Rudolph Valentino - star of silent films

Heart-throb actor who died tragically young

Rudolph Valentino in a publicity shot for his
hit movie The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The man who would become Rudolph Valentino was born on this day in 1895 in Castellaneta, a small town in a rocky region of Puglia notable for steep ravines.

Born the second youngest of four children by the French wife of an Italian veterinary surgeon, he was christened Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla.

When he arrived in America as an immigrant in 1913, he was registered as Rodolfo Guglielmi. His first movie credit listed him as Rudolpho di Valentina and he appeared under nine different variations of that name before achieving fame as Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in 1920.

During the silent movie boom, he enjoyed more success in The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle and The Son of the Sheik and his smouldering good looks made him a 1920s sex symbol, nicknamed "The Latin Lover" and adored by countless female fans.

Yet his route to fame was difficult. Unable to find work at home, he joined the exodus of southern Italians to the United States and aged just 18 boarded a boat to New York, disembarking at Ellis Island on 13 December, 1913.

He soon ran out of money and, even in the harsh New York winter, he had to sleep rough in Central Park.  Eventually, after working as a dishwasher and a gardener, he found employment at Maxim's Restaurant-Cabaret as a "taxi dancer", a paid-for partner for female clients.

Maxim's attracted a wealthy clientele and it is there that Valentino began to capitalise on his good looks and natural charm to become a sought-after partner. But he had to leave after the relationship he developed with a Chilean heiress landed him in jail.

When the lady in question sought a divorce from her husband, Valentino agreed to take the stand to support her claims of infidelity on her husband's part, testifying that he was seeing a female dancer at Maxim's.  Out of revenge, the husband, a well-connected businessman, had Valentino arrested, along with a known madam, on trumped-up vice charges.

He was released after only a few days but the scandal cost him his job and when the heiress then shot her ex-husband during a custody dispute, he decided it would be in his interests to move on and he joined a travelling musical troupe that would eventually lead him to the West Coast, and Hollywood.

There he inveigled himself with more wealthy women by offering private dance tuition. At the same time, he was pursuing his ambition to work in the cinema and landed a series of bit-part roles.

It was while travelling to Florida for one of these that he read the novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by the Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and decided to seek out June Mathis, a screenwriter for Metro Pictures, who had bought the rights to the novel, in the hope of securing a part. As it happens, Mathis had seen him perform and already had him in mind.

The movie was a massive success, one of the first to make more than $1 million at the box office, and Valentino became a star.  He was paid accordingly. At his peak he earned $10,000 a week at a time when the average wage in the United States was $2,000 a year.

Yet contentment eluded him.  At times difficult to work with, he clashed with a number of directors and a bitter dispute with one of his studios led to him being unable to work at all after they refused to release him from his contract.  Despite his earnings power, he also ran up huge debts.

Although he was married twice, albeit divorced both times, he found himself the target for gossip and innuendo about his sexuality. His taste for jewellery and exotic clothes led some male writers to imply that he was gay. One columnist enraged him so much he took boxing lessons from Jack Dempsey, the world heavyweight champion, and challenged the writer to a fight.

Crowds gather outside the Campbell Funeral Home in
New York ahead of Rudolph Valentino's funeral 

Valentino's death in 1926 at the age of only 31 shocked the world.  He collapsed at a New York hotel and was taken to hospital. At first he was thought to have appendicitis but it transpired he had perforated gastric ulcers. This in turn led him to develop peritonitis and pleuritis, conditions affecting the membranes lining his abdomen and lungs, which proved fatal.

The outpouring of grief among his fans was such that 100,000 people, mainly female, lined the streets of New York as his funeral cortege made its way to St Malachy's Roman Catholic Church in the Broadway theatre district.  A similar number were said to have filed past his coffin at the Frank Campbell Funeral Home, where his body was displayed for a number of days before the private ceremony.

Although his debts meant there was little in his estate to pay the costs, a second funeral then took place in Beverley Hills in California and Valentino's body was laid to rest in the Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery, in a crypt provided by June Mathis, his scriptwriter friend, who had bought it for a husband she subsequently divorced.

Travel tip:

Valentino is honoured in several ways in his home town of Castellaneta.  A Rudolph Valentino Museum was opened in his childhood home and a statue unveiled in 1961. A Foundation was created to promote his life and his work and in 2009 a film school - the Centro Studi Cine Club Rodolfo Valentino Castellaneta - was opened in the town.

Rudolph Valentino's family home in Castellaneta

Travel tip:

The Valentino Museum, where the exhibits include the bed in which he slept as a boy, can be found on Via Vittorio Emanuele, in the old part of Castellaneta, which has a medieval layout of narrow alleys and streets and sits on a ridge above the sheer-sided Gravina di Castellaneta.

(Photo of Valentino family home by Pietro d'Ambrosio CC BY-SA 3.0)


More reading

Pina Menichelli: silent movie diva who achieved worldwide fame

How Shakespeare made Zeffirelli a household name

Spaghetti westerns opened doors for top producer

Also on this day:

1527: The Sack of Rome

1963: The birth of Alessandra Ferri, prima ballerina assoluta




Home

Mudslides in Campania

Towns and villages destroyed in natural disaster

Dramatic picture shows mud cascading down mountainside

Italy was in shock on this day in 1998 as a series of mudslides brought devastation in Campania, 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.

Scenes in the Sarno suburb of Episcopio was said to be reminiscent of nearby Pompeii, the city destroyed in the Vesuvius eruption of 79AD, with some streets completely buried in mud up to four metres deep.

Hospitals and schools were destroyed and volunteers joined rescue workers in digging for survivors over several days. It is believed that the bodies of some victims were never found, particularly among a significant number of illegal immigrants in the area.

Residents wade through mud in Sarno

Nearly 4,000 firefighters, troops, forest rangers and medical workers, including 80 United States marines based in Naples, helped with the rescue operation.

One factor thought to have contributed to the unstable mountainsides was the replacement of chestnut trees, which have large root systems that help hold the ground together, with hazelnut trees, which are more profitable but have much smaller root systems.

Environmentalists also pointed to the burning of trees and brush to plant commercial crops and the uncontrolled expansion of towns and villages, with parts of streams and river beds disappearing under concrete and asphalt and drainage channels often clogged with rubbish and building waste.

Many houses, apartment blocks and industrial buildings were said to be shoddily built with inadequate foundations, which meant they quickly collapsed when the mudslides hit.

The catastrophe prompted the Italian Ministry of the Environment to introduce legislative measures for environmental protection which have come to be known as Legge Sarno (Sarno Laws).

But the government was accused of responding too slowly as the disaster was unfolding, failing to issue evacuation instructions even after the Mayor of Sarno telephoned the Civil Protection Department to warn that a torrent of mud, rocks and broken trees was heading for the town.  Rescuers did not arrive until after nightfall, which meant valuable time was lost in which helicopters and other equipment could not be used.

Campania has been plagued by mudslides.  There have been almost 650 since 1918, the highest for any region in Italy.  In fact, it is the most dangerous part of Italy for natural disasters, with almost one-third of all the country's floods, landslides and earthquakes over the past 70 years taking place within its borders.

Travel tip:

Sarno is situated in an area of 500 square kilometres known as the Sarno basin, in which some 750,000 people live.  It is made up of largely industrial towns but also contains the ruins of Pompeii, some 20 kilometres to the west. Parts of the Roman city buried by the 79AD eruption of Vesuvius were unearthed in 1599 during work to alter the course of the River Sarno, although serious excavation did not begin until 1748.

Porticoes line the historic main
street in Cava de' Tirreni

Travel tip:

A diocese of the Roman Catholic church from around 1,000AD, Sarno had religious ties for many years with Cava de' Terreni, a town a few kilometres from Salerno notable for a Benedictine abbey and a beautiful porticoed main street in the commercial district of what was once the most prosperous town in the area.

Home

Bartolomeo Cristofori - inventor of the piano

Instrument maker adapted harpsichord to play soft and loud notes

Bartolomeo Cristofori in a 1726 portrait

Bartolomeo Cristofori, the man widely credited with inventing the piano, was born on this day in 1655 in Padua.

He came up with the idea while working for the Grand Prince Ferdinando de' Medici in Florence, who had hired him to look after his collection of harpsichords and other instruments.

It is thought that Cristofori, who was assumed to have been an established maker of musical instruments when Ferdinando invited him to Florence in around 1690, wanted to create a keyboard instrument similar to a harpsichord but capable of playing notes of varying loudness.

An inventory of Medici instruments from 1700 described an "arpicimbalo", which resembled a harpsichord but which created sounds through hammers and dampers rather than the plucking mechanism employed by the harpsichord. It was said to be "newly invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori".

In 1711, Scipione Maffei, a poet and journalist, referred to Cristofori's "gravicembalo col piano, e forte" (harpsichord with soft and loud), the first time it was called by its eventual name, pianoforte. A Florentine court musician, Federigo Meccoli, noted that the "arpi cimbalo del piano e forte" was first made by Cristofori in 1700, which is regarded as the birth date for the piano.

An early model was dismissed by the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach as possessing too heavy a touch and too weak a treble.  Cristofori made further modifications over time and by 1726 his instrument had many of the characteristics of a modern piano, albeit with fewer keys.

In Germany, meanwhile, the organ designer Gottfried Silbermann, using Cristofori's blueprint, began making pianos of his own in 1730, which met with Bach's approval.

Three Cristofori pianos survive, the oldest a 1720 model at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  The Museo Strumenti Musicali in Rome has one dated at 1722 and the Musikinstrumenten-Museum of Leipzig University has one made in 1726.

Cristofori’s invention was initially slow to catch on in Italy, but records show that Queen Maria Barbara de Braganza of Spain, patron and student of the composer Domenico Scarlatti, bought five. It is thought that hundreds of Scarlatti’s single-movement keyboard sonatas, of which there were more than 500, may have been intended for piano, rather than harpsichord.

By the late 18th century, thanks to its range and versatility, the pianoforte had become a leading instrument of Western music. By the end of the 19th century, many wealthier households in Europe and North America possessed a piano and almost every major Western composer from Mozart onwards had played it and put it at the heart of their musical output.

Cristofori remained in Florence following the death of Ferdinando in 1713 and continued to work for the Medici court until his health declined.  There is evidence that his assistants were Giovanni Ferrini and Domenico dal Mela, who both went on to establish notable careers of their own.  Dal Mela is said to have made the first upright piano.  Cristofori died in Florence in January 1731.

The Basilica of St Anthony in Padua

Travel tip:

The city of Padua - or Padova - in the Veneto region of northern Italy is best known for the frescoes by Giotto that adorn the Scrovegni Chapel and for the vast 13th-century Basilica of St. Anthony, notable for its Byzantine-style domes. The old part of the town has arcaded streets and many cafes. The University of Padua, established in 1222, is one of the oldest in the world.

Travel tip:

Florence is said to be the birthplace of opera, a form of entertainment that evolved after musicians, dancers and actors began performing light-hearted scenes known as intermezzi to keep audiences entertained between acts of Roman plays.  Noble Florentine families began to enthuse more about the intermezzi than the plays themselves and in 1600 the first complete opera - Euridice, by Jacopo Peri - was performed at the Pitti Palace at the royal wedding of Maria de' Medici and Henry IV of France.

Home

Niccolò Machiavelli – writer and diplomat

Political scientist came up with the idea ‘the ends justify the means’ 

Niccolò Machiavelli: detail from a
portrait by Santi di Tito

Statesman and diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli, whose name has become synonymous with the idea of political cunning, was born on this day in 1469 in Florence.

The ideas he put forward in his writing were to make the word ‘machiavellian’ a regularly used pejorative adjective and the phrase ‘Old Nick’ a term to denote the devil in English.

The son of an attorney, Machiavelli was educated in grammar, rhetoric and Latin. After Florence expelled the Medici family in 1494 he went to work for the new republic in the office that produced official Florentine documents.

Machiavelli also carried out diplomatic missions to Rome on behalf of the republic where he witnessed the brutality of Cesare Borgia and his father, Pope Alexander VI, as they tried to acquire large parts of central Italy .

He later became responsible for the Florentine militia and, because of his distrust of mercenaries, used citizens in the army. Under his command, Florentine soldiers defeated Pisa in battle in 1509.

But Machiavelli’s success did not last and in 1512 the Medici, using Spanish troops, defeated the Florentines at Prato . He was dismissed from office in Florence by a written decree issued by the new Medici rulers.

Machiavelli was forced to withdraw from public life and retired to his home in the Chianti region of Tuscany, where he wrote his most famous work, ‘The Prince’, which was to give the world the political idea of ‘the ends justify the means’.

In ‘The Prince’ he was able to write with first-hand knowledge about the methods he had seen used by Cesare Borgia on behalf of his father, Pope Alexander VI.

The book put forward the idea that the aims of princes, such as glory and survival, could justify the use of immoral means. 

Machiavelli also advocated that it is safer to be feared than to be loved, if you can’t achieve both, and he recommended that if an injury has to be done to a man ‘it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared’.

His ideas were to exert a lasting, profound influence on western political thought and are still referred to today. But in modern times, people have begun to interpret them as pragmatic observations rather than as encouraging ruthlessness, cruelty and violence in people.

Machiavelli never returned to public office and died at his home in 1527 at the age of 58.

Travel Tip:

Machiavelli wrote ‘The Prince’ at his country home in Sant’Andrea in Percussina, south of Florence, in the heart of Chianti country near San Casciano Val di Pesa. The house where he is believed to have lived is now a bed-and-breakfast called La Fonte del Macchiavelli.

The Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence, which
has a monument to Machiavelli

Travel Tip:

There is a monument to Machiavelli in the beautiful Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence , where many famous Florentines are buried. A marble structure by Innocenzo Spinazzi was erected in his memory in 1787. The Latin inscription on the front of the monument means: ‘No eulogy is equal to such a name’.

(Photo of the Basilica di Santa Croce by Diana Ringo CC BY-SA 4.0)

More reading:

Dismissal led Machiavelli to write seminal work The Prince

Home