but the restored Bourbon monarchy showed her no mercy, reputedly because she had written pamphlets denouncing Queen Maria Carolina as a lesbian. On the day of her execution, Pimentel was reputed to have stepped calmly up to the gallows, quoting Virgil by saying: ‘Perhaps one day this will be worth remembering.’ She was 47 years of age.  Read more…

Carla Fracci – ballerina

Brilliant Romantic dancer brought ballet to the people

Destined to become one of the greatest ballerinas of the 20th century, Carolina ‘Carla’ Fracci was born on this day in 1936 in Milan.  Carla became a leading dancer of the La Scala Theatre Ballet in her home town and then worked with the Royal Ballet in London, Stuttgart Ballet, Royal Swedish Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, becoming known for her interpretations of leading characters in Romantic ballets such as Giselle, Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet.  Sent to live with relatives in the countryside during World War Two, she returned to Milan after the conflict ended and her mother took her and her sister to sit the La Scala Theatre ballet school entrance exam.  At first she was bored, but after performing alongside Margot Fonteyn in The Sleeping Beauty when she was 12, Carla changed her mind and started working hard to make up for lost time.  Read more…

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Pope Pius X

Good hearted pontiff was made a saint

Pope Pius X, who chose to live in poverty and devote his life to the Blessed Virgin Mary, died on this day in 1914 in the Apostolic Palace in Rome.  His body was exhumed from its tomb nearly 30 years later and was found to be miraculously incorrupt and Pius X was made a saint in 1954.  Pius X was born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto in 1835 in Riese in the province of Treviso.  He was the second son of the ten children born to the village postman and his seamstress wife. Although the family were poor, they valued education and, as a young boy, Sarto walked six kilometres (3.7 miles) to attend school every day.  In 1850 he was given a scholarship to attend the seminary in Padua, where he completed classical, philosophical and theological studies with distinction.  After being ordained a priest, he continued to study while carrying out the duties of a parish pastor.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years, by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker 

Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their scrupulous and provocative retelling of the history of opera, examining its development, the means by which it communicates, and its societal role. In a new revision with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the 21st century this book explores the tensions that have sustained opera over 400 years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Abbate and Parker argue that, though the genre's most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to transform the viewer with its enduring power.  Abbate and Parker's A History of Opera is the first full new history of opera in sixty years - now in paperback in an updated second edition

Carolyn Abbate is Professor of Music at Harvard University and the author of Unsung Voices and In Search of Opera. Roger Parker is Professor of Music at King's College, London, and the author of Leonora's Last Act and Remaking the Song.

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19 August

Nanni Moretti - film director

Award winning filmmaker helped shape politics

Giovanni ‘Nanni’ Moretti, film director, producer, screenwriter and actor, was born on this day in 1953 in Brunico in South Tyrol.  Moretti has been a prominent opponent to Silvio Berlusconi’s governments and policies in Italy. In his 2006 film, Il Caimano, a comedy drama focusing on allegations about Berlusconi’s lifestyle, he played the role of Berlusconi himself.  Moretti’s parents, who were both teachers, were from Rome but he was born while they were on holiday in Trentino-Alto Adige. His father, Luigi Moretti, taught Greek at Sapienza University in Rome.  While growing up Moretti developed a passion for the cinema and water polo. He started making films as a hobby and played in the junior national water polo team in 1970.  His first feature film, Io sono un autarchico - I am Self-sufficient, was released in 1976.  Read more…

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Cesare Prandelli – football coach

Led Italy to the final of Euro 2012

The former head coach of the Italian national football team, Cesare Prandelli, was born on this day in 1957 in Orzinuovi, near Brescia.  Under Prandelli’s guidance, the azzurri finished runners-up in the European Championships final of 2012 and qualified for the finals of the World Cup in Brazil in 2014.  Despite winning a two-year extension to his contract, he quit after Italy’s elimination at the group stage in Brazil, which he considered was the honourable course of action after a very disappointing tournament in which the azzurri beat England in their opening match but then lost to Costa Rica and Uruguay.  As a player, Prandelli had been a member of a highly successful Juventus team in the early 1980s, winning Serie A three times and the European Cup in 1985 – albeit on a night overshadowed by tragedy at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels.  Read more…

Andrea Palladio - the world's favourite architect

Humble stonecutter became his profession's biggest name

Andrea Palladio, the humble stonecutter who became the most influential architect in the history of his profession, died on this day in 1580, aged 71.  The cause of his death is not clear but some accounts say he collapsed while inspecting the construction of the Tempietto Barbaro, a church in Maser, a town in the Veneto not far from Treviso.  He was initially buried in a family vault in the church of Santa Corona in Vicenza, the city in which he spent most of his life, but later re-interred at the civic cemetery, where a chapel was built in his honour.  Examples of Palladio's work can be found all over the region where he lived and in Venice, where he was commissioned to build, among other architectural masterpieces, the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, the focal point of the view across the lagoon from St Mark's Square through the Piazzetta.  Read more…

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Salomone Rossi - violinist and composer

Leading Jewish musician of the late Renaissance 

The composer and violinist Salomone Rossi, who became a renowned performer at the court of the Gonzagas in Mantua in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and is regarded as the leading Jewish musician of the late Renaissance, is thought to have been born on this day in 1570.  Jews had periodically been persecuted in the Italian peninsula for hundreds of years. At around the time of Rossi’s birth, Pope Pius V expelled all Jews from all but two areas of the papal states and Florence established a ghetto, in which all Jews within the city and the wide Grand Duchy of Tuscany were required to live.  The Mantua of Rossi’s day was more enlightened than many Italian cities, however. Jews were not only tolerated but were often allowed to mix freely with non-Jews. The liberal atmosphere allowed Jewish writers, musicians and artists to have an important influence on the culture of the day.   Read more…

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Book of the Day: Berlusconi: The Epic Story of the Billionaire Who Took Over Italy, by Alan Friedman

Before a real estate tycoon called Donald J Trump became President of the United States, there was Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire media mogul turned prime minister who dominated Italian life for 20 years. A candid, warts-and-all portrait of the leader who played hard in office and in private life, from the bunga-bunga parties to his most secret moments with world leaders, Berlusconi: The Epic Story of the Billionaire Who Took Over Italy is rich in anecdotes and revelations involving Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, George W Bush, Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, and many others.  Berlusconi's incredible rise to power started from nothing. A self-created man, he was a cruise ship crooner as a young man, became - like Trump - a real estate tycoon in the '70s, started the first commercial television network in history, and turned AC Milan into a world-class soccer club. And that was all before he survived the squalid swampland of Italian politics to become prime minister who not only served the longest in Italian history, but also generated - at least, before Trump - the most controversy of arguably any world leader.

Alan Friedman is a US-born journalist, author, television producer and documentary maker who has spent more than 40 years as an award-winning correspondent and commentator with newspapers in London, the United States, Italy and Germany.

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18 August

NEW - Federico Borromeo - cardinal and cultural patron 

Archbishop of Milan who founded Biblioteca Ambrosiana

Federico Borromeo, who served as Archbishop of Milan from 1595 until his death in 1631 and founded the city’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana and its integral art gallery, was born on this day in 1564 in Milan.  He followed his cousin and spiritual guide Carlo Borromeo - later canonised as Saint Charles Borromeo - as a leading figure in the Counter-Reformation movement in the Catholic Church.  Federico’s life was also notable for his personal charity during the famine of 1627-28, when he fed up to 2,000 people every day within his own residence, and for his bravery during the 1630 plague outbreak, when he stayed in Milan to visit the sick and the dying, despite the grave risk to his own health.  He was immortalised in Alessandro Manzoni’s seminal novel, I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), in which the author holds up Federico’s work as Archbishop as an example of humble and courageous Christian charity. Read more…

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Antonio Salieri - composer

Maestro of Vienna haunted by Mozart rumours

Antonio Salieri, the Italian composer who in his later years was dogged by rumours that he had murdered Mozart, was born on this day in 1750 in Legnago, in the Veneto.  Salieri was director of Italian opera for the Habsburg court in Vienna from 1774 to 1792 and German-born Mozart believed for many years that “cabals of Italians” were deliberately putting obstacles in the way of his progress, preventing him from staging his operas and blocking his path to prestigious appointments.  In letters to his father, Mozart said that “the only one who counts in (the emperor’s eyes) is Salieri” and voiced his suspicions that Salieri and Lorenzo Da Ponte, the poet and librettist, were in league against him.  It emerged years after Mozart died that the young composer had told friends in the final weeks of his life that he feared he had been poisoned.  Salieri was immediately the prime suspect.  Read more…

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Gianni Rivera - footballer and politician

Milan legend served in the Italian Parliament and as MEP

Gianni Rivera, a footballer regarded as one of Italy's all-time greats, was born on this day in 1943 in Alessandria, a city in Piedmont some 90km east of Turin and a similar distance south-west of Milan.  Rivera played for 19 years for AC Milan, winning an array of trophies that included the Italian championship three times, the Italian Cup four times, two European Cup-Winners' Cups and two European Cups.  He won 63 caps for the Italian national team, playing in four World Cups, including the 1970 tournament in Mexico, when Italy reached the final.  Later in life, he entered politics, sitting in the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament from 1987 to 2001 and serving as a Member of the European Parliament from 2005 to 2009.  Rivera had a tough upbringing in Alessandria, which suffered heavy bombing during the later stages of the Second World War, with hundreds of residents killed.  Read more…

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Beatrice Borromeo - journalist and model

Glamorous aristocrat who specialises in gritty real-life stories

The journalist Beatrice Borromeo, a descendant of one of Italy’s oldest aristocratic families and married to a member of the Monegasque royal family, was born on this day in 1985 in Innichen in the German-speaking province of South Tyrol in northeast Italy.  Although born into wealthy high society, Borromeo was driven by her political and humanitarian beliefs from an early age, taking part in demonstrations in Milan against the government of Silvio Berlusconi and deciding to pursue a career in journalism, working full time for the Italian daily newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano.  Since marrying long-time boyfriend Pierre Casiraghi - grandson of Prince Rainier III and the actress Grace Kelly - and having two children, she has devoted much energy towards making documentary films, but always on hard-hitting topics such as climate refugees and the women of ‘Ndrangheta - the Calabrian mafia. Read more... 

Umberto Guidoni - astronaut

First European to step on to the International Space Station

The astronaut Umberto Guidoni, who spent almost 28 days in space on two NASA space shuttle missions, was born on this day in 1954 in Rome.  In April 2001, on the second of those missions, he became the first European astronaut to go on board the International Space Station (SSI).  After retiring as an active astronaut in 2004, Guidoni began a career in politics and was elected to the European Parliament as a member for Central Italy.  Although born in Rome, Guidoni’s family roots are in Acuto, a small hilltown about 80km (50 miles) southeast of the capital, in the area near Frosinone in Lazio known as Ciociaria.  Interested in science and space from a young age, Guidoni attended the Gaio Lucilio lyceum in the San Lorenzo district before graduating with honours in physics specialising in astrophysics at the Sapienza University of Rome in 1978. Read more…

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Francesco Canova da Milano – lutenist and composer

Brilliant virtuoso performed for popes and noblemen

Lute player and composer Francesco Canova da Milano was born on this day in 1497 in Monza near Milan in Lombardy.  Nicknamed il Divino by his contemporaries, Francesco Canova da Milano was known throughout Europe as the leading composer of his time for the lute. More of his work has been preserved than that of any other lutenist from the period and he influenced the work of other composers for more than a century after his death.  Francesco’s father, Benedetto, and his older brother, Bernardino, were also talented musicians.  Francesco studied the lute as a child and by 1514 he was known to be a member of the papal household in Rome. He and his father became private musicians to Pope Leo X in 1516.  His father was employed until 1518, but Francesco stayed with Leo X till the pope’s death in 1521. Read more…

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Fernanda Pivano - writer and translator

Played key role in popularising American literature in Italy

The writer and translator Fernanda Pivano, who became an important figure in Italian literary circles for translating and writing about the greats of 20th century American literature, from Ernest Hemingway to the so-called Beat Generation, died in Milan on this day in 2009.  She was 92, having enjoyed a literary career spanning half a century. Her final article in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera was published only a month before her death.  As well as Hemingway, with whom she developed a close friendship after meeting him for the first time in 1949, Pivano - whose first name was usually shortened to Nanda - translated into Italian works by classic American writers such as F Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Dorothy Parker.  In the 1950s, she became fascinated by the culture and ideals of what became known as the Beat Generation.  Read more… 

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Book of the Day: Sacred Painting and Museum, by Federico Borromeo. Translated and edited by Kenneth S Rothwell Junior

Federico Borromeo is well known as a leading Catholic reformer and as the founder of the Ambrosiana library, art collection, and academy in that city. Less known is the fact that the institution's art museum was the culmination of many decades of reflection on the aesthetic qualities and religious roles of art. Borromeo recorded his reflections in two treatises. "De pictura sacra" ("Sacred Painting", 1624) laid out the rules that artists should follow when creating religious art. Borromeo touched on dozens of iconographical issues and in so doing drew on his deep knowledge not only of church fathers, councils, and scripture but also of classical art and literature. In "Musaeum" (1625) Borromeo showed a less doctrinaire and more personal side by walking the reader through the Ambrosiana and commenting on specific works in his collection. He offered some of the earliest and most important critiques to survive on works by artists such as Leonardo, Titian, and Jan Brueghel the Elder. This volume offers, for the first time, translations of the treatises directly into English as well as freshly edited Latin texts, an introduction, extensive notes, and an appendix on the Academy of Design that was established in conjunction with the museum. 

Kenneth S Rothwell Jr is Professor of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

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