Tullio Serafin – opera conductor

Toscanini’s successor furthered the career of Callas

Tullio Serafin

The man who helped Maria Callas develop her singing talent, musician and conductor Tullio Serafin, was born on this day in 1878 in Rottanova near Cavarzere in the Veneto, on the Adige river just south of the Venetian Lagoon.

Serafin studied music in Milan and went on to play the viola in the orchestra at Teatro alla Scala under the baton of Arturo Toscanini.

He was later appointed assistant conductor and then took over as musical director at the theatre when Toscanini left to go to New York.

Serafin conducted at La Scala between 1909 and 1914, from 1917 to 1918 and then returned briefly at the end of the Second World War.

He became a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1924 and stayed with them for ten years before returning to Italy to become artistic director at the Teatro Reale in Rome.

During his career he helped the development of many singers, including Rosa Ponselle, Magda Olivero and Joan Sutherland.

Serafin’s most notable success was with Maria Callas, with whom he collaborated on many recordings. He is credited with helping the American-born singer achieve a major breakthrough in 1949 when he persuaded her to take over from the leading belcanto soprano Margeritha Carosio at the opening night of Bellini's I Puritani at La Fenice in Venice after Carosio was forced to withdraw through illness.

Callas protested that she was inadequately prepared but her performance received rave reviews, giving her the confidence to expand her repertoire.  Thereafter, success followed success.

The conductor was also responsible for reviving 19th century operas by Bellini, Rossini and Donizetti and establishing them in the 20th century repertoire.

Serafin died in 1968 in Rome at the age of 89.

The bell tower of the Duomo and the
Palazzo Barbiani in Cavarzere

Travel tip:

Rottanova, where Serafin was born, is a small hamlet on the outskirts of Cavarzere, a comune situated about 35km south of Venice in the Veneto. Cavarzere dates back to before Roman times when it was a military outpost. It later became a refuge for people escaping from the barbarians after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Travel tip:

Teatro alla Scala, where Serafin conducted for so many years, is in Piazza della Scala in the centre of Milan across the road from the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. La Scala has a fascinating museum that displays costumes and memorabilia from the history of opera. The entrance is in Largo Ghiringhelli, just off Piazza della Scala. It is open every day except the Italian Bank Holidays and a few days when it is closed in December. Opening hours are from 9.00 to 12.30 and 1.30 to 5.30pm.

HomeHome.30 to 5.30 pm.

Amilcare Ponchielli - opera composer

Success of La Gioconda put musician on map

Amilcare Ponchielli composed 11 operas

The opera composer Amilcare Ponchielli was born on this day in 1834 in Paderno Fasolaro, near Cremona, about 100km south-east of Milan in what is now Lombardia.

Ponchielli's works in general enjoyed only modest success, despite the rich musical invention for which he was later applauded.  One that did win acclaim in his lifetime, however, was La Gioconda, which was first produced in 1876 and underwent several revisions but remained unaltered after 1880.

Well known for the tenor aria, Cielo e Mar, and the ballet piece, Dance of the Hours, La Gioconda is the only opera by Ponchielli still performed today and many recordings have been made, featuring some of the biggest stars of recent times.

Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi and Montserrat Caballe are among those to have played the role of Gioconda, written for soprano, while the lead tenor part of Enzo, whose affections are sought both by Gioconda and another major character, Laura, has been taken by Giuseppe Di Stefano, Carlo Bergonzi, Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo among others.

Ponchielli had such a talent for music that he won a scholarship to Milan Conservatory at nine years old and had written his first symphony by the time he was 10.

He left the Conservatory in disappointment after being denied the professorship that was supposed to have been his prize in a competition and for a number of years his main musical occupation was as a bandmaster, at first in Piacenza and then Cremona.  He arranged and wrote more than 200 compositions for wind instruments.

The Milan Conservatory, which Ponchielli attended
from the age of nine years

His passion for opera was undiminished, however, and he achieved his first breakthrough with I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), an opera based on the novel by Alessandro Manzoni, which he had originally written soon after completing his studies and which earned him his first contract with a music publisher in 1872.

The original premiered at the Teatro Concordia in Cremona in 1856; the revised version was first performed at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan. The leading soprano role was taken by Teresina Brambilla, from Cassano d'Adda, just outside Milan, whom Ponchielli would marry.

Ponchielli wrote 11 operas in total but none won him the acclaim he received for La Gioconda, which was based on Angelo, Tyrant of Padua, a play by Victor Hugo.

Listen to Luciano Pavarotti performing Cielo e Mar from La Gioconda

Nonetheless, works such as Il figliuol prodigo and Marion Delorme, from another play by Victor Hugo, both performed at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, are recognised as having been influences on a new generation of composers from which Giacomo Puccini, Pietro Mascagni and Umberto Giordano emerged.

In 1881, Ponchielli was appointed maestro di cappella of Bergamo Cathedral, and from the same year he was a professor of composition at the Milan Conservatory, where his students included Puccini, Mascagni and Emilio Pizzi.

He died of pneumonia in Milan in 1886 and was buried in the city's Monumental Cemetery.

Travel tip:

Paderno Fasolaro, a small town in the heart of the Po Valley, is now known as Paderno Ponchielli in honour of its most famous native son.  It was given the name after local residents began a petition on the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1934, although it took until 1950 for the President of the Republic, Luigi Einaudi, to issue a decree making the change legal.

The cathedral at Cremona is a fine
example of Romanesque style

Travel tip:

The city of Cremona has a strong musical tradition, particularly in the production of violins and other stringed instruments.  It was home to rival violin makers Antonio Stradivari, Giuseppe Guarneri and the Amati family.  Cremona has an exceptional Romanesque cathedral, with an ornate facade including a Renaissance logia with three niches, flanked by two orders of loggette (small logias).

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Joe Petrosino - New York crime fighter

Campanian immigrant a key figure in war against Mafia

Joe Petrosino, the New York cop from Campania
who wanted to protect the good name of Italians

Joe Petrosino, a New York police officer who dedicated his life to fighting organised crime, was born Giuseppe Petrosino in Padula, a southern Italian town on the border of Campania and Basilicata, on this day in 1860.

The son of a tailor, Prospero Petrosino, he emigrated to the United States at the age of 12.  The family lived in subsidised accommodation in Mulberry Street, part of the area now known as Little Italy on the Lower East Side towards Brooklyn Bridge, where around half a million Italian immigrants lived in the second half of the 19th century.

Giuseppe took any job he could to help the family, at first as a newspaper boy and then shining shoes outside the police headquarters on Mulberry Street, where he would dream of becoming a police officer himself.

In 1878, by then fluent in English and known to everyone as Joe, Petrosino became an American citizen but it took him five years and repeated applications to realise his dream of joining the police. At 5ft 3ins he was technically too short to meet the criteria for an officer but after the police began to use him as an informant it was decided he could be of use in the fight against Italian organised crime. He was the first Italian-speaking officer in the history of the New York Police Department.

His career progressed partly because of his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, the future president, who was then a police commissioner in New York.  Noting his success in solving crimes involving Italians, Roosevelt promoted him to detective sergeant in the Homicide Division, after which Petrosino was hand-picked to lead a newly-formed Italian Squad, comprising Italian-American detectives.

Enrico Caruso, victim of  a blackmail
attempt foiled by Petrosino

The Italian Squad was set up specifically to fight against the rise of criminal organisations such as the Mafia and it appealed to Petrosino, who saw the Mafia as bringing shame to decent Italian-Americans. By the time of his appointment to the new division, in 1908, the Italian immigrant population of Manhattan and Brooklyn had grown to more than a million, living mainly in Little Italy, East Harlem and Williamsburg.

Petrosino achieved notable successes in hampering Mafia activities, often working undercover. Famously, he tracked down and arrested mobsters attached to the so-called Black Hand who were attempting to blackmail the Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso, while he was performing at the Metropolitan Opera House.

In 1907 he married Adelina Saulino, the daughter of the owner of a restaurant he frequented, with whom he rented an apartment in Lafayette Street, just one block away from his childhood home in Mulberry Street.  They had a daughter in 1908.

The marriage was shortlived, although for tragic reasons.  Despatched on a secret mission to Sicily in 1909, armed with a list of New York criminals with links to the island, Petrosino was to gather evidence aimed at facilitating the deportation under new legislation of Italians with criminal convictions in their own country.

However, soon after Petrosino had set sail, Theodore A Bingham, who had succeeded Roosevelt as police commissioner, gave an interview to the New York Herald in which he discussed the officer's mission, which as a result was no longer so secret.

Petrosino's ship docked in Genoa, after which he stopped off in Milan, Bologna and Rome before paying a visit to his brother, Vincenzo, in Padula, en route to Sicily.

Petrosino's hearse paraded through New York

Soon after he arrived in Palermo, Petrosino received a message from somebody claiming to have information that would be helpful to him and arranged to meet them in the city's Piazza della Marina. It was a trap.  While waiting for his supposed informant, Petrosino was hit by three bullets from the gun of a Mafia assassin and died on the spot.

A funeral took place in Palermo, after which Petrosino's body was returned to New York and another ceremony took place at St Patrick's Cathedral in Mott Street, which runs parallel with Mulberry Street in Little Italy, after which a procession of 200,000 people followed the coffin to the Calvary Cemetery in Queens.

No one was convicted of Petrosino's killing, although Vito Cascio Ferro, one of his targets for arrest, was detained, only to be released when an associate came forward with an alibi. More than a century later, a descendant under investigation by the Italian police confessed that it was known within the family that Vito Cascio Ferro had ordered his murder.

Travel tip:

Padula, which is situated just outside the beautiful Cilento National Park in Campania, is a small community of just over 5,200 people about 100km south of Salerno, notable for the Padula Charterhouse - Certosa di Padula in Italian - the largest monastery in Italy with a physical area of some 51,500 square metres (12.7 acres) and 320 rooms.

One of the entrances to the Certosa di Padula

Travel tip:

The majestic Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park extends from the Tyrhennian coast to the feet of the Campania-Lucania Apennines. It includes coastal and mountain areas which play host to an abundance of wild life but there is also a rich cultural history, notably the Greek ruins at Velia and Paestum. 

More reading:

Libero Grassi - the Palermo businessman who refused to pay his pizzo

Carlo Gambino - was the notorious Mafia Don the model for Puzo's Godfather?

(Photo of Certosa di Padula by Enrico Viceconte CC BY-SA 2.0)

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Libero Grassi - anti-Mafia hero

Businessman brutally murdered after refusing to pay

Libero Grassi

Libero Grassi, a Palermo clothing manufacturer, died on this day in 1991, shot three times in the head as he walked from his home to his car in Via Vittorio Alfieri, a street of apartment buildings not far from the historic centre, at 7.30am.

It was a classic Mafia hit to which there were no witnesses, at least none prepared to come forward. Such killings were not uncommon in the Sicilian capital as rival clans fought for control of different neighbourhoods.

Yet this one was different in that 67-year-old Grassi had no connection with the criminal underworld apart from his brave decision to stand up to their demands for protection money and refuse to pay.

Grassi owned a factory making underwear, which he sold in his own shop.  He employed 100 workers and his business had a healthy turnover. In a struggling economy, he was doing very well.

Of course, the Mafia wanted their cut.  Grassi began receiving demands, first by telephone, then in person, that he fall in line with other Palermo businesses and pay a pizzo, the term used for the monthly payment the mob collects from businesses in the city in a racket worth today in the region of €160 million a year.

The penalties imposed for not paying range from vandalism or arson directed at business premises to physical harm and even death.  It is little wonder than an estimated 80 per cent of businesses comply, each paying around €500 per month.

Libero Grassi pictured in his factory in Palermo

But Grassi decided he would not pay.  Indeed, he was so outraged by the practice routinely accepted as normal that in January 1991 he wrote an open letter in a Palermo daily newspaper denouncing the Mafia and proudly telling the city of his stand.  He also gave the names of his would-be extortionists to the police, as a result of which five members of the Mafia were arrested.

Grassi was hailed as a hero by the Mayor of Palermo and attracted widespread media attention, even appearing on national television.  Yet within the business community there was little support.  In fact, Grassi found himself shunned and isolated for attracting headlines that his fellow traders felt did damage to the image of the Palermo business community.

Meanwhile, the Mafia continued to make demands and Grassi continued to dismiss them, despite his shop being broken into and subjected to a failed arson attack.  Eventually, he paid the ultimate price.

After the killing, a protest movement began, initially a spontaneous demonstration involving 10,000 people taking to the streets, eventually leading to the formation in Sicily of the Addiopizzo movement, which encouraged businesses to resist extortion demands and consumers to buy only from shops on a "pizzo-free" list.

Following gestures of support for Grassi's stand that included a five-hour TV special hosted by Maurizio Costanzo and Michele Santoro, two of Italy's best known presenters, the police eventually charged Salvatore Madonia, the son of the head of Palermo's Resuttana crime family, with his murder.

The placard out up by Grassi's family close to the spot
where he was gunned down near his home

With the help of evidence from a "supergrass", Madonia, his father Francesco and 28 other mobsters were convicted of around 60 murders, including Grassi.

His widow, Pina, and two children, Davide and Alice, put up a placard on the spot where Libero was killed, denouncing not only the Mafia but also the business community that refused to support him and the politicians that sat on their hands rather than move to clamp down on illegal activities.

Today, anti-Mafia campaigners meet on Via Vittorio Alfieri every August 29 in a show of solidarity. The Palermo authorities have honoured Grassi by giving his name to a technical college and a station on the city's new metro.

Travel tip:

Happily, visitors to Palermo would normally witness nothing to suggest that the criminal underworld exerts any influence on daily life.  The Sicilian capital, on the northern coast of the island, is a vibrant city with a wealth of beautiful architecture bearing testament to a history of northern European and Arabian influences.  The church of San Cataldo on Piazza Bellini is a good example of the fusion of Norman and Arabic architectural styles, having a bell tower typical of those common in northern France but with three spherical red domes on the roof.

The church of San Cataldo in Palermo with its mix of
Norman and Arabic architectural styles

Travel tip:

Although Mount Etna typically has snow on its upper slopes in the winter, away from the mountainous regions Sicily has a particularly mild climate, with daytime temperatures even in December and January usually climbing above 10 degrees Celsius and rarely slipping below five degrees even at night.  Palermo is the sunniest city in Italy with typical averages of between 10 and 14 hours of sunshine daily between April and September.

More reading:

Giovanni Falcone - judge and anti-Mafia crusader

Carlo Gambino - the Palermo mobster who became a Mafia Don in New York

Books

Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia, by John Dickie

The Sicilian Mafia: A True Crime Travel Guide, by Carl Russo

(photo of Church of San Cataldo by Bjs CC BY-SA 2.5)

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