Claudio Villa - singing star

'King' of Sanremo sold 45 million records

Claudio Villa's tenor voice was considered good enough
for operatic arias but he chose a career in pop

The singer Claudio Villa, who sold 45 million records and won the Sanremo Music Festival four times, was born on New Year's Day in 1926 in the Trastevere district of Rome.

The tenor, nicknamed 'the little king' on account of his diminutive stature and fiery temper, lent his voice to popular songs rather than opera although his voice was of sufficient quality to include operatic arias in his repertoire.

His four wins at Sanremo, in 1955, 1957, 1962 and 1967, is the most by any individual performer, a record he shares with Domenico Modugno, the singer-songwriter who was at his peak in the same era.

Villa recorded more than 3,000 songs and enjoyed a successful film career, starring in more than 25 musicals. His biggest hits included Ti Voglio Come Sei, Binario, Non ti Scordar di Me, Buongiorno Tristezza and Granada. 

Listen to Claudio Villa performing on the Italian TV show Canzonissima

He was a frequent guest on the Italian TV variety show Canzonissima, which was broadcast on state channel Rai Uno between 1958 and 1974. Later, he became a master of traditional Italian and Neapolitan songs.

Born Claudio Pica, the son of a taxi driver, he was raised in a working class area, living in the shadow of Rome's main prison in Via Lungara.

Villa starred in many
successful musicals

His talent for singing became apparent while he was still a teenager and he won the first song contest in which he participated, at the age of 14, performing the song Chitaratella, made popular by his idol, Carlo Buti.

Villa began to make regular appearances on the local station Radio Roma in 1946 and made his first record the following year on the Parlophone label.  He appeared in his first musical in the same year.

His career spanned 40 years, tailing off only in the 1980s, when he was profoundly affected by the death of his mother. He performed at Sanremo for the final time in 1985.

Villa lived in Rome all his life.  In 1986, he took a prominent role in an anti-fast food movement after the fast food chain McDonald's was allowed to open a branch in Piazza di Spagna.

His death, which was announced during the Sanremo Music Festival of 1987, came as a shock to his many fans.  Suffering from pancreatis and heart trouble, he travelled to Padua to undergo surgery but never left hospital, suffering a heart attack a month after his operation.

Villa married the actress Miranda Bonansea in 1952, with whom he had a son, Mauro, but they divorced after 10 years. After a number of relationships, including a long-standing one with the Roman singer Noemi Garofalo, who bore him a daughter, Manuele and a second son, Claudio, he was married again in 1973, to Patrizia Baldi.

Patrizia was just 18, some 31 years his junior, and the marriage made headlines for that reason.  Yet they remained together and had two children, Andrea and Aurora.

Travel tip:

Although formerly a working class neighbourhood, the Trastevere district, which sits alongside the River Tiber, is regarded as one of Rome's most charming areas for tourists to visit. Full of winding, cobbled streets and well preserved medieval houses, it is fashionable with Rome's young professional class as a place to live, with an abundance of restaurants and bars and a lively student music scene.

The Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere

Travel tip:

Trastevere is home to one of the oldest churches in Rome in the Basilica of Santa Maria.  The floor plan and wall structure of the church date back to the 340AD, although most of it was built in the first half of the 12th century. Inside, the walls and ceiling are covered with breathtakingly beautiful 13th century mosaics, by Pietro Cavallini.

More reading:

How Domenico Modugno's first Sanremo win gave the world an Italian classic

Gigliola Cinquetti - the first Italian to win Eurovision

Rita Pavone - the 60s star who conquered America

Also on this day:

Capodanno in Italy





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Giovanni Michelucci - architect

Designer made mark with railway station and motorway church

Giovanni Michelucci 

The architect Giovanni Michelucci, whose major legacies include the Santa Maria Novella railway station in Florence, died on this day in 1990 in his studio just outside the Tuscan city at Fiesole.

Considered by many to be the 'father' of modern Italian architecture, he was only two days away from his 100th birthday.  He was still working and is said to have been inspecting progress on his latest project when he slipped and fell, later suffering a cardiac arrest.

Michelucci, who was born in Pistoia on January 2, 1891, is also remembered for the brilliantly unconventional church of San Giovanni Battista, with its tent-like curved roof, which forms part of a rest area on the Autostrada del Sole as it passes Florence.

The Santa Maria Novella station project for which he first won acclaim came after a collective of young architects known as the Tuscan Group, co-ordinated by Michelucci, beat more than 100 other entries in a national competition in the early 1930s to built a new station behind the church of the same name.

The linear design was loathed by conservatives but loved by modernists, although it could not be said to conform to the style identifiable as Fascist architecture in Italy at the time, which had echoes of classical Roman design, albeit without ornate decoration.

It met with the approval of Fascist leader Mussolini, nonetheless, who approved the design, and it came to be regarded subsequently as a masterpiece of rationalist architecture. The stone of its exterior blended with the historic colours of Florence, yet a spacious entrance hall and gallery with a thermolux and steel roof made it functional and modern.

Santa Maria Novella railway station in Florence

The station was built between 1932 and 1935, almost 30 years before Michelucci's second landmark work, which he undertook at the age of 73 after the highways authority commissioned him to design a church that would both honour the memory of those who died in the construction of the motorway and provide a 'parish for tourists', where travellers could break their journeys to worship.

The church, in concrete and stone, is built around a traditional 'cross' floor plan with tent-like vertical elements, rising to a height of 27.5 metres (90 feet), giving it a modern feel. The roof is of copper, oxidised to a blue-green colour on the outside and burnished blond on the inside, with marble, glass and bronze used for other interior features.

Michelucci came from a family which owned a craft iron workshop, which gave him his introduction to design. He graduated from the Higher Institute of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence before teaching at the Institute of Architecture of Florence, where he could later become Dean.

During his military service in the First World War, he built his first architectural work, a chapel for soldiers on the eastern front in Casale Ladra, near Caporetto in what is now Slovenia.

In the early 1920s, Michelucci taught in Rome, the city where he married the painter Eloisa Pacini. He returned to Florence in 1928.

Michelucci's 'motorway' church of San Giovanni Battista

Other important works in Tuscany include a 1936 town plan for Pistoia, the classicist-style Palazzo del Governo in Arezzo the same year and the Borsa Merci in Pistoia (1950).

In Florence, he designed an urban plan for the Sorgane neighbourhood of Florence in 1955) and the Cassa di Risparmio of Florence in 1957.  The Inn of the Red Crawfish at the Pinocchio Park in Collodi (1963) is his, as is the skyscraper in Piazza Matteotti in Livorno (1966).

His biggest disappointments were the rejection of his plans for reconstruction of the Ponte Vecchio area after the Second World War II and for restoring the buildings around Piazza Santa Croce after the 1966 flood.

However, Michelucci did become involved with the reconstruction work necessitated by the Vajont Dam disaster in the mountains above Venice in 1963, in particular the village of Longarone, where he designed a memorial church.

Always an architect who wanted his buildings to benefit the people who used them, in his later years he concentrated almost entirely on what might be deemed social projects, designing churches, schools, hospitals, and prisons. He also devoted time and energy to setting up the Michelucci Foundation to support research into urban planning and modern architecture and to promote his own values and ideals.

Travel tip:

Florence's railway station was opened on February 3, 1848, to serve the railway lines to Pistoia and Pisa. It was initially called Maria Antonia in honour of Princess Maria Antonia of the Two Sicilies but was renamed after the church of Santa Maria Novella after the unification of Italy.  Nowadays, the station is used by 59 million people every year and is one of the busiest in Italy, with high speed lines to Rome and Bologna.

The 11th century cathedral of Fiesole

Travel tip:

Fiesole, situated in an elevated position about 8km (5 miles) north-east of Florence, has since the 14th century been a popular place to live for wealthy Florentines and even to this day remains the richest municipality in Florence.  Formerly an important Etruscan settlement, it was also a Roman town of note, of which the remains of a theatre and baths are still visible.  Fiesole's cathedral, built in the 11th century, is supposedly built over the site of the martyrdom of St. Romulus.

More reading:

Ulisse Stacchini's architectural legacy to Milan

Pier Luigi Nervi - from football stadiums to churches

How Marcello Piacentini's designs symbolised Fascist ideals

Also on this day:

New Year's Eve - the Festa di San Silvestro


(Picture credits: Motorway church by Luca Aless)

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Titus – Roman Emperor

'Good' ruler who helped victims of Vesuvius eruption

A statue of  Titus unearthed in Herculaneum,
 which can be found in a Berlin museum

The Roman Emperor Titus was born Titus Flavius Vespasianus on this day in AD 39.

He was Emperor from AD 79 to 81 and is remembered for capturing Jerusalem and for completing the Colosseum in Rome.

Two months after his accession, on August 24, AD 79, Mount Vesuvius in Campania began erupting, eventually killing thousands of people around Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Titus appointed officials to coordinate the relief effort, while donating large amounts of money from the imperial treasury to aid the victims. He visited Pompeii twice.

Titus was a member of the Flavian dynasty and succeeded his father Vespasian after his death, becoming the first Roman emperor to come to the throne after his biological father.

Titus was believed to have been born in Rome on December 30, AD 39, the eldest son of Titus Flavius Vespasianus, who was commonly known as Vespasian.

His father had earned prestige as a military commander, taking part in the invasion of Britain in AD 43 under the emperor Claudius.

Titus served under his father in Judea during the first Jewish-Roman war. The campaign came to a brief halt with the death of Emperor Nero in AD 68, which launched Vespasian’s bid for imperial power.

When Vespasian was declared Emperor in July AD 69, Titus was left in charge of ending the Jewish rebellion.  In AD 70 he besieged and captured Jerusalem and the Arch of Titus was built in Rome to commemorate his victory.

The Arch of Titus in Rome, built to commemorate the
victory of Titus in capturing Jerusalem

After the death of Vespasian from an infection, Titus succeeded him as Emperor.

Under the rule of his father, he gained notoriety in Rome while serving as prefect of the Praetorian Guard, and for carrying on a controversial relationship with the Jewish queen, Berenice.

There were fears among some Romans that Titus might be another Nero, whose leadership was seen as brutal and corrupt. In fact, his brief reign was considered a triumph by Suetonius and other historians, who saw him as a 'good' emperor and recorded that he was much loved by the population.

Building work on the Flavian amphitheatre, now known as the Colosseum, began in AD 70 under Vespasian and was finally completed in AD 80 under Titus. To inaugurate the amphitheatre, spectacular games, including gladiatorial combat and mock naval battles, were held there, lasting for 100 days.

But after barely two years as Emperor, Titus died of a fever on 13 September AD 81. Historians have speculated about his death and suspicion has fallen on his brother, Domitian, who succeeded him as Emperor and could have poisoned him.

Travel tip:

The Colosseum in the centre of Rome is the largest amphitheatre ever built. Construction began on the oval building in about AD 70 close to the Forum. The amphitheatre was built to hold up to 80,000 spectators and was used for events such as gladiator contests, mock sea battles and executions. Nowadays it has links to the Catholic Church and the Pope always starts his torch-lit Good Friday procession there.

The gladiator barracks: One of the ruins left behind after the
eruption of Vesuvius and later uncovered at Pompeii

Travel tip:

Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, burying the Roman cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis and Stabiae and killing thousands. An eyewitness account of the eruption has been left behind by a Roman administrator and poet, Pliny the Younger, who described the event in his letters to the historian Tacitus. In the early hours of the morning of 25 August, pyroclastic flows of hot gas and rock began to sweep down the mountain, knocking down all the structures in their path and incinerating or suffocating the people who remained. The remains of about 1500 people have been found at Pompeii and Herculaneum. The excavated ruins of Pompeii, show what daily life was like in a Roman city, down to what was sold in the shops and how people decorated their homes. Tourists can also visit the volcano, which since 1955 has been part of Mount Vesuvius National Park.

More reading:

AD 79: Europe's worst volcanic disaster

Decline and fall: Gibbon's epic work on history of Roman Empire

The 1944 Vesuvius eruption

Also on this day:

1572: Death of the architect Galeazzo Alessi

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Tullio Levi-Civita – mathematician

Professor from Padua who was admired by Einstein

Tullio Levi-Civita

Tullio Levi-Civita, the mathematician renowned for his work in differential calculus and relativity theory, died on this day in 1941 in Rome.

With the collaboration of Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, his professor at the University of Padua, Levi-Civita wrote a pioneering work on the calculus of tensors. Albert Einstein is said to have used this work as a resource in the development of the theory of general relativity.

Levi-Civita corresponded with Einstein about his theory of relativity between 1915 and 1917 and the letters he received from Einstein, carefully kept by Levi-Civita, show how much the two men respected each other.

Years later, when asked what he liked best about Italy, Einstein is reputed to have said ‘spaghetti and Levi-Civita.’

The mathematician, who was born into an Italian Jewish family in Padua in 1873, became an instructor at the University of Padua in 1898 after completing his own studies.

He became a professor of rational mechanics there in 1902 and married one of his own students, Libera Trevisani, in 1914.

Albert Einstein: the German physicist
held Levi-Civita in high regard

In 1917, having been inspired by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, Levi-Civita made his most important contribution to this branch of mathematics, the introduction of the concept of parallel displacement in general curved spaces.

This concept immediately found many applications and in relativity is the basis of the unified representation of electromagnetic and gravitational fields. In pure mathematics his concept was instrumental in the development of modern differential geometry.

Levi-Civita also worked in the fields of hydrodynamics and engineering. He made great advances in the study of collisions in the three-body problem, which involves the motion of three bodies as they revolve around each other.

His books on these subjects became standard works for mathematicians and his collected works were published in four volumes in 1954.

Levi-Civita was invited by Einstein to visit him in Princeton in America and he lived there for a while in 1936, returning to Italy with war looming.

He was removed from his post at the University of Rome in 1938 by the Fascist regime because of his Jewish origins, having taught there since 1918.

Deprived of his professorship and his membership of all academic societies by the Fascists, Levi-Civita became isolated from the scientific world and in 1941 he died at his apartment in Rome, aged 68.

Travel tip:

The University of Padua, where Levi-Civita studied and later taught, was established in 1222 and is one of the oldest in the world, second in Italy only to the University of Bologna. The main university building, Palazzo del Bò in Via VIII Febbraio in the centre of Padua, used to house the medical faculty. You can take a guided tour to see the pulpit used by Galileo when he taught at the university between 1592 and 1610.

The Caffè  Pedrocchi is an historic meeting place
for students and intellectuals in Padua

Travel tip:

Right in the centre of Padua, the Caffè Pedrocchi has been a meeting place for business people, students, intellectuals and writers for nearly 200 years. Founded by coffee maker Antonio Pedrocchi in 1831, the caffè was designed in neoclassical style and each side is edged with Corinthian columns. It quickly became a centre for the Risorgimento movement and was popular with students and artists because of its location close to Palazzo del Bò, the main university building. It became known as the caffè without doors, as it was open day and night for people to read, play cards and debate. Caffè Pedrocchi is now a Padua institution and a must-see sight for visitors, who can enjoy coffee, drinks and snacks all day in the elegant surroundings.

More reading:

Vincenzo Viviani - mathematician and scientist who worked with Galileo

How Evangelista Torricelli invented the barometer

The 18th century astronomer whose work still benefits astronauts today

Also on this day

1966: The birth of footballer Stefano Eranio


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