Arcangelo Corelli – musician

Baroque composer had a major influence on the development of music

 

The composer Arcangelo Corelli

Violinist and composer Arcangelo Corelli was born on this day in 1653 at Fusignano, a small town near Ravenna.

He is remembered for his influence on the development of violin style and for his use of the genres of sonata and concerto. Corelli’s 12 Concerti Grossi established the concerto grosso as a popular medium of composition.

Named Arcangelo after his father, who died a few weeks before his birth, he studied music with the curate of a neighbouring village before going to the nearby towns of Faenza and Lugo to learn musical theory.

Corelli later studied with Giovanni Benvenuti, who was a violinist at the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna and in 1670 he started at the Philharmonic Academy in Bologna.

He moved on to Rome where to begin with he played the violin at a theatre. It is known that by 1677 he had written his first composition, a Sonata for Violin and Lute.

By 1675 Corelli was third violinist in the orchestra of the chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi and by the following year he had become second violinist.In 1681 his 12 Trio Sonatas for two violins and a cello were published and the following year he became first violinist in the San Luigi dei Francesi orchestra.

In 1687 Corelli became musical director at the Palazzo Pamphili, where he performed, conducted and organised important musical occasions.

On one occasion he conducted a large orchestra of stringed instruments to entertain the British ambassador, who had been sent to Rome by King James II of England to attend the coronation of Pope Innocent XII.

Corelli was also a brilliant teacher and among his many students was the young Antonio Vivaldi.

Considered to be the best violinist of his time, Corelli was invited to Naples in 1702 to perform a composition by Alessandro Scarlatti in the presence of the King.

Corelli died in Rome in 1713 and his 12 Concerti Grossi were published the following year in Amsterdam. Both Bach and Handel are said to have studied his work and been influenced by him.

The Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna
Photo: 0mente0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Travel tip:

Fusignano, where Corelli was born, is a comune (municipality) in the province of Ravenna in the Emilia-Romagna region. Ravenna was the capital city of the Western Roman Empire from 402 until its collapse in 406. The city’s Basilica of San Vitale is famous for its wealth of Byzantine mosaics, the largest and best preserved outside Turkey, and the church is on the Unesco World Heritage list. Arguably, Fusignano's most famous citizen is football manager Arrigo Sacchi, who won two European Cups as manager of AC Milan.

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Travel tip:

Corelli is buried in the Pantheon in Piazza della Rotonda in Rome . Considered to be Rome’s best preserved ancient building, the Pantheon was built in AD 118 on the site of a previous building dating back to 27 BC. It was consecrated as a church in the seventh century and many important people, including Victor Emanuel II, Umberto I and his wife, Queen Margherita, are buried there, along with the painters Raphael and Annibale Carracci, the architect Baldassare Peruzzi and the writers Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo and Émile Zola.

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More reading:

Why Alessandro Scarlatti was ahead of his time

The Baroque composer who enjoyed the patronage of a Swedish queen

The Venetian musician who inspired the spread of the Baroque style

Also on this day:

1600: The death of Bruno Giordano, 'martyr of science'

1796: The birth of opera composer Giovanni Pacini

1916: The birth of actor Raf Vallone

(Picture credits: Basilica of San Vitale by 0mente0; Pantheon by Roberta Dragan; via Wikimedia commons)

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Giambattista Bodoni - type designer

 Celebrity printer whose name lives on in type

A portrait of Giambattista Bodoni
by Giuseppe Lucatelli circa 1805

Typographer, printer and publisher Giambattista Bodoni was born on this day in 1740 in Saluzzo in the region of Piedmont.

At the height of his career he became internationally famous and was complimented by the Pope and paid a pension by Napoleon.

Bodoni designed a modern typeface that was named after him and is still in use today.

His father and grandfather were both printers and as a child he played with their leftover equipment. He learnt the printing trade at his father’s side and at the age of 17 travelled to Rome to further his career.

Bodoni served an apprenticeship at the press of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, the missionary arm of the Catholic Church.

In 1768 he was asked to assume management of the Duke of Parma’s Royal Press, where he produced Italian, Greek and Latin books.

He started using modern typefaces of his own design and came up with the typeface that retained the Bodoni name in 1790.

He became well known and important travellers visited his press to see him at work. Bodoni produced fine editions of the writings of Horace and Virgil in 1791 and 1793 respectively and Homer’s Iliad in 1808.

He died in 1813 in Parma , but his widow, Margherita, completed his work on a series of classics for his new patron, Joachim Murat.

Five years after his death she published a manual of all his typefaces.

Travel tip:

Saluzzo, the birthplace of Bodoni, is a town in the province of Cuneo in the region of Piedmont. Once named Saluces and part of France, it was ceded to the House of Savoy in 1601 and eventually became part of Piedmont . As well as a 15th century Cathedral, which has a Baroque high altar, the town has a 14th century church, dedicated to San Giovanni, which has a striking Gothic façade and Cloister.

Parma's baptistery, one of many historic
sights in city in Emilia-Romagna
Photo: Philip Schafer (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Travel tip:

Parma, where Bodoni worked and eventually died, is an historic city in the Emilia-Romagna region, famous for its ham (Prosciutto di Parma) and cheese (Parmigiano-Reggiano), the true ‘parmesan’. In 1545 the city was given as a duchy to the illegitimate son of Pope Paul III, whose descendants ruled Parma till 1731. The composer, Verdi, was born near Parma at Bussetto and the city has a prestigious opera house, the Teatro Regia. 

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Galileo Galilei – astronomer and physicist

Scholar has been judged to be the founder of modern science 

A portrait of Galileo Galilei painted
in 1636 by Justus Sustermans 

Renaissance scientist Galileo Galilei was born on this day in 1564 in Pisa.  He was an astronomer, physicist and engineer and has been called the father of observational astronomy and of modern science.

His astronomical observations, made with the help of telescopes he designed and engineered himself, confirmed the phases of Venus, discovered the four largest satellites of Jupiter and analysed sunspots. He cannot be credited with inventing the telescope, his own having come later than one patented in Holland, although he was certainly a pioneer of its development. Among Galileo's other inventions, however, the military compass is accepted as solely his.

Controversy marred Galileo's later life. His astronomical observations and other aspects of his scientific knowledge led him to support the view of the Polish scientist Nicolaus Copernicus in the previous century that the sun rather than the earth was the centre of the solar system.

This led to his trial and conviction by the Roman Catholic Inquisition as a heretic. He avoided being burned at the stake by reluctantly recanting the statements he had made in a publication on the subject but spent the last 10 years of his life under house arrest at his villa at Arcetri, south of Florence. 

Galileo was educated at a monastery near Florence and considered entering the priesthood but he enrolled instead at the University of Pisa to study medicine.

In 1581 he noticed a swinging chandelier being moved to swing in larger and smaller arcs by air currents. He experimented with two swinging pendulums and found they kept time together although he started one with a large sweep and the other with a smaller sweep. It was almost 100 years before a swinging pendulum was used to create an accurate timepiece.

Two of Galileo Galilei's early telescopes, which
are kept at the Museo Galileo in Florence

He talked his father, Vincenzo, a noted lutenist and composer, into letting him study mathematics and natural philosophy instead of medicine and by 1589 had been appointed to the chair of Mathematics at Pisa.

He moved to the University of Padua where he taught geometry, mechanics and astronomy until 1610. His interest in inventing is thought by some historians to have been driven by family circumstances. After the death of their father, Galileo's younger brother, Michelangelo or Michelagnolo, who also became a lutenist and composer, was financially dependent on his older sibling, who saw the invention and patenting of new devices as a way to generate extra income.

During his own lifetime and subsequently, Galileo tended to be referred to by his first name only, as was common during the 16th and 17th centuries in Italy. He is thought to be related to Galileo Bonaiuti, an important physician, professor, and politician in Florence in the 15th century.

Galileo's appearance before the Inquistion led to
him being threatened with being burned at the stake

Like Galileo Galilei almost two centuries later, Bonaiuti was buried in the Florence's Basilica of Santa Croce, the resting place of many significant historical figures, including the sculptor Michelangelo Buonarotti, the statesman and author Niccolò Machiavelli and the composer Gioachino Rossini.

Galileo's financial situation might have been better had he not deviated from his father's wish for him to study medicine, which at the time offered a better prospect of a comfortable career. But after his early experiments with pendulums while ostensibly studying medicine, he attended a lecture on geometry and persuaded his father to let him switch to mathematics and natural philosophy.  Soon, his inventive mid led to his creation of a thermoscope, a forerunner of the thermometer.

In time Galileo became Chair of Mathematics at Pisa University before moving to the University of Padua, where he taught geometry, mechanics and astronomy and made significant discoveries in both pure science and applied science, for example on the strength of materials and in his advancement of the telescope. He enjoyed the patronage of the Medici and Barberini families at times during his life.

Following his conviction for heresy and subsequent house arrest, from 1633 until his death at Arcetri in 1642, Galileo wrote one of his finest works, Two New Sciences, about the laws of motion and the principles of mechanics.

Pisa's famous leaning tower is unmissable
by visitors to the Campo dei Miracoli

Travel tip:

Pisa, the town of Galileo’s birth, is famous the world over for its leaning tower, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Italy . Already tilting when it was completed in 1372, the bell tower of the cathedral is in Piazza del Duomo, also known as Piazza dei Miracoli or Campo dei Miracoli in the centre of Pisa.  Pisa's other attractions include a wealth of well-preserved Romanesque buildings, Gothic churches and Renaissance piazzas. The city has a lively charm enhanced by its reputation as a centre of education. The University of Pisa, founded in 1343, now has elite status, rivalling Rome’s Sapienza University as the best in Italy, and a student population of around 50,000 makes for a vibrant cafe and bar scene. Not far from the city is the resort of Marina di Pisa, a seaside town located 12km (7 miles) from Pisa that began to develop in the early 17th century and grew rapidly after a railway line from Pisa opened in 1892. That growth saw the opening of restaurants and hotels and the construction of many beautiful Art Nouveau and neo-medieval villas. 

The Museo Galileo in Florence is housed in the 11th
century Palazzo Castellani on Piazza dei Giudici

Travel tip:

The Museo Galileo in Florence is in Piazza dei Giudici close to the Uffizi Gallery. It houses one of the biggest collections of scientific instruments in the world in Palazzo Castellani, an 11th century building. The first floor's nine rooms contain the Medici Collections, which include his two extant telescopes and the framed objective lens from the telescope with which he discovered the Galilean moons of Jupiter, plus his thermometers and a collection of terrestrial and celestial globes. The nine rooms on the second floor house instruments and experimental apparatus collected by the 18th-19th century Lorraine dynasty, which bear witness of the remarkable contribution of Tuscany and Italy to the progress of electricity, electromagnetism and chemistry.  The museum is open Mondays to Sundays from 9.30 to 18.00, closing at 13.00 on Tuesdays. 

More reading:

Galileo Galilei convicted of heresy

Galileo demonstrates the potential of the telescope to Venetian lawmakers

The disciple of Galileo who invented the barometer 

Also on this day:

1898: The birth of comic actor Totò 

1910: The birth of circus clown Charlie Cairoli

1927: The birth of cardinal and papal candidate Carlo Maria Martini

1944: The destruction by Allied bombers of Monte Cassino Abbey

(Picture credits: Telescopes by Sailko; Leaning Tower by Softeis; via Wikimedia Commons)

(Painting locations: Galileo portrait (1636-40) by Justin Sustermans, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London; Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition (1857) by Cristiano Banti, private collection)

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San Valentino and Sant’Antonino

Celebrations for two different Italian saints

Saint Valentine, a third century Roman martyr, is commemorated with a feast day on this day every year.

His name has become associated with the tradition of courtly love but all that is really known about him is that he was martyred and buried at a cemetery on the Via Flaminia in Rome on 14 February.

His feast day was first established in 496 by a Pope who revered him. It is thought he was imprisoned and tortured and then hastily buried, but that his disciples later retrieved his body.

Sorrento's Sant'Antonino looks across the square
 to the Basilica named after him.

During the Middle Ages it was believed that birds paired in mid-February and this is probably why Saint Valentine’s Day became associated with romance.

But while lovers all over the world raise a glass to Saint Valentine on this day, residents and visitors in Sorrento celebrate the festival of Sant’Antonino, the city’s patron saint.

Sant’Antonino Abate died on 14 February, 626. He is credited with saving the life of a child swallowed by a whale and also protecting Sorrento against plague and invasion.

Each year on the anniversary of his death, a silver statue of Sant’Antonino is carried in a procession through the streets of Sorrento and there are festive lights, fireworks, and musical events in his name.

Travel tip: 

Sant’Antonino’s body is buried in a crypt that became part of the Basilica di Sant’Antonino, a magnificent church that dates from the 11th century, but has been added to and refurbished over the years and is situated in Sorrento’s Piazza Sant’Antonino. Inside the Basilica, another statue of the saint is surrounded by the many offerings from sailors who have been saved from shipwrecks over the centuries and believe it was thanks to the intervention of Sant’Antonino.

Travel tip:

A statue of the Saint stands among the palm trees in the middle of Piazza Sant’Antonino opposite Sorrento’s town hall. Just off the square, the Via Santa Maria delle Grazie has many interesting shops, bars and restaurants, including the long-established Ristorante Sant'Antonino, named after the saint, which serves fish, seafood and Sorrentine specialities.

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