Luca Zingaretti - actor

Found fame as TV detective Inspector Montalbano

Luca Zingaretti: famous for his portrayal
of the Sicily detective Inspector Montalbano

The actor Luca Zingaretti, best known for his portrayal of Inspector Montalbano in the TV series based on Andrea Camilleri's crime novels, was born on this day in 1961 in Rome.

The Montalbano mysteries, now into a 10th series, began broadcasting on Italy's RAI network in 1999 and has become a hit in several countries outside Italy, including France, Spain, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Zingaretti has played the famously maverick Sicilian detective in all 28 feature-length episodes to date, each one based on a novel or short story collection by the Sicilian-born author Camilleri, now in his 92nd year but still writing.

Although he had established himself as a stage actor and had appeared in a number of films, it was the part of Montalbano that established Zingaretti's fame.

Yet he had hoped to become a star on another kind of stage as a professional footballer.  Growing up in the Magliana neighbourhood in the south-west of Rome, he spent as much time as he could out in the streets kicking a ball and played for a number of junior teams.

Zingarette in a scene from Inspector Montalbano

He was good enough, at 17, to earn a semi-professional contract with Rimini, then in Serie B, but a scholarship to the Silvio d'Amico Academy of Dramatic Arts persuaded him to return to Rome, abandoning his football career.

Before training to be an actor, Zingaretti had played
football at a semi-professional level in Rimini

On graduating, he began to work in the theatre, appearing in Chekhov's Three Sisters, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan.  He did his first film work in 1987 and attracted critical acclaim for the first time in the director Marco Risi's movie The Wolfpack in 1994.

His profile was raised a little more when he played a Mafia boss in the popular TV series La Piovra in 1997 and it was soon afterwards that he learned of the plan to adapt Camilleri's Montalbano books for the small screen.

Zingaretti was intrigued because Camilleri had been one of his tutors at the Academy and he was familiar with the novels and their main character.  He auditioned and landed the part.

The exposure sent Zingaretti's career to another level, making him the most famous face on Italian TV and Italy's best paid actor.  Although he considers himself Roman in character, he immersed himself in the Montalbano role and earned Camilleri's respect for his authentic portrayal of a Sicilian, while the tough but caring detective, always rooting for the disadvantaged and exploited, won him a place in the affections of millions of viewers.

The city of Ragusa in southern Sicily, where much of the
location filming of Inspector Montalbano took place

In Zingaretti's opinion, the show, which is filmed on location in Sicily, is popular because Camilleri captures the lost charm of the island he knew as a child and because he created in Montalbano an old-fashioned character, dealing with the worst the crime world can throw at him, rejecting corruption and retaining a strict moral code.

Zingaretti's film career has continued in tandem, bringing him recognition among his peers.  He won two awards for Best Actor - a David di Donatello from the Academy of Italian Cinema and a Karlovy Vary Award from the film festival of the same name - for Alla luce del sole, a real-life drama directed by Roberto Faenza in which Zingaretti played Pino Puglisi, a Roman Catholic priest killed by the Mafia.

Married to the Naples-born actress Luisa Ranieri, whom he met on the set of the TV series Cefalonia, he became a father for the second time in 2015.  Their wedding took place in Sicily at the Castello di Donnafugata, near Ragusa.

His brother, Nicola, is a politician, a former MEP and a member of the Democratic Party of Italy.  He is currently president of the region of Lazio.

A beautiful, atmospheric picture that captures
 the dome of the Duomo di San Giorgio.

Travel tip:

Most of the Commissario Montalbano series is shot on location, mainly around the picturesque city of Ragusa, the historic centre of which perches on top of a hill called Monte Iblei. Rebuilt in Baroque style after the earthquake of 1693, it has charming narrow streets, pretty squares and some elegant buildings, including the 18th century Duomo di San Giorgio.

Travel tip:

The fictional town of Vigàta, where Montalbano is based in the Camilleri novels, is modelled on Porto Empedocle, a industrial port near Agrigento on the south coast of Sicily and Camilleri's home town.  Because of the association, the town changed its name to Porto Empedocle Vigàta, hoping to attract more visitors, although much of the exterior filming of buildings portrayed as being in Vigàta actually took place in Ragusa.  The police station where Montalbano works is the town hall in Scicli, another inland town a few kilometres south of Ragusa.

Also on this day: 

1869: Birth of Victor Emmanuel III, Italy's king through two World Wars

More reading:

Andrea Camilleri, nonagenarian creator of Inspector Montalbano

Umberto Eco - academic novelist hailed for The Name of the Rose

Franco Lucentini - one half of a crime-writing duo

Buy Andrea Camilleri novels from Amazon

(Photo of Duomo di San Giorgio by Gdiquattro via Wikimedia Commons)

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Ennio Morricone - film music maestro

Composer who scored some of cinema's greatest soundtracks

Ennio Morricone, pictured in 2012

Ennio Morricone, who composed some of the most memorable soundtracks in the history of the cinema, was born on this day in 1928 in Rome.

Still working even as he enters his 89th year, Morricone has written more than 500 film and television scores, winning countless awards.

Best known for his associations with the Italian directors Sergio Leone, Giuseppe Tornatore and Giuliano Montaldo, he has also worked among others with Pier Paolo Pasolini, Brian de Palma, Roland Joffé, Franco Zeffirelli and Quentin Tarantino, whose 2015 Western The Hateful Eight finally won Morricone an Oscar that many considered long overdue.

Among his finest soundtracks are those he wrote for Leone's 'Dollars' trilogy in the 1960s, for the Leone gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America two decades later, for Joffé's The Mission and De Palma's The Untouchables.

He composed the score for Tornatore's hauntingly poignant Cinema Paradiso and for Maddalena, a somewhat obscure 1971 film by the Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz that included the acclaimed Come Maddalena and Chi Mai, which later reached number two in the British singles chart after being used for the 1981 TV series The Life and Times of David Lloyd George.

Much of Morricone's film music, as well as his more than 100 classical compositions and numerous jazz and pop songs from the 1960s and 70s, has been recorded and his commercial sales have topped 70 million records worldwide.

Listen to Morricone's beautiful Gabriel's Oboe from The Mission

Morricone, whose parents moved to Rome from Arpino, an ancient hill town near Frosinone in southern Lazio, was brought up in the Trastevere district of the capital, one of five children raised by his father, Mario, a professional musician who played the trumpet, and mother Libera, who ran a small textile business.

He learned the fundamentals of music from his father before entering the National Academy of St Cecilia, where he first met Sergio Leone.

Sergio Leone, the director  behind
 the 'Dollars' trilogy

On graduating, he had some success writing for the theatre as well as for radio. After marrying his girlfriend of six years, Maria Travia, in 1956, and becoming a father a year later, he began supporting his family by playing in a jazz band and arranging pop songs for the Italian public broadcaster, RAI.

Over the next few years he composed pop songs for Rita Pavone, Mario Lanza, Paul Anka and Francoise Hardy among many others.

He branched into film music for the first time in the early 1960s, taking the commission that was to change his life when Leone, his friend from St Cecilia's, asked him to write the score for his groundbreaking Western, A Fistful of Dollars.

Starring the 34-year-old American actor, Clint Eastwood, in his first major role, A Fistful of Dollars was a huge success, spawning two more in the genre that became known as 'Spaghetti Westerns'.  For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly each grossed more than $20 million.

A Fistful of Dollars made $14.5 million, which was incredible given that Leone made it on a budget of less than $250,000.  With only limited access to a full orchestra, Morricone had to improvise, incorporating gunshots, cracking whips, a whistle, a jew's harp, trumpets, and a Fender electric guitar into his score, as well as using human, mainly female voices as musical instruments. The result was a highly distinctive score that it became a classic in the history of cinema music, as instantly recognizable today as it was then, and several of Morricone's innovative measures became part of his repertoire.

Listen to Morricone's music for the opening scene of The Hateful Eight

The trilogy began a relationship with Sergio Leone that would last 20 years and opened many doors for Morricone, whose career prospered from then on.

His first nomination for Best Original Score at the Academy Awards came in 1979 for Days of Heaven, directed by the American Terence Malick.  There were two nominations in the 1980s, for Joffé's The Mission in 1986 and De Palma's The Untouchables in 1987, and probably would have been a third had the American distributors of Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984) submitted the paperwork on time.

Morricone was particularly disappointed not to win with The Mission, which features the wonderful melody Gabriel's Oboe as its main theme, complaining that jazz musician Herbie Hancock's score for Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight, while beautifully done, used existing music.

The Hateful Eight: Morricone's score for
Quentin Tarantino's film won an Oscar

Further nominations came for Barry Levison's Bugsy (1991) and Tornatore's Malena (2000), and by the second decade of the new millennium Morricone's 50-year movie career had brought him 44 major awards.

It appeared, though, that the award he craved above all would elude him, and an honorary Oscar in 2007 for his overall contribution to film music seemed a slightly hollow consolation prize.

But then, late in 2014, just past his 86th birthday, he was approached by Quentin Tarantino, with whom he had collaborated previously but had had a difficult relationship. Morricone had not scored a complete Western for 35 years and had not worked on a high-profile Hollywood production since 2000 but The Hateful Eight, set just after the American Civil War, appealed to him.

He produced a score that was magnificent, one that would sit comfortably alongside anything he had done previously, from the sweeping L'Ultima Diligenza per Red Rock that accompanies the chillingly atmospheric opening scenes, to Regan's Theme, a melody of gathering pace with echoes of what he did for Leone half a century previously.

It earned Morricone his third Golden Globe, to go with The Mission and the ragtime-jazz score he wrote for Tornatore's Legend of 1900 and then, at the 87th Academy Awards night of February 22, 2016, the one he thought would never come and which made him, at 87 years, the oldest winner of a competitive Oscar.

Morricone, who has never left Italy despite being offered a villa in Hollywood by one of the studios he worked with, remains an active composer.  He and Maria had four children - Marco, Alessandra, Andrea, who himself became a film music composer, and Giovanni, who is a film director and producer in New York.

UPDATE: Morricone died in July 2020, aged 91, as a result of injuries sustained in a fall. Following a private funeral, he was entombed in Cimitero Laurentino in Rome.

The unspoilt hill town of Arpino

Travel tip:

Arpino, home of Morricone's parents, is a hill town situated about 120km south-east of Rome, 46km north-west of Frosinone in Lazio. Clinging to a ridge on top of a hill, it is relatively accessible from a nearby station on one of the Rome-Naples railway lines, yet attracts few tourists and therefore has the unspoilt feel of a traditional southern Italian community.

Travel tip:

The Trastevere district of Rome, which sits alongside the River Tiber, is regarded as one of the city's most charming neighbourhoods, full of winding, cobbled streets and well preserved medieval houses.  Increasingly fashionable with Rome's young professional class as a place to live, it has an abundance of restaurants and bars and a lively student music scene.

More reading:

How Shakespeare adaptations made Franco Zeffirelli a household name

Sergio Leone - distinctive style of 'Spaghetti Western' creator

How Nino Rota found fame for The Godfather theme

Also on this day: 

1816: Lord Byron, the English poet and aristocrat, sets foot in Venice for the first time.

(Picture credit: First photo of Morricone by Georges Biard via Wikimedia Commons)
(Videos from YouTube)

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Niccolò III d’Este – Marquis of Ferrara

Soldier who built up the importance of Ferrara

Niccolò III d'Este, Marquis of Ferrara

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.

Hotels in Ferrara by Hotels.com

Travel tip:

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)

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Virna Lisi - actress

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.

Hotels in Rome by venere.com

The 18th century Teatro Pergolesi in Jesi

Travel tip:

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.

Hotels in Jesi by Hotels.com

More reading:

Anna Magnani - Oscar-winner whose characters shared her down-to-earth qualities

Dino de Laurentiis - producer who help take Italian cinema to the world

Roberto Benigni - eccentric comedian, actor and director who scored a first for Italy

Also on this day:

1830: Death of the king of Naples and Sicily

(Photos of Virna Lisi from YouTube; photo of Teatro Pergolese from gaspa via Wikimedia Commons)

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