Francesco Rosi - film director

Documentary style put him among greats of Italian cinema

Francesco Rosi

The film director Francesco Rosi, one of Italy's most influential movie-makers over four decades, was born on this day in 1922 in Naples. 

Rosi, who made his directing debut in 1958 and filmed his last movie in 1997, built on the fashion for neo-realism that dominated Italian cinema in the immediate post-war years and his films were often highly politicised.

Many of his works were almost pieces of investigative journalism, driven by his revulsion at the corruption and inequality he witnessed in the area in which he grew up, and the dubious relationships between local government and figures from the crime world.

His film Hands Over the City, for example, starring Rod Steiger as unscrupulous land developer, sought to show how the landscape of Naples was shaped by greed and political interests.  The film's disclaimer stated that “All characters and events narrated in this film are fictitious, but the social reality that created them is authentic.”

The Mattei Affair, which starred Gian Maria Volonté - himself a political activist - tells the story of Enrico Mattei, a former Italian resistance fighter who rose to be head of ENI, the state-owned oil company, and died in a plane crash in Sicily. Conspiracy theorists linked his death with his attempt, in the middle of the Cold War, to break America's dominance of the Italian market, sign deals with Arab countries and even court Russia as a possible trading partner.

The project took Rosi's team into such dangerous political territory that one of his researchers, the journalist Mauro de Mauro, disappeared. He was never found and it is presumed he was murdered for finding out too much about the case.

Gian Maria Volonté (centre) in a scene from The Mattei Affair

Lucky Luciano, which featured Volonté and Steiger, was another movie filmed in the style of a documentary investigation, this time with its focus on the controversial role of a repatriated Sicilian-American Mafia boss in the Allied liberation of Sicily and the assault on the Italian mainland towards the end of the Second World War.

Later, with Illustrious Corpses, Rosi sought to shine light on the dark machinations of what would come to be known as 'The Strategy of Tension' during the 1980s, in which a series of deadly attacks carried out by right-wing extremists with the apparent collusion of the secret services would be blamed on activists on the hard left in order to derail an alliance being proposed between the Christian Democrat Party and the Communist Party.

Among his many awards was a Palme d'Or at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival for The Mattei Affair, a Golden Lion at the 1963 Venice Biennale for Hands Over the City and ten David di Donatello awards from the Academy of Italian Cinema.

In 2012, he was awarded an honorary Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for lifetime achievement and leaving "an indelible mark on the history of Italian film-making".

Rosi was born in Montecalvario, a neighbourhood of central Naples that includes part of the Spanish Quarter, the Piazza Carità and the bustling Via Toledo.  His father worked in the shipping industry, but also drew satirical cartoons, once earning a reprimand for his insulting depictions of Benito Mussolini and King Vittorio Emmanuel III.

Giorgio Napoletana, a schoolfriend of Francesco Rosi,
who would go one to become President of the Republic

Rosi went to college with Giorgio Napolitano, who would later become Italian President, and they would remain lifelong friends.  He studied law but his career took him in a different direction, first as an illustrator of children's books, then as a reporter with Radio Napoli.

The connections he made through the radio station led him into theatre work and film.  After several films as assistant director, learning from Ettore Giannini and Luchino Visconti among others, he made his solo debut in 1958 with La Sfida (The Challenge), an expose of corruption in the retail trade in Naples which quickly made clear Rosi's preoccupation with social justice and the complex labyrinths in Italian society.

His breakthrough in terms of international acclaim came in 1962 with Salvatore Giuliano, a fictional exploration of the life of the Sicilian bandit of the title, his connections with the state and the church, and his role in fighting against communism in Sicily.  Rosi's aim was to use the bandit’s life and death to convey the complexities of post-war Sicilian politics and society in which "resolving the truth was an impossibility."

Salvatore Giuliano won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1962 and established Rosi as one of the central figures of the post-neorealist phase in Italian cinema, along with Gillo Pontecorvo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Taviani brothers, Ettore Scola and Valerio Zurlini.

Rosi’s later movies were accomplished productions but critics felt they lacked the power of his earlier work, although in his adaptation of Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi's memoir about his experiences as a doctor exiled in southern Italy for his anti-Fascist views, with Volonté in the title role, came close, winning a BAFTA for Best Foreign Language Film.

After ending his career in film with The Truce, based on holocaust survivor Primo Levi's memoir of returning to Italy after his liberation from Auschwitz, he returned to theatre, notably directing the Neapolitan comedies of Eduardo De Filippo.

He spent his last years living in Rome on Via Gregoriana, near the Spanish Steps.   He died in 2015 aged 92.

The Via Toledo in Naples has a typical flavour of the city

Travel tip:

Montecal- vario, where Francesco Rosi was born, is said by many visitors to capture the essence of Naples.  Bordered on one side by the Via Toledo, the busy shopping street which links Piazza Dante with Piazza Trieste e Trento, it includes the part of the Spanish Quarter in which can be found the Teatro Nuovo, an historic theatre originally built in 1724 and twice destroyed by fire.  The theatre became famous for comic opera in the 19th century and in the 20th century staged the plays of the great Neapolitian comic dramatist, Eduardo de Filippo.

Hotels in Napoli by Booking.com

Travel tip:

The Via Gregoriana, where Francesco Rosi spent his last years, is a street almost in the centre of Rome, very close to the tourist hubbub of Piazza di Spagna and the Spanish Steps, yet still retains the air of a peaceful residential thoroughfare, the kind you might expect to find in a well-to-do suburb.  Commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1575, it runs from the church of Trinita dei Monti, which looks down over Piazza di Spagna, towards Via del Tritone and has long been popular with artists and intellectuals.

Rome hotels by Booking.com

More reading:

Ennio Morricone, the film music maestro enters his 89th year

Anna Magnani - Oscar winning star of neo-realist fashion

The legacy of Fellini and La Dolce Vita

Also on this day:

1905: The birth of conductor Annunzio Mantovani


(Picture credits: Francesco Rosi by Georges Biard; Gian Maria Volonté by Pèter; Giorgio Napoletana by Ralf Roletschek; Via Toledo by Inviaggiocommons all via Wikimedia Commons)

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Giuseppina Strepponi – soprano

Death of the woman who inspired Donizetti and Verdi

Giuseppina Strepponi in a portrait that can
be seen at the museum at Teatro alla Scala

Opera singer Giuseppina Strepponi died on this day in 1897 at the village of Sant’Agata in the province of Piacenza in Emilia-Romagna.

She was the second wife of the composer Giuseppe Verdi and is often credited with helping him achieve his first successes, having starred in several of his early operas.

Strepponi was born Clelia Maria Josepha Strepponi in Lodi, a little over 40km south-east of Milan, in 1815.

Her father was the organist at Monza Cathedral and also a composer and he gave her piano lessons when she was very young. At the age of 15 she was enrolled at the Milan Conservatory and she won first prize for singing in her final year.

Strepponi made her professional debut in 1834 at the Teatro Orfeo in Taranto and enjoyed her first success the following spring in Trieste, singing the title role in Rossini’s Matilde di Shabran. She quickly became a celebrity, singing Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini roles all over Italy to great acclaim.

A portrait of Giuseppe Verdi in 1839, the
year of his first opera, Oberto 

She made her debut at Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1839 as Leonora in the first production of Giuseppe Verdi’s first opera, Oberto.  Her strong performance was one of the main reasons the opera was received so well.

Despite suffering illnesses, Strepponi continued to be a popular singer in the early 1840s. She sang the title role in Donizetti’s Adelia in 1841, which he had written specifically for her. In 1842 she received acclaim for her performance of Abigaille in the world premiere of Verdi’s Nabucco at La Scala.

By 1844 she was beginning to experience vocal problems and she had a disastrous season in Palermo in 1845 when she was booed by the audience.

Most of her performances after that were in Verdi operas and she retired from the stage in February 1846 at the age of 31.

Her voice had been damaged by overwork during a career in which she had several affairs and carried on working through at least three known pregnancies.

It was only after she retired and moved to Paris to become a singing teacher that what had been a professional relationship with Verdi blossomed into something more. A widower whose first wife, Margherita, had died young, Verdi visited her there and they began a romance.

The couple returned to Italy in 1849 and began living together in Busseto, Verdi’s home town. She was shunned in the town and at church because they were not married and so the couple moved to a house in the nearby village of Sant’Agata, which is today known as Villa Verdi.

Strepponi helped Verdi’s work by translating for him and supplying comments and criticism while he was composing.

The Villa Verdi, where Strepponi and Verdi lived for
almost half a century before her death in 1897

They were finally married in 1859 and lived together happily until Strepponi became bedridden through arthritis. She was 82 when she died from pneumonia on November 14, 1897, and was initially buried in Milan.

Verdi had left instructions in his will that he wanted to be buried next to her, but after his death he was buried in another cemetery in Milan.

However, so they could be together once again, on February 26, 1901 their bodies were both transferred to be buried in the oratory at the Casa di Riposo, a retirement home for musicians Verdi had created. At the ceremony, Arturo Toscanini directed a choir singing the famous Va, pensiero chorus from Nabucco.

Travel tip:

Villa Verdi, where Strepponi died, is a house Verdi owned from 1848 till his death in 1901 in the village of Sant’Agata in the province of Piacenza. He extended the original house and developed the park around the house, planting many exotic trees. Today visitors can view some of the rooms, including Strepponi’s room, with its original bed, where she died in 1897.

Hotels in Busseto by venere.com

The Basilica Cattedrale della Vergine Assunta
dominates Lodi's Piazza della Vittoria 

Travel tip:

Lodi, the birthplace of Strepponi, is a city in Lombardy, to the south-east of Milan. The town’s main square, Piazza della Vittoria, has porticoes on all four sides and is listed by the Italian Touring Club among the most beautiful squares in Italy. In 1796, in his first major battle, the young Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the Austrians in the Battle of Lodi.

Hotels in Lodi by venere.com

More reading:

The death of Giuseppe Verdi - how Italy mourned his loss

Gaetano Donizetti: the greatest composer of lyrical 
opera

How opera brought fame and wealth to Gioachino Rossini

Also on this day:

1812: The birth of Aleardo Aleardi, the poet who was an important figure in the Risorgimento movement



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Agostina Livia Pietrantoni - Saint

Tragic sister’s simple virtue stopped the traffic in the capital

Sister Agostina Livia Pietrantoni
was murdered by a patient

Nun Agostina Livia Pietrantoni died on this day in 1894 in Rome after being attacked by a patient at the hospital where she was working.

Her story touched Romans so deeply that her funeral brought the city to a standstill as thousands of residents lined the streets and knelt before her casket when it passed them.

The November 16 edition of the daily newspaper Il Messaggero reported that a more impressive spectacle had never before been seen in Rome.

‘From one o’clock in the afternoon, the streets close to Santo Spirito, and all the roads it was believed that the funeral procession would pass, were crowded with people to the point of making the flow of traffic difficult.’

Sister Agostina was beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1972 and canonised by Pope John Paul II in 1999. Her feast day is celebrated each year on November 12.

Sant’Agostina was born Livia Pietrantoni in 1864 in Pozzaglia Sabina to the north east of Rome. She was the second of 11 children born to a poor farmer and his wife.

She started work at the age of seven doing manual labour, carrying heavy sacks of stones and sand for road construction.

The former Santo Spirito Hospital, now a convention centre,
 is situated on the banks of the Tiber close to the Vatican

When she was 12, she went to Tivoli with other poor children to work during the olive harvesting.

Livia refused offers of marriage when she was older as she had her heart set on entering a religious order and, after an initial rejection, was accepted into the Thouret order, becoming a nun and taking the name of Agostina in 1887.

Sister Agostina was sent to work as a nurse at Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome. While working in the tuberculosis ward she contracted the disease herself, but miraculously recovered from it and continued to work there.

On one occasion while working on the tuberculosis ward she was attacked and beaten after seizing a knife from a male patient.

The patient, Giuseppe Romanelli, began to harass her and send her taunting death threats. Her fellow Sisters asked her to take time off work for her own safety but she refused.

On the morning of November 13, 1894, Romanelli stabbed Sister Agostina to death in a dark corridor at the hospital.

After suffering stab wounds to her shoulder, left arm, jugular and chest, she died, moments after forgiving her killer.

Following her canonisation, Sant’Agostina Pietrantoni was named as the Patron Saint of Nurses in 2003.

The village of Pozzaglia Sabina in Lazio, where Agostina
was born and where her remains are buried

Travel tip:

Pozzaglia Sabina, where Sant’Agostina was born, is a small comune in the province of Rieti in Lazio. In 2004 Sant’Agos- tina’s remains were returned to her home town and buried in her former parish church, the Church of San Nicola di Bari, in the first chapel on the left side of the church, which is now dedicated to her.

Travel tip:

Tivoli, where Sant’Agostina worked as a child harvesting olives, is to the north east of Rome. It is famous for its 16th century Villa d’Este, which has a terraced hillside garden with spectacular fountains. The Villa d’Este is now a state museum and is listed as a UNESCO world heritage site.

More reading:

Saint Giustina of Padua - murdered by Romans for preaching Christianity

The election of Pope John Paul II, the Polish pope

Saint Peter's Basilica - the largest church in the world

Also on this day:

1868: The death of composer Gioachino Rossini

(Photo of Pozzaglia Sabina by altotemi via Wikimedia Commons)

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Silvio Berlusconi resigns as PM

Financial crisis brings down 'untouchable' premier 

A large crowd assembled outside the Palazzo Quirinale
to celebrate Berlusconi's resignation in 2011

Silvio Berlusconi resigned as prime minister of Italy on this day in 2011. A controversial, polarising figure, he had dominated Italian politics for 17 years.

With Italy in the grip of the economic crisis that had brought severe consequences to other parts of the Euro zone, Berlusconi lost his parliamentary majority a few days earlier and promised to resign when austerity measures demanded by Brussels were passed by both houses of the Italian parliament.

The Senate had approved the measures the day before. When the lower house voted 380-26 in favour, Berlusconi was true to his word, meeting president Giorgio Napoletano within two hours to tender his resignation.

His last journey from the Palazzo Chigi to the Palazzo Quirinale, the respective official residences of the prime minister and the president, was not a dignified one.

When he arrived at the Quirinale, he was booed by a large and somewhat hostile crowd that had gathered, entering the building to shouts of 'buffoon' and 'mafioso'.  A gathering of musicians and singers serenaded him with a version of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah.  After the meeting concluded, he left by a side entrance to avoid further barracking.

Berlusconi had until that moment held a reputation as a consummate survivor, becoming Italy's longest-serving post-war prime minister despite a litany of scandals.

Berlusconi is one of the richest men in Italy

One of Italy's richest men, he built a fortune estimated at $9billion (€9bn) from a business empire that comprised three television channels, a major publishing house, a national newspaper, the AC Milan football club and countless smaller companies.

He entered politics in In 1993, founding his own political party, Forza Italia - literally, Italy Power - named after an Italian football chant, and was prime minister within a year.

As the head of a decidedly right-wing coalition with the post-Fascist Alleanza Nationale (National Alliance) and the separatist Lega Nord (Northern League), he made many Italians uncomfortable about the direction in which the country was moving.

Yet many hoped his business prowess could help revitalize Italy's economy and saw him as a refreshing change from a political establishment associated with instability and corruption.

The coalition was always an uneasy one, however, and the hopes of his supporters began to erode when Berlusconi was indicted for tax fraud.  He lost to the left-wing Romani Prodi in the election of 1996.

Berlusconi's capacity for bouncing back, though, was remarkable.  By 2001 he was back in power, having rallied his former allies to defeat Prodi and held together the longest-serving Italian government since the Second World War.

Defeated by Prodi again in 2006, he was re-elected in 2008 at the helm of a revamped party, renamed the People of Freedom. 

Romano Prodi

But Italy's economic crisis proved too much for him in the end. In the week of his resignation, the interest rate on Italy's enormous public debts - estimated at around $2.6 trillion - touched 7%, the rate at which Greece, Ireland and Portugal were forced to seek bailouts from the EU.

Berlusconi was never far removed from scandal during his political career but his ability to brush off allegations of corruption or sexual indiscretion made him seem untouchable.

Less than a year after his resignation, however, he was given a four-year sentence for tax fraud and barred from public office, a verdict upheld in Italy's supreme court a year later.

Because he was over 75, he could not be jailed under Italian law and instead served four hours a week of community service, working with elderly dementia patients at a Catholic care home near Milan.

A seven-year sentence imposed in 2013 on charges of having sex with an underage girl was overturned in 2015 and Berlusconi says he will make a political comeback. But his reformed Forza Italia party has so far attracted only minimal support

The Palazzo Chigi in Rome, the official residence of
the Italian prime minister

Travel tip:

The 16th-century Palazzo Chigi, which overlooks the Piazza Colonna and the Via del Corso in Rome, was in the ownership of the Chigi family, part of Roman nobility, from 1659 until the 19th century. It became the residence of the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador to Italy in 1878 before being bought by the Italian state in 1916, when it became the home of the Minister for Colonial Affairs. Later it was the official residence of the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and in 1961 became the official meeting place of Council of Ministers, whose President is the head of the Italian government and can now use the palace as his official residence.

Waterways are another key feature of Milano Due

Travel tip:

Berlusconi's business roots are in the groundbreaking 1970s new town of Milano Due, which was built by Berlusconi's company Edilnord as a residential centre close to the Segrate area of suburban Milan.  Although property there is nowadays marketed with a well-heeled clientele in mind, Berlusconi conceived it as something different, providing homes for families in a safe environment, an inter-connecting system of walkways ensuring that its residents could reach any part of the community without encountering any vehicular traffic.  Every house or apartment was connected to a cable television system run by another Berlusconi company,  TeleMilano, Italy's first private television channel, was the project from which the tycoon would eventually grow his national TV company, Mediaset.

Also on this day:

1948: Death of composer Umberto Giordano

More reading:

Silvio Berlusconi: how he built his power

Gianni Rivera - AC Milan legend who clashed with Berlusconi

Enzo Biagi - veteran journalist 'silenced' by Berlusconi

Beppe Grillo, the comedian turned activist behind the Cinque Stelle - Five Star - movement

Books

My Way: Berlusconi in His Own Words, by Alan Friedman

Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony, by Paul Ginsborg

The Italians, by John Hooper

(Picture credits: Crowd scene by Lalupa; Berlusconi by European People's Party; Palazzo Chigi by Geobia; Romano Prodi by Presidenza della Repubblica; all via Wikimedia Commons)

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