Pope John Paul I

Sudden end to the reign of ‘The Smiling Pope’

Pope John Paul I making his weekly
address to the crowds outside St Peter's

John Paul I died on this day in 1978 in Rome, having served for just 33 days as Pope.

His reign is one of the shortest in Papal history and resulted in the most recent ‘Year of Three Popes’, which hadn’t happened since 1605.

John Paul I was also the most recent Pope to be born in Italy, his death ending the succession of Italian pontiffs that started with Clement VII in 1523.

Pope John Paul I was born Albino Luciani in 1912 in a small town then known as Forno di Canale, in the province of Belluno in the Veneto.

The son of a bricklayer, he decided to become a priest when he was just ten years old and was educated first at the seminary in Feltre and then in Belluno.

After Luciani was ordained, he taught for a while at the seminary in Belluno before going to Rome to work on a Doctorate in Sacred Theology.

He was appointed Bishop of Vittorio Veneto by Pope John XXIII in 1958. The next Pope, Paul VI, made him Patriarch of Venice in 1969 and then Cardinal Priest of San Marco in 1973.

Albino Luciani in 1959, soon after he was
 appointed Bishop of Vittorio Veneto 

After the death of Pope Paul VI in August 1978, Luciani was elected Pope in the fourth ballot of the papal conclave. He accepted his election but prophesied that his reign would be a short one.

The new Pope chose the name John Paul to honour both of his predecessors, Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI. It was the first time in history a Pope had chosen a double name.

It was suggested at the time that his election had been a compromise to satisfy rival camps among the Cardinals.

Pope John Paul I died during the night of 28 September 1978 and was found the following morning lying in his bed with a book open next to him and his reading light on. According to a doctor at the Vatican he had died at around 11 pm of a heart attack.

After his funeral in St Peter’s Square, the Pope’s body was laid to rest in a tomb in the Vatican grottoes.

His successor Cardinal Karol Wojtyla chose the name Pope John Paul II and paid tribute to his predecessor’s warm qualities.

In Italy John Paul I is remembered as ‘The Smiling Pope’, Il Papa del Sorriso.

Pope John Paul I was against Communism but was a friend to Muslim people and defended their right to build Mosques in Italy.

The suddenness of his death and the discrepancies in statements issued by the Vatican about it resulted in a number of conspiracy theories being aired. Several books were published and films and plays were produced based on the story.

David Yallop’s book, In God’s Name, puts forward the theory that the Pope was in danger because of corruption in the Vatican Bank, while Malachi Martin’s book, Vatican: A Novel, suggests the Pope was murdered by the Soviet Union because he was opposed to Communism. Other books and films propose alternative theories.

The house in Canale d'Agordo in which Albino Luciani, who
would become Pope John Paul I, was born

Travel tip:

Canale d’Agordo, the birthplace of John Paul I, is a small town in the province of Belluno in the Veneto, which was previously known as Forno di Canale. The Albino Luciani Museum, which displays documents, personal items and objects associated with the life of Pope John Paul I, opened last month in the old town hall in Canale d’Agordo.

Travel tip:

Belluno, where Luciani both studied and taught in the Seminary, is about 100 kilometres north of Venice. Named Alpine Town of the Year in 1999, it is the most important city in the area of the Eastern Dolomites and has some fine architecture There are picturesque views of the surrounding countryside to be seen from the 12th century Porta Ruga at the end of the main street and from the Campanile of the 16th century Duomo.

(Photo of John Paul's birthplace by Sibode 1 GFDL)

Books

In God's Name, by David Yallop

Vatican: A Novel, by Malachi Martin



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Gracie Fields - actress and singer

English-born performer who made Capri her home 

Gracie Fields

The English actress, singer and comedian Gracie Fields died on this day in 1979 at her home on Capri, the island on the south side of the Gulf of Naples.

The 81-year-old former forces sweetheart had been in hospital following a bout of pneumonia but appeared to be regaining her health.  The previous day she had walked with her husband, Boris, to the post office on the island to collect her mail.

Some English newspapers reported that Gracie had died in the arms of her husband but that version of events was later corrected. It is now accepted that Boris had already left La Canzone del Mare, the singer's original Capri home overlooking the island's landmark Faraglioni rocks, to work on the central heating at a second property they had bought in Anacapri, on the opposite side of the island, and that Gracie was with her housekeeper, Irena, when she passed away suddenly.

Fields, born Grace Stansfield in Rochdale, England, in 1898, had visited Capri for the first time in the late 1920s or early 30s, with two artists she had befriended in London, where she was becoming an established star in the revue format that was popular with theatregoers in the inter-war years.  She would develop a romance with one of them, John Flanagan.

They stayed in a former British fort overlooking Marina Piccola, named Il Fortino, and Fields was captivated, proclaiming that if she could ever own "one blade of grass" on the island she would be "the happiest woman alive."

Gracie Fields entertaining RAF personnel in France in 1939

The opportunity arose more quickly than she anticipated when Il Fortino came up for sale in 1933 and she bought it, for £11,000.  The only sadness was that Flanagan, with whom she lived in London, declined her offer to move to Capri with her, claiming he would have been too distracted to work.

Nonetheless, she was not deterred from pursuing her dream.  In 1935 she met Mario Bianchi, an actor from Cesena in northern Italy who had starred in a number of silent movies in the United States under the name of Monty Banks.

Together they set about restoring Il Fortino and would eventually turn it into La Canzone del Mare, a restaurant and bathing complex that is still in business today as a luxury hotel. It was a life far removed from Rochdale, the mill town in Lancashire, where Fields was born above a fish and chip shop.

However, the next few years were tough for Gracie.  She made her first movie - Sally in Our Alley - in 1931 and in the next eight years starred in a dozen more.  In 1939 came the devastating news that she had cervical cancer.

She was given only a 50-50 chance of making a recovery but happily, after surviving a major operation, she was given the all-clear.  Soon afterwards, she divorced her first husband, the theatre impresario Archie Pitt, her former manager, and in 1940 married Monty, who had been at her side throughout her illness.

The movie poster for the 1939 Gracie
Fields film Shipyard Sally

Marriage to an Italian led her into further problems, however.  When Italy formed its alliance with Germany in the Second World War, Monty was classified as an alien and the couple were advised to move to America so that he could avoid internment in Britain.

Their decision led to a backlash against Fields at home, with newspapers accusing her of abandoning her country.  She rebuilt her reputation by performing at home and in Canada and the United States without pay, donating all the proceeds to the war effort.  She also threw herself into entertaining British and Allied servicemen abroad, performing during air raids in France, behind enemy lines in Berlin, and travelling as far away as New Guinea and the South Pacific islands.

She made her last movie in 1945 but continued her career, appearing regularly on television in both entertainment shows and drama. Away from the camerasm she spent much of her life on Capri.  La Canzone del Mare, where she and Monty lived in a house above the restaurant, became a favoured haunt for Hollywood stars including Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Greta Garbo and Noël Coward.  Opera singer Maria Callas and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis are also said to have been visitors.

The Chiesa di Santo Stefano,
where Fields was married in 1952

After Monty Banks died in 1950, Fields was married for a third time, to a Romanian radio repairman called Boris Alperovici. The ceremony took place at the Chiesa di Santo Stefano, the striking white church that overlooks the Piazzetta in Capri town.

She made her last TV appearance in the United States in January 1979 and shortly afterwards, seven months before her death, was invested as a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II.  She is buried in Capri's Protestant Cemetery.

Travel tip:

Capri has been a popular resort since Roman times and the remains exist of a number of Imperial Roman villas.  Although its first known tourist was a French antiques dealer who visited in the 17th century, recording his impressions in diaries, it was not until the 1950s that the island began to attract visitors in anything like the numbers of today.   Tourists arrive at the island by ferry or hydrofoil from Naples, Sorrento, Positano, Amalfi and other ports around the Gulf of Naples.  Attractions include the Blue Grotto, the picturesque Marina Piccola, the limestone Faraglioni sea stacks, and the towns of Capri and Anacapri.

The view from the terrace of the Villa San Michele

Travel tip:

As well as being popular with tourists, Capri was for many years a favourite retreat for writers and can list Axel Munthe, Norman Douglas, Graham Greene, Curzio Malaparte, Mario Soldati and Alberto Moravia and Maxim Gorky as former residents.  Greene spent at least two months of every year at his Villa Rosario in Anacapri, where the Villa San Michele, home to Axel Munthe, the Swedish physician and author, is open to the public and offers outstanding views.

(Photo of Chiesa di Santo Stefano by Berthold Werner CC BY-SA 3.0)
(Photo of view from Villa san Michele by Berthold Werner CC BY-SA 3.0)

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Anna Magnani - Oscar-winning film star

Roman one of only three Italians to land best actor award

Anna Magnani, the Rome-born
actress who died in 1973

Anna Magnani, who found fame for her performance in Roberto Rossellini's neorealist classic movie Rome, Open City and went on to become one of only three Italian actors to win an Academy Award, died on this day in Rome in 1973.

Magnani had been quietly suffering from pancreatic cancer and her death at the age of just 65 shocked her fans and even close friends. Rossellini, with whom she had a tempestuous five-year relationship before he ditched her for the Swedish actress, Ingrid Bergman, was at her bedside along with her son, Luca.  Rossellini was considered to be Magnani’s one great love. The American playwright Tennessee Williams, who wrote two parts for her in his plays (Serafina in The Rose Tattoo and Lady in Orpheus Descending) specifically with Magnani in mind, was so devastated he could not bring himself to attend her funeral.

Instead he sent 20 dozen roses to signify the bond they developed while working together over 24 years.  When Williams was in Rome they would meet for cocktails on the roof-top terrace of her home, overlooking the city, always at eight o'clock - "alle venti" in Italy, where times are generally expressed according to the 24-hour clock.  They would sign off letters and telegrams to one another with the words "Ci vediamo alle venti" or "See you at eight."

The funeral procession attracted crowds in the tens of thousands. Countless businesses closed and many streets were shut to traffic as Magnani's coffin was taken to the Basilica di Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, near the Pantheon in central Rome, where the service took place.  The Piazza Minerva was thronged with people, who broke into spontaneous cheering when the coffin appeared.

The original movie poster for the film
of the Tennessee Williams play

It was the movie version of The Rose Tattoo, for which Williams wrote the screenplay, that won Magnani her Oscar in 1955, playing opposite Burt Lancaster. She was the first of two Italian actresses to win the Academy Award, to be followed six years later by Sophia Loren for Vittorio De Sica's La Ciociara, which was renamed Two Women for the American market.

Loren’s role was originally designed for Magnani and Loren was supposed to play the role of her daughter. Magnani refused to play opposite Loren, who was already 26 years old and not right for a teenaged virgin, and actually gave De Sica the idea to cast Loren as the mother; a role for which she would win the Best Actress Oscar in 1962.

Roberto Benigni is the only Italian-born male actor to win an Oscar, for Life is Beautiful in 1998.

Magnani's acting was notable in that she was able to bring her own personality, her affinity with the ordinary people she grew up with, to her roles, in which she was often cast as una popolana - a coarse woman of working class background.  Raised largely by her grandparents in a poor, working-class part of Rome, Anna was a product of a short-lived marriage between her mother, Marina Magnani, and an itinerant Calabrian father (who worked in Egypt) whom she met only once.

Some erroneous biographical notes suggest she was born in Alessandria, Egypt but Magnani herself insisted that while her mother may have been in Egypt when she fell pregnant, she had moved back to Rome and was living in the Porta Pia area by the time she gave birth.  Magnani was given her maternal surname, the last name of both her mother and grandmother.

While Anna had a tough upbringing in Rome, her grandmother managed to send her to a convent school, learned French, played piano, and, at age 17, went on to study at the Eleonora Duse Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome for two years. She often said she felt more at home with the more down-to-earth people in her own neighborhood as it taught her to become streetwise at a young age. Magnani soon was supporting herself by singing in cabarets and nightclubs, where her performances drew comparisons with the French singer, Edith Piaf.

Magnani had her first film role in the 1920s, although it was 20 years before her breakthrough in Rossellini's 1945 movie Rome, Open City, which is generally regarded as the first film in the Italian neorealist genre to achieve commercial success. Magnani's performance as Pina, the pregnant widow of an Italian resistance fighter murdered by the occupying Germans forces as she tries to protect her fiance, was acclaimed for its brilliance. Although she was not regarded as a conventional beauty, she had an earthy sensuality that audiences found captivating.

Anna Magnani, centre, in a scene from Rome, Open City,
the film that was the turning point in her career

Her relationship with Rossellini, often punctuated with violent rows in which they were renowned for throwing crockery at one another, foundered after five years, when Rossellini began an affair with Bergman, reneging on a promise to make Magnani the star of his 1950 film, Stromboli, and giving the role instead to the Swedish actress.  Magnani retaliated  by making her own film with director William Dieterle entitled Vulcano.

Yet Magnani's career never faltered as it this very time, in 1949-50, that her friendship with American playwright Tennessee Williams would blossom. She went on to work with many of the great Italian directors, such as Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini, whose 1972 film, Roma, would be her last.

Magnani married Italian director, Goffredo Alessandrini, in the 1930s but they were together only briefly before the marriage was annulled.  Her son, Luca, was born in 1942, the product of an affair with an Italian actor, Massimo Serato. Luca was stricken with polio as a child (1944) but Anna dedicated her life to caring for him in his younger years and providing him with the best (Swiss) medical care. Luca Magnani - Anna fought in court for him to keep her maternal surname - would go on to be a noted architect and real estate developer.

Luca Magnani's daughter, Olivia Magnani, born in Bologna in 1975, has followed her grandmother in becoming a movie actress. She is the fifth generation to carry on the Magnani name.

The stage play, Roman Nights, by Italo-American playwright Franco D’Alessandro recounts the inspired, fruitful, and tumultuous friendship between Anna Magnani and Tennessee Williams. 

The beautiful vaulted ceiling of the Basilica
di Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome

Travel tip:

The Basilica di Santa Maria sopra Minerva is the only existing example of an oroginal Gothic church in Rome, its Renaissance-style frontage concealing a Gothic interior featuring an arched vaulted ceiling painted blue with gilded stars.  It contains a marble sculpture, Cristo della Minerva, by Michelangelo, and the strikingly beautiful Carafa Chapel, with frescoes by Filippino Lippi.  Buried in the church are Saint Catherine of Siena, the Renaissance painter Fra Angelico, and at least four popes.

Travel tip:

Porta Pia, from which the neighbourhood in which Anna Magnani was born takes its name, is a gate in Rome's Aurelian Walls, designed by Michelangelo and named after Pope Pius IV.  It was close to Porta Pia that a breach of the walls made by Bersaglieri soldiers from the north of Italy enabled Rome to be captured and completed the unification of Italy in 1870.  It was also the scene of a failed assassination attempt on Benito Mussolini in 1926 by anti-Fascist activist Gino Lucetti.

Also on this day:

1982: The birth of World Cup winning football coach Enzo Bearzot

1997: St Francis Basilica struck by earthquake

More reading:

Roberto Rossellini - father of neorealism

Federico Fellini - genius behind La Dolce Vita

Gina Lollobrigida - 60s sex symbol

(Photo of interior of Basilica by Tango7174 GFDL)

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Zucchero Fornaciari – singer

Sweet success for writer and performer

Zucchero is known for the passion and
emotion of his stage performances

The singer/songwriter now known simply as Zucchero was born Adelmo Fornaciari on this day in 1955 in Roncocesi, a small village near Reggio Emilia.

In a career lasting more than 30 years, he has sold more than 50 million records and has become popular all over the world.

He is hailed as ‘the father of the Italian blues’, having introduced blues music to Italy, and he has won many awards for his music. He has also been given the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

As a young boy, Zucchero lived in the Tuscan seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi, where he sang in the choir and learned to play the organ at his local church.

He became fond of soul music and began to write his own songs and play the tenor saxophone. He started playing in bands while studying veterinary medicine but gave up his studies to follow his dream of becoming a singer.

He took the stage name of Zucchero, the Italian word for sugar, which was a nickname one of his teachers had given him.

Zucchero with U2 lead singer Bono at a U2
concert in Turin in 2015

Zucchero took part in the San Remo song contest for the second time in 1985 and although his song ‘Donne’ did not win, it went on to become a hit single.

His 1987 album Blues became the highest selling album in Italian history and made Zucchero a household name. His next album Oro, Incenso e Birra, which included guest spots by Ennio Morricone, Eric Clapton and Rufus Thomas, then outsold it.

Zucchero has sung in duets with Paul Young, Sting, and Luciano Pavarotti and his collaboration on the song Miserere with the young Andrea Bocelli won popularity for the up-and-coming tenor.

He sang regularly in the concerts organised by Pavarotti to raise money for children in war zones and more recently he has sung at the Concert for Emilia, to raise money for earthquake victims, and in the Voices for Refugees concert in Vienna in 2015.

Watch Zucchero on stage at the Arena in Verona

His new single, Streets of Surrender, which is dedicated to the victims of the recent Paris attacks, will be among the songs he will perform in his concerts at the Arena in Verona taking place between now and 28 September.

Travel tip:

Roncocesi, where Zucchero was born, is a hamlet – frazione -- of Reggio Emilia, situated about seven kilometres outside the city. Reggio Emilia is an ancient walled city in Emilia-Romagna that has many beautiful buildings within the hexagonal shape of its historic centre. Roman remains mingle with medieval palaces and Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces.

Stage construction under way at the Arena di Verona 

Travel tip:

The Arena di Verona, where Zucchero is appearing in concert between 16 and 28 September, is a wonderful surviving example of a first-century Roman amphitheatre, which has now become a famous location for large-scale, outdoor productions of opera each summer.

See Zucchero's back catalogue of music at Amazon.com

(Main photo of Zucchero by Danielle dk CC BY-SA 3.0)
(Bono & Zucchero photo by angelo freddo)

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