Elsa Martinelli – actress

Tuscan beauty was spotted by Kirk Douglas

The actress Elsa Martinelli in a 1965
appearance in the TV show The Rogues

Actress and former model Elsa Martinelli was born Elisa Tia on this day in 1935 in Grosseto.

She moved to Rome with her family as a teenager and was discovered by designer Roberto Capucci in 1953 while working as a barmaid in the city.

Her stunning looks helped her to become a successful fashion model and she eventually began playing small parts in films.

As Elsa Martinelli she appeared in Claude Autant-Lara’s Le Rouge et Le Noir in 1954.

Her first important role came a year later when Kirk Douglas is said to have seen her on a magazine cover and told his production company to hire her to appear opposite him in the film, The Indian Fighter.

In 1956 she won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival for playing the title role in Mario Monicelli’s Donatella.

Martinelli married Count Franco Mancinelli Scotti di San Vito and they had a daughter, Cristiana, in 1958.

Ten years later, after she had split up with her first husband, Martinelli married photographer and furniture designer Willy Rizzo.

In the 1950s and 1960s she attended lavish parties and events in Rome with celebrities such as Anita Ekberg, Maria Callas, Sophia Loren, Carlo Ponti and Harold Robbins.

More reading: Federico Fellini, film director, born 20 January, 1920

Martinelli went on to have a long string of film and television credits to her name.

She appeared in the 1992 comedy film Once Upon a Time and most recently in the television series, Orgoglio, in 2005.

The Cathedral in Grosseto
Photo by Waugsberg (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Travel tip:

Grosseto, where Elsa Martinelli was born and lived as a child, is in the centre of Tuscany, about 14 kilometers from the sea and surrounded by walls commissioned by Francesco I de Medici in the 16th century, There is a 13th century Cathedral with a façade of black and white marble as well as many beautiful old palaces in the centre of the city.


Travel tip:

Rome in the late 1950s and early 1960s was considered the most desirable place in the world in which to party. The economy was booming, designers, such as Roberto Capucci, had made the city synonymous with the word glamour and American directors flocked to make their films at Cinecittà, the studio complex south of the city. This golden era is epitomised by Federico Fellini’s film La dolce vita (The Sweet Life), featuring Marcello Mastroianni as a reporter who follows every move of the celebrities who frequent Rome’s exclusive nightclubs and live in the city’s historic, aristocratic villas.

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Fire at La Fenice

Oldest theatre in Venice keeps rising from the ashes

The sign welcoming visitors to Teatro La Fenice,
Venice's famous opera house

La Fenice, the world famous opera house in Venice, was destroyed by fire on this day in 1996.

It was the third time a theatre had been burnt down in Venice and it took nearly eight years to rebuild.

The theatre had been named La Fenice, the Phoenix, when it was originally built in the 1790s, to reflect that it was helping an opera company rise from the ashes after its previous theatre had burnt down.

Disaster struck again in 1836 when La Fenice itself was destroyed by fire but it was quickly rebuilt and opened its doors again in 1837.

The American writer, Donna Leon, chose La Fenice to be the main location in her first novel featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, published in 1992.

But in January 1996, approximately four years after Leon’s novel, Death At La Fenice,was published, the theatre burnt down again, making it front page news all over the world.

Arson was immediately suspected and in 2001 a court found two electricians guilty of setting the building on fire.

More on opera: Death of composer Giuseppe Verdi, 27 January, 1901

They were believed to have burnt it down because their company was facing heavy fines because of delays in the repair work they were carrying out. One of them disappeared after his final appeal was turned down, having been sentenced to seven years in prison. The other went on to serve a six-year prison sentence.

The fugitive electrician was arrested on the Mexico-Belize border in 2007 and extradited to Italy. After serving 16 months in prison he was released on day parole.

La Fenice was rebuilt in the same style as before at a cost of more than 90 million euros and it reopened with an orchestral concert in 2003.

The first opera performed in the rebuilt theatre was a production of Verdi’s La Traviata, staged in November 2004.

Travel tip:

Teatro La Fenice in Campo San Fantin is the oldest theatre in Venice. Its heyday was during the 19th century when the premieres of Rossini’s Tancredi and Semiramide and Verdi’s La Traviata were held there. During the Austrian occupation of Venice,  the audience threw red, white and green flowers on the stage to represent the Italian flag and shouted Viva Verdi. They weren’t just praising the composer, but using the letters of his last name as code for ‘Vittorio Emanuele Re d’Italia’.

Campiello Santa Maria Nova in Venice,
close to the home of author Donna Leon

Travel tip:

The writer Donna Leon, who lives in Venice, chose to put her character, Brunetti, on the opposite side of the Grand Canal from herself. She lives close to the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Cannareggio while Brunetti’s apartment is supposed to be in Calle Tiepolo near the church of San Polo.

She often describes Brunetti leaving the Questura and jumping on to a police launch that would then head out into the lagoon. But in her novel, A Venetian Reckoning, published in 1996, Brunetti has to go home urgently. Instead of going down to Riva Schiavoni and taking the Vaporetto, he knows it will be quicker to cut through the back streets to Campo Santa Maria Formosa and Campo San Bartolomeo and cross the Grand Canal on a traghetto. Two old ladies are waiting to be rowed across but he waves his police badge at the gondolier and orders him to take him to the end of Calle Tiepolo.

Browse books by Donna Leon at amazon.co.uk

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Gianluigi Buffon – goalkeeper

Record breaking footballer still at peak of his career

Gianluigi Buffon
Picture courtesy of Puma

Italy and Juventus goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon was born on this day in 1978 in Carrara in Tuscany.

Widely considered by football experts to be the best goalkeeper in the world, he is known for his outstanding ability to stop shots.

He holds the record for the most clean sheets, both in Serie A and the national side, and he has won numerous awards.

Now aged 38, Buffon has announced that he will probably retire after the 2018 World Cup finals in Russia.

He has played a record 154 times for Italy and is expected to be first choice at this summer’s European Championships in France.

Buffon, whose nickname is Gigi, was born into a family of athletes. His mother, Maria, was a discus thrower and his father, Adriano, was a weight lifter. His two sisters both played volleyball for the Italian national team and his uncle was a prominent basketball player.

Watch 10 of Gianluigi Buffon's greatest saves

His grandfather’s cousin, Lorenzo Buffon, was also a top goalkeeper, playing for AC Milan and Italy, representing his country at the 1962 FIFA World Cup.

Gianluigi Buffon began his career with the Parma youth team at the age of 13 as an outfield player. When both of the team’s goalkeepers were injured he was asked to deputise in goal and within two weeks he had been promoted to first team 'keeper.

Buffon saves a penalty from England's Ashley Cole
during Italy's quarter-final shoot-out win at Euro 2012

When he transferred from Parma to Juventus in 2001 for 100 billion lire, more than 51 million euros (the equivalent of £32.4 million) he became the most expensive goalkeeper in history and the record still stands.

Buffon auctions off his captain’s arm band after every match to benefit the charities he supports.

UPDATE: Since this article was written, Buffon spent the 2018-19 season playing for Paris St Germain in France, returned to Juventus for two more seasons and rejoined his boyhood club, Parma, last summer, continuing to play in Serie B, the second tier of the Italian championship. He retired from international football after Italy failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup finals.

Travel tip:

The city of Carrara in Tuscany, where Buffon was born, is famous for the quarries that produce white and blue-grey Carrara marble. Among the sights worth seeing in the centre of the town are a decorative 12th century Duomo and a 16th century Ducal Palace, the Palazzo Cybo Malaspina, which is now the headquarters of a Fine Arts Academy.

Palazzo Cybo Malaspina in Carrara
Photo: Davide Papalini (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Travel tip:

Juventus Football Club, colloquially known as Juve, play at Juventus Stadium in Corso Galileo Ferraris in Turin. You can book a ticket to visit the club’s museum and tour the stadium, which will even give you the chance to see inside the club's dressing rooms. For more details go to www.juventus.com 

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Giuseppe Verdi – composer

 How Italy mourned the loss of a national symbol

Giuseppe Verdi, photographed
in about 1870

Opera composer Giuseppe Verdi died on this day at the age of 87 in his suite at the Grand Hotel et de Milan in 1901.

The prolific composer who had dominated the world of opera for a large part of the 19th century was initially buried privately at Milan’s Cimitero Monumentale.

But a month later Verdi’s body was moved to its final resting place in the crypt of a rest home for retired musicians that he had helped establish in Milan.

An estimated crowd of 300,000 people are reported to have turned out to bid Verdi farewell and ‘Va, pensiero’, a chorus from his 1842 opera Nabucco, was performed by a choir conducted by Arturo Toscanini.

Verdi meant a great deal to the Italian people because his composition, ‘Va, pensiero’ had been the unofficial anthem for supporters of the Risorgimento movement, which had sought the unification of Italy.

In his early operas Verdi had demonstrated sympathy with the cause of the Risorgimento and people had come to associate him with the movement’s ideals.

But as he became older and more prosperous he had chosen to withdraw from public life and had established himself on a country estate just outside Busseto, the town of his birth, near Parma in Emilia-Romagna.

Verdi surprised the world of music with a triumphant final phase of his career when he composed his Requiem in 1874, Otello in 1887 and Falstaff in 1893.

The composer was reported to have been very upset by the assassination of King Umberto 1 in 1900 and started to write a poem about the monarch that was never completed. 

In January, 1901 Verdi suffered a stroke. Despite receiving dedicated medical care at his hotel he died a few days later.

Read more:


Verdi's Il trovatore first staged, 19 January 1853

Death of conductor Arturo Toscanini, 16 January 1957


Travel tip:

The Grand Hotel et de Milan in Via Manzoni in Milan is now part of the Leading Hotels of the World Group. It was designed in the 18th century but has been renovated and improved many times over the years. Close to La Scala, the Galleria and Duomo, it was in an ideal position for important visitors to Milan such as Verdi, Caruso and Maria Callas.

The statue of Giuseppe Verdi
in his home town of Busseto
Photo: VivaVerdi (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Travel tip:

Busseto, the home town of Verdi, is in the province of Parma in Emilia-Romagna. Verdi was born in the nearby village of Le Roncole in 1813 but moved into the town in 1824. You can visit the churches of Santa Maria degli Angeli and San Michele Arcangelo where Verdi played the organ. Villa Verdi, the country house where he lived with singer Giuseppina Strepponi, is just outside the town in the nearby village of Sant’Agata.

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