Terrorist attack at Fiumicino

Horrifying end to Christmas celebrations

The departure hall at Fiumicino in the
aftermath of the 1985 attack

The peace of Italy's festive celebrations was shattered by a devastating terrorist attack on this day in 1985 when Arab gunmen opened fire in the main departure hall at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport.

The attack, which claimed the lives of 16 people, took place shortly after 9.05am, when the four perpetrators approached the check-in desks of Israel's El Al Airline and the United States carrier Trans World Airlines.

Israeli secret services were aware that an attempt either to hijack a plane or stage an attack on the ground was being planned between December 25 and 31 in Rome and an Israeli security officer became suspicious of the quartet as he watched their movements in the departure hall.

However, when he stepped forward to challenge them, they produced assault rifles and began firing, at the same time throwing grenades.

The Israeli officer was killed and in the ensuing gunfight, involving more Israeli security staff and Italian police, some 12 passengers were fatally wounded.  They included Americans, Mexicans, Greeks, Italians and at least one Algerian.

The entrance to Fiumicino Airport today

Three of the gunmen were shot dead and a fourth, 18-year-old Ibrahim Khaled, was captured by police.

A simultaneous attack at Vienna International Airport resulted in three more passenger deaths.

The attacks were at first blamed on the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), but its leader, Yasser Arafat, denied the accusations and denounced the strikes.  Responsibility was later claimed by the breakaway PLO faction, the Abu Nidal Organization, in retaliation for the Israeli bombing of PLO headquarters in Tunis three months earlier.

The United States accused Libya, who praised the attacks as "heroic", of funding the terrorists who carried out the attacks. The charge was denied.  Italian secret services blamed Syria and Iran and in 2013 a court in the United States ruled that Syria owed the victims of the attacks $1 billion each in compensation.

Ibrahim Khaled, the only survivor among the Rome attackers, was sentenced in 1988 to 30 years in jail.  Abu Nidal himself was sentenced to life imprisonment in his absence.  Khaled had told investigators that both the Rome and Vienna operations had been carried out by Abu Nidal's guerrilla group and that the attacks had been planned in Damascus with the apparent consent of the Syrian authorities.

The Rome attack took place 12 years after 34 people died at Fiumicino - 30 of them on board a Pan American aircraft on the runway - during another attack by Arab terrorists.

Travel tip:

While best known as the location of Rome's largest international airport, Fiumicino, which is situated at the mouth of the Tiber, about 30km (19 miles) from the centre of the capital, is also a resort town and fishing centre with a population of almost 78,000.  Attractions include the Oasi di Macchiagrande nature reserve, the Museum of Roman Ships and an art museum, the Pianeta Azzurro.

Some parts of Ostia Antica are stunningly well preserved

Travel tip:

Across the Tiber from Fiumicino, the remains of the ancient Roman city of Ostica Antica, represent an underappreciated gem. Beautifully preserved - more so than the volcano-ravaged Pompei - the site occupies around 10,000 square metres, radiating from a mile-long main street.  There are many houses and apartment blocks, plus warehouses and public buildings, and an impressive amphitheatre.  The city used to be Rome's port but the natural changes in the geography of the coastline over the centuries mean that it is now 3km (2 miles) inland.

More reading:

Kidnap of ex-PM Aldo Moro stuns Italy

Red Brigades seize NATO boss in Verona

Death of a terror suspect that inspired a Dario Fo play

Also on this day:

1983: Pope John Paul II forgives his would-be killer

(Picture credits: Fiumicino Airport by Ra Boe; Ostia Antica by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra; via Wikimedia Commons)

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Beppe Severgnini - journalist and author

Books observing national mores have been best sellers

Journalist Beppe Severgnini: respected commentator
and witty observer of his fellow human beings

The author and journalist Giuseppe Severgnini was born on this day in 1956 in Crema in northern Italy.

Better known as Beppe Severgnini, he is a respected commentator on politics and social affairs, about which he has written for some of the most influential journals and newspapers in Italy and the wider world.

Severgnini is equally well known for his humorous writing, in particular his gently satirical observations of the English and the Americans as well as Italians, about whom he has written many books.

His biggest selling titles include An Italian in America, which has also been published as Hello America. He has also enjoyed success with La Bella Figura: An Insider's Guide to the Italian Mind, Mamma Mia! Berlusconi's Italy Explained for Posterity and Friends Abroad, and An Italian in Britain.

Severgnini is currently a columnist for Corriere della Sera in Italy and the International New York Times in the United States.  A former correspondent for the British journal The Economist, he writes in both Italian and English, having spent a number of years living in London, Washington and New York.

The son of a notary in Crema, Severgnini graduated in law at the University of Pavia.  For a brief period he worked at the European Community headquarters in Brussels before beginning his career in journalism at the age of 27, when he joined the Milan daily newspaper Il Giornale, headed by veteran Italian journalist Indro Montanelli.

It was soon evident he was a talented writer and he became the paper's London correspondent.  Subsequently, during the years of the fall of communism, he became a special correspondent in Eastern Europe, Russia and China.

Beppe Severgnini's books have been bestsellers in
Italy, Great Britain and the United States

When Montanelli set up a new venture, La Voce, Severgnini became its Washington correspondent in 1994 before returning to Italy the following year and beginning his long association with Corriere della Sera, for whom as well as writing opinion pieces he moderates a popular forum, simply called 'Italians', originally aimed at Italian expatriates, which has become one of the most read regular features of the newspaper's website.

Severgnini was Italian correspondent for The Economist between 1996 and 2003 and still writes for the magazine from time to time.  He has also contributed to the Sunday Times and The Financial Times in the UK and occasionally writes about football for Gazzetta dello Sport.

Away from newspapers and books, he has taught at the Walter Tobagi graduate School of Journalism at the University of Milan, been writer in residence at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a visiting fellow at Ca’ Foscari Venezia. 

One of his books, Signori, si cambia: In viaggio sui treni della vita (All Change: Travelling on the Train of Life), has been turned into a play, Life is a Journey, in which he also stars.

The Piazza del Duomo in Severgnini's home
town of Crema in Lombardy

He presents a television show on RAI TRE entitled The Grass is Greener, which compares Italy with other European countries and America.

He was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) in 2001 and a Commendatore of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 2011.

A keen supporter of Internazionale and the owner of a 1954 Vespa motor scooter, Severgnini lives near Milan with his wife and their son Antonio.

Travel tip:

The small city of Crema, which sits on the banks of the Serio river about 50km east of Milan, has an attractive historic centre built around the Piazza del Duomo.  Apart from the cathedral itself, which has a tall bell tower completed in 1604, the area includes the Santa Maria della Croce basilica, built around a 35km high circular central structure, the Palazzo Pretorio and the Palazzo Comunale.

The covered bridge over the Ticino river in Pavia was
rebuilt after being destroyed in the Second World War

Travel tip:

Pavia was once the most important town in northern Italy, the legacy of which is evident in its many fine buildings. These include a cathedral boasting one of the largest domes in Italy, a beautiful Romanesque Basilica, San Michele, and the well preserved Visconti Castle, surrounded by a large moat, which is home to the Civic Museum. The covered bridge across the Ticino River is a faithful reproduction of a 13th-century bridge destroyed during Allied bombing raids in the Second World War.

More reading:

Why Silvio Berlusconi took veteran journalist Enzo Biagi off the air

Bruno Vespa - TV journalist who opened door to late-night political debate

How football journalist Gianni Brera enriched the Italian language

Also on this day:

Festa di Santo Stefano

Books:

Buy Beppe Severgnini's books from Amazon

(picture credits: main Beppe Severgnini by Davide Schenette; second Beppe Severgnini by Alessio Jacona; Piazza del Duomo by MarkusMark; Bridge at Pavia by Konki; all via Wikimedia Commons)

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Lina Cavalieri – soprano

Christmas Day baby became singing beauty

Lina Cavalieri was described as 'the
world's most beautiful woman'

Singer and actress Lina Cavalieri was born Natalina - meaning 'Little Christmas' - Cavalieri on this day in 1874, in Viterbo in Lazio.

During her career she starred opposite Enrico Caruso in operas and earned the title of ‘the world’s most beautiful woman', while many of her female contemporaries tried to attain her hour-glass figure by using tight-laced corsetry.

Raised as one of five children in humble circumstances, she was expected to work to supplement the family income.  To this end, she sold flowers and sang on the streets of Rome.

After a music teacher heard her singing, she was offered some music lessons.  Subsequently, she found work as a café singer and then in theatres in Rome.

Increasingly popular both for her voice and her physical beauty, she made her way from Rome first to Vienna and then Paris where she performed in music halls including the Folies-Bergère and worked with singing coaches to develop her voice.

The progression to opera came in 1900, when she made her debut in Lisbon as Nedda in Pagliacci, by Ruggero Leoncavallo. It was in the same year that she married her first husband, the Russian Prince, Alexandre Bariatinsky, whom she had met in Paris and who had encouraged her to believe she should not be content with working in mere music halls.

The Lisbon audience gave her a difficult time, however, and the production was abandoned after only a few nights, at which point Bariatinsky left her.  Cavalieri returned to Paris and might have given up her operatic ambitions without the encouragement of her sister, Ada, who helped her rebuild her confidence.

Cavalieri starred opposite Enrico Caruso
in Paris and New York

After successes at Teatro San Carlo in Naples, in Warsaw, Ravenna, Palermo and St Petersburg, a breakthrough moment came when in 1905 she starred opposite Caruso in Umberto Giordano’s opera, Fedora, at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris.

The performance was so successful they took the production to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Cavalieri stayed with the Met for two seasons, performing again with Caruso in 1907 in Giacomo Puccini’s opera Manon Lescaut. She became one of the most photographed stars of the time and women everywhere tried to copy her figure.

She had a brief, second marriage to Robert Winthrop Chanler, an American artist and a member of the Astor and Dudley-Winthrop families.  Married in 1910, the had separated within weeks and were divorced in 1912.

During her career she sang with many famous singers, including the French tenor Lucien Muratore, who became her third husband in 1913.

After retiring from the stage, Cavalieri ran a beauty salon in Paris and wrote an advice column on make-up for a magazine. She also launched her own range of beauty products and perfumes.

A poster for the film 'The World's Most
 Beautiful Woman' with Gina Lollobrigida

In 1915 she returned to Italy to make films and then went back to America, where she starred in silent movies, many of which have since been lost.

She moved to Italy again after marrying her fourth husband, the writer Paolo d’Arvanni.

Despite being in her sixties when the Second World War began, she became a volunteer nurse.

Tragically, Cavalieri and her husband were both killed in 1944 after an Allied bombing raid destroyed their home near Florence.

After her death, Cavalieri was painted repeatedly by the Italian artist Piero Fornasetti, who found her face in an old magazine and became obsessed with her, creating hundreds of versions of her image.

In 1955 she was portrayed by Gina Lollobrigida in the film Beautiful but Dangerous, which was alternatively called The World’s Most Beautiful Woman, a French-Italian production directed by Robert Z Leonard.

Travel tip:

Viterbo, where Lina Cavalieri was born, is the largest town in northern Lazio, situated about 80km (50 miles) north of Rome. In the 12th and 13th centuries, with Rome often chaotic as rival families engaged in feuds, Viterbo became a favourite refuge for embattled popes. Much of its most notable architecture, such as the Papal Palace, has echoes of that period. It was bombed heavily during the Second World War but much of its historical centre remained intact and nowadays it is a somewhat overlooked city.

The Villa del Poggio Imperiale outside Florence
(picture by Sailko via Wikimedia Commons)

Travel tip:

Lina Cavalieri was killed at her home just outside Florence at Poggio Imperiale, near the imposing neoclassical Villa del Poggio Imperiale, which was once the home of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany. It was seized from the Salviati family by the Medici and was then later given to Napoleon’s sister before becoming a girl’s school. Some of the frescoed state rooms are open to the public by appointment.

More reading:

Giuseppina Strepponi - the inspiration for Donizetti and Verdi

How Ruggero Leoncavallo created one of the world's favourite operas

Renata Tebaldi - soprano with the 'voice of an angel'

Also on this day:

Christmas in Italy


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Francesco Cirio - canning pioneer

Market trader whose name became known worldwide

Francesco Cirio

Francesco Cirio, who pioneered the technique of canning food products to preserve their freshness, was born on this day in 1836 in the town of Nizza Monferrato in what is now Piedmont.

His father was a grain trader and Francesco developed entrepreneurial instincts at an early age.  By the age of 14 he was working at the fruit and vegetable market of Porta Palazzo in Turin.

He soon became aware that there was a demand for fresh Italian produce in London and Paris and set up a company to export fruit and vegetables to other cities in Europe.

At the same time he heard about the work of Nicolas Appert, the French confectioner and chef, whose attempts to find ways to preserve food led him to discover that heat could be used as a method of sterilisation and that foods treated in that way could be sealed in cans and would retain their fresh condition for many months.

The method, which became known as Appertisation, was taken up by Cirio, who set up his first canning factory in Turin in 1856 at the age of 20, concentrating first on peas and then achieving similar success with other vegetables.

A poster from the early part of the 20th century
advertising Cirio's most famous product

Within a decade, the Cirio brand was appearing on the shelves of grocery stores all over the world and by 1885 the Societa Anonima di Esportazione Agricola Francesco Cirio, with its headquarters in Turin, had opened subsidiaries in Milan, Naples, Belgrade, Berlin, Brussels, London, Paris and Vienna.

Francesco died in 1900 but his partner, Pietro Signorini, continued the development of the company, which invested in the agricultural development of Southern Italy.  Canned tomatoes became a major part of the business and from the 1920s onwards, the name Cirio became synonymous with Italian tomatoes.

The business continued to thrive through the 20th century before it became engulfed in the financial scandals of the late 1990s. The company was wound up after a number of executives were arrested on fraud charges during the anti-corruption drive in Italy that saw several other of the country's biggest commercial names disappear from the shelves.

However, the Cirio brand lives on as part of the Gruppo Cooperativo Conserve Italia, a cooperative consortium of vegetable producers based in San Lazzaro in Emilia-Romagna.

Travel tip:

Nizza Monferrato, in the province of Asti, grew up around the Abbey of San Giovanni in Lanero in the 13th century.  It passed into the hands of the House of Savoy in 1703 and began to flourish in the 18th century, when it was noted for its silk production.  Interesting buildings include the Palazzo Comunale, the seat of the local government since the 14th century, and the Palazzo Crova, which is a good example of the town houses favoured by the nobility in the 18th century.  The red wine Nizza, a DOCG wine made with Barbera grapes, is produced in just 18 municipalities around the town.

Stalls on the Porta Palazzo market in Turin, where
Francesco Cirio worked from the age of 14

Travel tip:

The Porta Palazzo market, located in Piazza della Repubblica in Turin, where Cirio cut his teeth in the fruit and vegetable business, is the largest open air market in Europe with around 800 stalls.  It trades from Monday to Friday and attracts not only customers from the city but from neighbourhoods further afield and many foreign visitors.  There is a strong representation of local producers with more than 100 stalls every day directly selling products from farmers around Turin. The market was renovated in 2006.

More reading:

Michele Ferrero - the man who invented Nutella spread

Piedmont roots of chef and TV presenter Antonio Carluccio

Soave - the classic Italian wine

Also on this day:

Christmas Eve - la Vigilia di Natale

(Picture credit: Porta Palazzo market by Xadhoomx via Wikimedia commons)



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