The military leader - condottiero in Italian -Niccolò III d’Este was born on this day in 1383 in Ferrara.
He was the son of Alberto d’Este, Marquis of Ferrara, and became ruler of the city when he was just ten years old on the death of his father, under the protection of Venice, Florence and Bologna.
A relative, Azzo d’Este, who was working for Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, tried to attack Ferrara, but Venice, Florence and Bologna helped Niccolò see off the challenge to his rule.
In 1403 Niccolò joined the league formed against the Duke of Milan and was appointed Captain General of the Papal Army by Pope Boniface IX.
At the age of 13, Niccolò was married for the first time, to Gigliola da Carrara, the daughter of Francesco II da Carrara, Lord of Padua.
Although his first marriage was childless, he fathered an illegitimate son, Ugo, in 1405. After the death of his wife, he was married for a second time to Parisina Malatesta, the daughter of Andrea Malatesta, and they had three children.
In 1425, Niccolò had Parisina and Ugo executed on charges of adultery, accusing them of having an affair. At the same time he issued a decree that all women within his domains found to be guilty of adultery were to be put to death, although he had to rescind this order once it was determined that this action would depopulate Ferrara.
Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan
He married his third wife, Ricciarda of Saluzzo in 1429. She bore him two children. In total he had five legitimate children and at least 11 illegitimate children.
Niccolò steadily established his reputation as an able military leader with a number of successful campaigns but it was Ferrara's role in brokering a peace between Milan and Venice in 1432 that particularly boosted the city's prestige.
As a result, Ferrara was chosen to be the seat of a council in 1438.
Niccolò died in Milan on Boxing Day in 1441 after the Christmas feast and it was widely suspected he had been poisoned. He had been invited to Milan apparently in friendship by Filippo Maria Visconti, the Duke of Milan, whose father, Gian Galeazzo, Niccolò had previously been in league against.
He was succeeded as Marquis of Ferrara by his illegitimate son, Leonello d’Este, who concentrated on sponsoring the arts and literature to the benefit of the city.
The entrance to Via Garibaldi from Piazza Municipio
Travel tip:
The d’Este family ruled the city of Ferrara in Emilia-Romagna between 1240 and 1598. You can still see the narrow, medieval streets to the west and south of the city centre, between the main thoroughfares of Via Ripa Grande and Via Garibaldi, which were the original core of the city in the middle ages.
Building work on the magnificent, moated Este Castle (Castello Estense) began two years after Niccolò’s birth and it was added to and improved by successive rulers of Ferrara until the end of the Este line. The castle was purchased for 70,000 lire by the province of Ferrara in 1874 to be used as the headquarters of the Prefecture.
(Photo of Via Garibaldi by Geobia via Wikimedia Commons)
Screen siren turned back on glamour roles to prove talent
Virna Lisi in a Hollywood publicity shot
The actress Virna Lisi, born on this day in 1936, might have become the new Marilyn Monroe if she had allowed Hollywood to shape her career in the way the movie moguls had planned.
She was certainly blessed with all the physical attributes to fulfil their commercial ambitions - no less a screen goddess than Brigitte Bardot called her 'the most beautiful woman in the world' - but decided she was too good an actress to be typecast as mere window dressing or eye candy and ultimately rejected their advances.
In time she proved to herself that she made the right decision when her portrayal of the manipulative Catherine de' Medici, the Italian who was Queen of France between 1547 and 1559, in Patrice Chéreau’s 1994 film La Reine Margot won her three awards - Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, a César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) and the Italian film critics' award, the Nastro d'Argento (Silver Ribbon).
Born Virna Pieralisi in the town of Jesi, in the province of Ancona in Marche, where her father had a marble importing business, she moved with her family to Rome in the early 1950s and Virna's progress through school had her earmarked for a place at business college.
But on the recommendation of a friend of the family, the singer and actor Giacomo Rondinella, she was given a part in a film, E Napoli canta (And Naples sings). Just 17 years old and a natural beauty, so much did she charm Italian film producers that she was quickly in demand.
It was clear to the critics that she could act, winning praise for her performance in Sergio Corbucci's Romolo e Remo (Romulus and Remus), and she won many parts in Italian TV dramas. But it was her looks that were most sought after, earning her a lucrative contract advertising toothpaste in a TV commercial, her face accompanied by the slogan 'con quella bocca può dire ciò che vuole' (with that mouth, she can say whatever she wants).
Hollywood studio bosses wanted Virna Lisi
to become the new Marilyn
She minded less about her acting talent being overlooked in the early 1960s than she would later, especially when the chance came to make significant money in Hollywood.
Transformed into a blue-eyed blonde temptress, Lisi starred opposite Jack Lemmon in the comedy How to Murder Your Wife, famously making her entrance by emerging from a giant cake, and had other hits with Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra and Rod Steiger.
The press fawned over her, one magazine article describing her as 'like Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly put together', but although she accepted being a cover girl she soon tired of lightweight, fluffy roles. She wanted to be seen as an actress, rather than simply someone who looked good on screen.
She turned down an invitation to pose in Playboy magazine, bought herself out of her contract with United Artists and returned to Italy. Back home, as if to prove she was serious about wanting different, more challenging parts, she rejected the title role offered by Dino de Laurentiis in Roger Vadim's film Barbarella, which went instead to Jane Fonda.
It took a while to achieve her ambitions but, little by little, Lisi shed her former image. Her performance alongside Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani in The Secret of Santa Vittoria, in which an Italian wine-producing village hides millions of bottles from plundering Nazis, was one step in her chosen direction.
She took a break into the early 1970s to spend more time with her husband and their son, Corrado, but on her return was acclaimed for her role as the sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, which won her the first of six Nastro d'Argento awards for best actress or best supporting actress.
Virna Lisi achieved her ambition where her portrayal
of Catherine de' Medici won acclaim and awards
At the age of 57, she was overcome with emotion when he name was read out for La Reine Margot at Cannes. "My son told me not to cry," she said later. "It was very stupid - but it had taken me 35 years."
Two years later, Lisi won an Italian Golden Globe for best actress in Follow Your Heart (1996), in which she played an elderly woman dying of cancer.
Lisi continued to work until she died in Rome in December 2014, aged 78, having filmed a television comedy earlier in the same year. Her husband, Franco Pesci, an architect she had met in Rome in the late 1950s and to whom she had been married 53 years, passed away in 2013.
Travel tip:
Rome's Colosseum, the largest and most famous Roman amphitheatre in the world, was constructed over eight years between 72 AD and 80 AD. It was capable of accommodating 50,000 spectators and had 80 entrances. It remains the city's most visited tourist attraction, ahead of St Peter's Basilica and The Pantheon.
Jesi, which was the site of a settlement in the fourth century BC, has developed as an industrial centre but maintains its cultural heritage within perfectly preserved medieval walls, built along the lines of its old Roman defences between the 13th and 14th centuries. Notable buildings include the Cathedral of San Settimio in Piazza Federico II, the nearby 12th century church of San Floriano, which once contained paintings by Lorenzo Lotto that are now housed in the Pinacoteca Civica. The Teatro Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, named in honour of the 18th century musician and composer who was born in Jesi, stands in the elegant Piazza della Repubblica.
Striker Luigi 'Gigi' Riva pictured during
Cagliari's victorious 1969-70 season
Luigi 'Gigi' Riva, who was born on this day in 1944, is widely regarded as one of the finest strikers in the history of Italian football.
Despite playing in an era when football in Italy was notoriously defensive, he scored more than 200 goals in a 16-year club career, 156 of them in Serie A for Cagliari, with whom he won the Scudetto (shield) as Italian League champions in 1970.
Nicknamed 'Rombo di tuono' - thunderclap - by the football writer Gianni Brera, Riva is also the all-time leading goalscorer for the Italian national team with 35 goals, his record having stood since 1974.
After his playing career, Riva spent 23 years as part of the management team for the Azzurri and was a key member of the backroom staff when Italy won the World Cup for a fourth time in 2006.
Born in Lombardia, not far from Lake Maggiore, Riva spent virtually his whole football career with Cagliari and made his home in Sardinia. The 1969-70 title is the only championship in the club's history and Riva, who scored 21 goals in the title-winning season, is as revered on the island as Diego Maradona is in Naples.
Although he came from a loving home in the small town of Leggiuno, just a few kilometres inland from the shores of Lake Maggiore, Riva had a tough upbringing.
His father, Ugo, died when he was just eight years old, killed in an accident at the foundry where he worked, after which his mother, Edis, decided to send Luigi to a religious boarding school, where the regime was hard.
Luigi Riva in the Italy shirt in which his
goals tally is still the highest.
He did not blame his mother, who had no choice in her circumstances but to work long hours for low pay, but Riva would later confess to suffering loneliness and depression. One of his regrets was that his mother did not live long enough for him to provide her with a comfortable retirement.
Release from the deprivations of school came when he was 15 and went to live with his sister, taking a job as a motor mechanic with dreams of becoming a racing driver. But it was his skill as a footballer, and in particular what he could do with his powerful left foot, that began to get him noticed. After scoring 63 goals in two seasons for a local amateur team, he earned a trial with Internazionale in Milan. That came to nothing but he was offered a contract to play in Serie C for Legnano, based about 50km from Leggiuno.
He stayed there only one season. His talent attracted numerous scouts and when Cagliari offered him the chance to play in Serie B he took it.
Sardinia was still a somewhat primitive island in 1963 and Riva was not sure what to make of it. His first impression was of a place 'where they sent people to punish them'.
Yet he grew to love the island and the Sardinians took him to their hearts. Previously regarded as a perennial Serie B club, they were promoted to Serie A in his first season and, on the back of his goals, began to climb steadily.
Leading Serie A scorer in 1966-67, when Cagliari finished sixth, he was capocannoneri again in 1968-69 with 21 goals as Cagliari achieved the highest league position in their history as runners-up to Fiorentina.
But the crowning glory of his career was the 1969-70 season as Cagliari lost only two matches and conceded just 11 goals in winning their one and only Scudetto.
Riva scored 21 goals of all kinds - tap-ins, long-range shots, powerful headers. Although some critics complained he was too reliant on his left foot, many players effective with both feet could not match his versatility. An overhead kick with which he scored against Vicenza is still regarded as one of the best Serie A goals of all time.
Although they had other good players, Cagliari supporters hailed Riva as the one who made it possible and his place in the island's folklore was established for all time.
A short film from RAI about Riva and the 1969-70 season
It might not have happened had Riva not felt so at home on the island. In 1967, when Juventus offered him a fortune to go to Turin, he had turned them down.
“I would have earned triple,” he said later. "But Sardinia had made me a man. It was my land. In those days, they called us shepherds and bandits around Italy. I was 23 and the great Juve wanted to cover me in money. I wanted the Scudetto for my land. We did it, the bandits and shepherds.”
With Italy, for whom he won 42 caps, he was a European champion in 1968 but the ultimate title of World Cup winner eluded him, essentially because the great Italian team of 1970 met an even better one in Brazil in the finals in Mexico.
Riva scored twice in the 4-1 quarter-final win over the hosts and Italy's third goal in the so-called 'Game of the Century', the 4-3 extra-time semi-final victory against West Germany, but Italy were overwhelmed as the brilliant Brazilians won 4-1 in the final.
Bedevilled by injuries for most of his career - he suffered a broken leg twice while playing for the national team - he retired in 1978, two years after rupturing a tendon in his right thigh. Cagliari retired his No 11 shirt in his honour in 2005.
The Castello district of Cagliari is
especially beautiful at night
For all that he regarded himself as an adopted Sardinian, Riva never forgot his roots. In retirement, he returned to Leggiuno, where he knocked down the house where his parents had lived and built a new one in its place, staying there periodically to chat with local people, some of whom he had known when he was a child, and to reflect on the course his life had taken him.
Travel tip:
Although it is Sardinia's main port and industrial centre, Cagliari has become a popular tourist destination for the tree-lined boulevards and elegant arcades of the marina area and the charm of its historical centre, known as Castello, with limestone buildings that prompted DH Lawrence to call it 'the white Jerusalem', which take on beautiful pastel hues at sunset.
Leggiuno, situated in an elevated position just inland from Lake Maggiore, is close to the Hermitage of Santa Caterina del Sasso, an extraordinary structure that appears to rise from the waters of Lake Maggiore, clinging to a sheer rock cliff face. A Roman Catholic monastery dating from the 14th century, it used to be accessible only by boat or by a steep flight of steps descending from the top of the cliff. Since 2010, visitors have been able to reach it via a lift built into an old well.
Much respected presenter taken off air by Berlusconi
Enzo Biagi, pictured in 2006
Enzo Biagi, the distinguished print and television journalist and author of more than 80 books, died in Milan on this day in 2007, at the age of 87.
A staunch defender of the freedom of the press, Biagi himself was the victim of censorship from the highest level of the Italian government in 2002 when prime minister Silvio Berlusconi effectively sacked him from the public broadcaster RAI for what he called "criminal use" of the network.
In what became known as il Editto bulgaro - the Bulgarian Edict - because he made the pronouncement during a state visit to Sofia, Berlusconi named another journalist, Michele Santoro, and the satirical comedian, Daniele Luttazzi, as guilty of similar conduct and said it was his duty to "not to allow this to happen".
It meant that the last years of Biagi's life were marred somewhat by an absence from the screen that lasted five years. He made an emotional comeback in April 2007, seven months before his death, when Romani Prodi had begun his second stint as PM and saw to it that he was reinstated.
Berlusconi's disapproval of Biagi was thought to have related to two interviews he conducted during the run-up to the 2001 elections.
In the first, he appeared to be sympathetic to Berlusconi's opponent, Francesco Rutelli. The second - just two days before polling - was with Roberto Benigni, the actor-director and comedian, who poked fun at what he saw as a conflict between Berlusconi's political ambitions and his business interests.
Silvio Berlusconi banished Biagi from
Italian state TV network RAI
Biagi had interviewed Berlusconi himself before he first stood for prime minister, grilling him over his relationship with Bettino Craxi at the time the former prime minister was convicted of corruption and illegal funding of the Italian Socialist Party.
Born in 1920 in Lizzano in Belvedere, an Apennine village in Emilia-Romagna, the son of a warehouse guard, he began working for the Bologna newspaper Il Resto del Carlino at the age of 18. An opponent of Fascism, he joined the Italian partisans in 1943 and was a member of an anti-Fascist political movement at the time but during his journalistic career he never adhered to any political party.
After the Second World War, he moved to Milan and between 1952 and 1960 was editor of the magazine Epoca. He started working regularly for RAI in the 1960s, while continuing to write for leading newspapers.
He hosted many magazine programmes for the station, interviewing leading political leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Muammar Gadaffi, as well as key figures from his other great love, the cinema.
Biagi published more than 80 books, many about history and current affairs, as well as a biography of his friend, the actor Marcello Mastroianni. His 1987 book, Il boss è solo, based on interviews with the Mafia pentito (state witness) Tommaso Buscetta, won the Premio Bancarella literary prize.
The snow capped Corno alle Scale mountain is close
to Biagi's home village of Lizzano in Belvedere
Travel tip:
Lizzano in Belvedere, in a mountainous area on the border between the provinces of Modena and Pistoia, offers all-year-round attractions, from skiing on the nearby Corno alle Scale peak in winter to trekking and mountain biking in the spring and summer, with the village centre well stocked with restaurants specialising in local dishes. The ancient round church, known as 'Rotonda' or 'Delubro', is an interesting feature.
Travel tip:
Bologna is the historic capital of Emilia-Romagna, at the centre of which is the spacious Piazza Maggiore, the social hub of the city, surrounded with arched colonnades, many attractive cafes and fine medieval and Renaissance buildings, including the Palazzo Comunale, the Fountain of Neptune and the imposing Basilica di San Petronio, which dominates the square.
