Ulisse Aldrovandi – naturalist

Professor became fascinated with plants while under house arrest

Ulisse Aldrovandi: a portrait housed at the Accademia
Carrara in Bergamo, attributed to Agostino Carracci

Ulisse Aldrovandi, who is considered to be the father of natural history studies, was born on this day in 1522 in Bologna.

He became renowned for his systematic and accurate observations of animals, plants and minerals and he established the first botanical garden in Bologna, now known as the Orto Botanico dell’Università di Bologna.

Aldrovandi’s gardens were in the grounds of Palazzo Pubblico in Bologna but in 1803 they were moved to their present location in Via Imerio, where they are run by the University of Bologna but are open to the public every day except Sunday.

The professor was also the first person to extensively document neurofibromatosis disease, which is a type of skin tumour.

Aldrovandi, who is sometimes referred to as Aldrovandus or Aldroandi, was born into a noble family. He studied humanities and law at the universities of Bologna and Padua and became a notary. He then became interested in studying philosophy and logic, which he combined with the study of medicine.

Aldrovandi commissioned artists to
illustrate his catalogues of wildlife

He was charged with heresy in 1549, accused of supporting theories doubting the Holy Trinity, and kept under house arrest in Rome until he was absolved in 1550.

During this time he developed an interest in botany, zoology and geology and, as soon as he was free to travel, he organised expeditions to the mountains, countryside, islands and coastal regions of Italy to collect and catalogue plants.

After obtaining a degree in medicine and philosophy in 1553, Aldrovandi started teaching logic and philosophy at the University of Bologna.

He rose to become Professor of Philosophy and then in 1561 became the first Professor of Natural Sciences at the university.

Aldrovandi assembled a collection of curiosities, about 7000 nature specimens, for which he wrote detailed descriptions. He collected plants for an herbarium and preserved more than 4,000 sheets of dried specimens in 16 volumes. He also commissioned artists to make illustrations of his specimens.

After a dispute about the composition of a popular medicine with pharmacists and doctors, Aldrovandi was suspended from all public positions for five years.

Aldrovandi painstakingly dried and
preserved the leaves of plant species

In 1577 he sought the aid of Pope Gregory XIII, who was a cousin of his mother. The Pope wrote to the authorities in Bologna asking for Aldrovandi to be reinstated and also gave him financial aid to help him publish his books.

Aldrovandi left his vast collection of works on botany and zoology to the Senate of Bologna and after his death at the age of 82 in 1605 they were conserved in Palazzo Pubblico and then in Palazzo Poggi.

They were distributed among other libraries in the 19th century but in 1907 some of the collection was brought back to Palazzo Poggi. In 2005 an exhibition to mark the 400th anniversary of Aldrovandi’s death was held there.

A ridge of the moon is named Dorsa Aldrovandi and the plant genus Aldrovanda is also named after him.

The Ulisse Aldrovandi Museum at the Palazzo Poggi

Travel tip:

Palazzo Poggi in Via Zamboni in Bologna is now the headquarters of the University of Bologna and contains the Ulisse Aldrovandi Museum. The palace was built between 1549 and 1560 for the Poggi family and became the Home of the Institute of Sciences in 1714. During the Napoleonic period the various collections became scattered between different museums but at the end of the last century the University set up a project to bring the dispersed collections back to their historic home.

The Aldrovandi Botanical Gardens in Bologna

Travel tip:

One of the main sights in the small town of San Giovanni in Persiceto near Bologna is the Civico Orto Botanico Ulisse Aldrovandi, a municipal botanical garden established in 1985 and named in honour of the naturalist.

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Elsa Schiaparelli - fashion designer

Clothes inspired by Surrealist art 

Elsa Schiaparelli left Rome in search of
adventure in around 1912

The designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who is regarded along with her rival Coco Chanel as one of the key figures in the fashion world between the two World Wars, was born on this day in 1890 in Rome.

Heavily influenced by the Surrealist cultural movement – the artists Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau were among her collaborators – she became a favourite of some of the world’s most recognisable women, including the American actresses Greta Garbo and Mae West, the German singer and actress Marlene Dietrich, and the socialite and heiress Daisy Fellowes.

Her style shaped the look of fashion in the 1920s and 1930s, often featuring elements of the trompe l’oeil artistic technique to create optical illusions, such as the dress she made with Dali’s collaboration that seemed to be full of rips and tears, or the evening coat she designed with Cocteau that featured two female profiles facing one another which, viewed another way, created the impression of a vase for the fabric roses adorning the shoulders and neck.

Other designs, such as the Lobster Dress and the Skeleton Dress, both influenced by Dali, satisfied her taste for the outrageous.

Schiaparelli was also an innovator.  She was among the pioneers of the wrap dress, she invented the divided skirt – a forerunner of shorts – that the tennis player Lili de Alvarez wore at Wimbledon in 1931, was the first to create designs that included zips in the colour of the fabric and the first to make brooch-like buttons and fasteners.

Schiaparelli's 1938 coat-dress, designed with Jean
Cocteau, is typical of her Surrealist style

She was also the first to come up with the idea of a catwalk show, featuring parading models in artistically designed stage sets with accompanying music.

The colour Shocking pink was her own creation, a shade of magenta inspired by a Cartier diamond owned by Daisy Fellowes.  Originally called Schiaparelli pink, it was first used by her on the packaging for her first fragrance, which she called Shocking, and thereafter became known as Shocking pink.

In fact, there was very little about Schiaparelli’s life that followed conventional patterns.

Born into wealth in Rome, her family home was an apartment in the baroque 18^th century Palazzo Corsini, a sumptuously grand palace in the Trastevere quarter of the city that was once home to royalty and now houses one of Rome’s most important art galleries.

Her mother, Maria-Luisa, was a Neapolitan aristocrat, her father, Celestino Schiaparelli, a prominent scholar and academic who for a while was Dean of the Sapienza University of Rome. His brother, the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, was notable for identifying what for many years were believed to be canals on Mars.

Elsa herself studied at the University but was soon courting controversy, publishing a book of sensual poetry deemed so shocking her parents sent her off to a convent in Switzerland, where she promptly forced them to bring her back to Rome by going on hunger strike.

Schiaparelli's trademark colour, Shocking Pink

She was soon bored with being confined to home, however, finding her lifestyle, while comfortable, to be unfulfilling, and embarked on a series of adventures that took her to London, Paris and New York, where she travelled in the company of a highly unsuitable husband, who called himself Count Wilhelm Frederick Wendt de Kerlor.

They had met in London after she attended a lecture he gave on theosophy, the study of the mystical and the occult, in which she had a fascination. He agreed to help her with her English and a relationship developed. In fact, he was essentially a con-man, passing himself off at various times as a doctor, a lecturer, a detective and criminal psychologist.  Yet he had a charisma she found hard to resist, they were married in 1914 and when he was deported from England in 1915 she followed him to Paris, Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo and eventually New York.

De Kerlor continued his dubious business practices in New York, attracting the attention of the authorities, and the couple both at times feared deportation, Elsa having been suspected of spreading support for Bolshevism among the Italian community. They had a child, Maria-Luisa, known as Gogo, in 1920, after which De Kerlor disappeared, abandoning his new family.

She returned with her daughter to France but went back to New York, having an affair with an opera singer, Mario Laurenti,  before his sudden death in 1922 prompted her to quit America and settle in Paris.

Schiaparelli models the knitted top with the
trompe l'oeil collar that launched her career

Schiaparelli’s career in fashion grew from the need to earn an independent income.  Although she had worked in a fashion boutique in New York, it was only after a friend introduced her to a couturier, Paul Poiret, that the idea of a career in the industry began to have some appeal.

A proposal that she could set up a business selling French haute-couture in New York came to nothing but her time in Poiret’s company allowed her to observe his methods, and she began to design clothes of her own. In 1927, she launched a collection of knitwear featuring the trompe l’oeil touches that would become her hallmark.

The collection was featured in Vogue magazine, after which her order book expanded rapidly. She steadily acquired more clients and added to her range, taking on more staff and opening her first shop, the House of Schiaparelli.

Her reputation grew and grew.  By 1931, an established star and celebrity, she was operating from prestigious premises in Place Vendôme.

Everything changed with the Second World War, however.  Soon after Paris fell to the Germans in 1940, Schiaparelli fled to New York, where she remained until the end of the conflict. After she returned to Paris, with austerity biting hard and other designers catching the eye, the business foundered and she took the decision to close in 1954.

Schiaparelli died in Paris in 1973 and for a while her work was not nearly as well remembered as that of her rival, Chanel. But there has been a revival of interest recently. In 2012, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art featured her work, along with that of Italian designer Miuccia Prada, in a major exhibition.

The Palazzo Corsini was Schiaparelli's home as a young girl

Travel tip:

The Palazzo Corsini, which overlooks the Tiber on Via della Lungara, just across the road from Villa Farnesina, was erected for the Corsini family – the Florentine aristocrats who were represented in the capital by Pope Clement XII (formerly Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini) – on the site of a 15^th-century villa, to a design by the architect Ferdinando Fuga. The villa had previously been the home of Christina, Queen of Sweden, who moved to Rome after abdicating.  The first floor of the palace now houses the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica. Most of the works were donated by the Corsini family and acquired by the state in 1883. It encompasses mainly Italian paintings from the early Renaissance to the late 18^th century, although there is also a Van Dyck and a Rubens. For more information visit www.barberinicorsini.org

The Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere

Travel tip:

Trastevere is a charming medieval quarter which is popular with visitors to Rome for its down-to-earth atmosphere and quaint cobbled streets. The central Piazza di Santa Maria has a homely neighbourhood feel, although the Basilica di Santa Maria, which dominates the square, contains some beautifully elaborate golden mosaics by Pietro Cavallini.  Behind the Palazzo Corsini is the University of Rome’s botanical gardens, with more than 7,000 plant species, while the nearby Gianicolo hill, seldom scaled by many tourists on account of a 20-minute climb, offers some of the best views across the city.

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Cesare Pavese - writer and translator

Author introduced great American writers to Fascist Italy

Cesare Pavese translated the works
of many American novelists

Cesare Pavese, the writer and literary critic who, through his work as a translator, introduced Italy to the Irish novelist James Joyce and a host of great American authors of the 20^th century, was born on this day in 1908 in Santo Stefano Belbo, a town in Piedmont about 60km from Turin.

Pavese would become an acclaimed novelist after the Second World War but was frustrated for many years by the strict censorship policies of Italy’s Fascist government.

It is thought he devoted himself to translating progressive English-language writers into Italian as the best way by which he could promote the principles of freedom in which he believed.

Pavese’s translations would have given most Italians they first opportunity to read writers such as Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos and Daniel Defoe, as well as Joyce, who would ultimately spend many years living in Italy.

The son of Eugenio Pavese, an officer of the law courts in Turin, Cesare had a fractured childhood. His father died when he was only six and his mother, Consolina, is said to have shown him little affection, as a result of which he grew up learning how to fend for himself.

He was born in Santo Stefano Belbo, situated in a picturesque vine-growing area east of Alba in southern Piedmont, because his parents were staying at their holiday home there when his mother went into Labour.  As soon as he was old enough, he moved to Turin and attended the lyceum – the Licio Classico Massimo d’Azeglio – where he was taken under the wing of the Italian anti-Fascist intellectual Augusto Monti.

Pavese hid in the hills outside Turin during the Second
World War occupation of the city by German soldiers

Monti was later imprisoned by the regime for his vociferous opposition, a fate that would befall Pavese not long after he had left the University of Turin, where he was mentored by Leone Ginzburg, husband of the author Natalia Ginzburg.

He had begun an affair with Tina Pizzardo, a young Communist he met at the sparsely-attended anti-Fascist meetings he used to frequent, and agreed for her to use his address as somewhere to which she could have correspondence delivered because her own movements were under surveillance.

However, when the authorities intercepted letters from Altiero Spinelli, a jailed anti-Fascist dissident, and found they were addressed to Pavese’s apartment, he was arrested and sent to a prison at Brancaleone in Calabria, almost 1,400km (870 miles) from Turin.

Pavese later wrote a book about his ordeal, although for many years his work remained unpublished by his own choice, rather than it be censored.  When a volume of his poetry was published during his incarceration, a number of poems were deleted by the Fascist authorities.

On his return to Turin after a little more than a year in jail, he found that Pizzardo had begun another relationship and countered his sadness by throwing himself into his work, again mainly in translating.  He became a close associate of Giulio Einaudi – father of the pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi and son of the politician Luigi Einaudi – with whom he helped establish the Einaudi publishing house. Natalia Ginzburg also worked there.

The young communist Tina Pizzardo,
with whom Pavese had an affair

Pavese was conscripted to fight in Mussolini’s Fascist army but avoided front-line action because he suffered from asthma. Instead, he was confined to a military hospital for six months.

In his absence, German troops occupied Turin and on returning to civilian life when he was discharged on health grounds Pavese went into hiding in the hills around Serralunga di Crea, near Casale Monferrato, where he remained between 1943 and 1945.

Most of Pavese’s work, mainly short stories and novellas, was published by Einaudi, appearing between the end of the Second World War and his death. In that time he was a member of the Italian Communist Party and worked on the party’s newspaper L’Unità.

The main character in many of Pavese’s stories was often a loner, whose relationships with both men and women tended to be short-lived. The stories are often bleak yet he was admired for the tautness of his prose, which was favourably compared to that of Ernest Hemingway.

They tended to draw comparison with his own life. As well as his affair with Pizzardo, whom he felt deserted him, he had a brief relationship after the war with Constance Dowling, an American actress, but that too failed and is seen to have been a contributory factor in his death at the age of only 41.

It came at a moment when he appeared to be at the height of his career, hailed as one of Italy’s greatest living writers.

Works such as La casa in collina (The House on the Hill) and Il carcere (The Prison), which were published as a two-novella volume entitled Prima che il gallo canti (Before the Cock Crows) and based in his experiences in prison, were regarded as confirming his genius, as were Il Compagno (The Comrade), Dialoghi con Leucò (Dialogues with Leucò) - philosophical dialogues between classical Greek characters – and La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires), which he dedicated to Dowling.  

In 1950, he won the prestigious Strega Prize but two months after receiving the honour he was found dead in an hotel room in Turin, having swallowed an overdose of barbiturates.  Entries in his diary indicated that he had been profoundly depressed following his break-up with Dowling, which he took as a sign that he would never find happiness in marriage, or with other people.

The village of Santo Stefano Belbo

Travel tip:

Pavese’s life is commemorated in several ways in Santo Stefano Belbo, where there is a museum housed in the house his parents owned in what is now Via Cesare Pavese, while the Cesare Pavese Foundation, which was established in 1973 and has its headquarters in Piazza Confraternita off Via Cavour, promotes not only the work of Pavese but encourages and supports other writers.

A plaque marks where Cesare Pavese lived in Turin

Travel tip:

In Turin, Pavese lived in the same building for 20 years on the Via Alfonso Lamarmora, one of the elegant residential streets in the grid of criss-crossing thoroughfares that characterises the centre of the city.  Via Lamarmora links Corso Stati Uniti with Via Sebastiano Caboto, bisecting the busy Corso Luigi Einaudi. There is a wall plaque marking the building that contained his apartment.

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Michelangelo’s David

Masterpiece emerged from an abandoned block of marble

A replica of Michelangelo's David now stands
 in front of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence

A huge statue of the Biblical hero David, sculpted by Michelangelo, was unveiled in Piazza della Signoria in Florence on this day in 1504.

The 5.17m (17ft) high statue was placed outside the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of civic government in Florence. The sculpture symbolised the defence of civil liberties in the republic of Florence, which at the time was an independent city state threatened on all sides by rival states. It was thought that the eyes of David were looking towards Rome and seemed to have a warning glare.

David is regarded as one of Michelangelo’s masterpieces. He was sculpted from a block of Carrara marble originally designated to be one of a series of prophets for Florence Cathedral. The marble was worked on by two artists before being abandoned and left exposed to the elements in the yard of the Cathedral workshop.

The original statue in its home in
Galleria dell'Accademia

After 25 years of neglect, the Cathedral authorities decided to find an artist to produce a sculpture from their expensive block of marble.

At the age of 26, it was Michelangelo who convinced the overseers of works for the Cathedral that he deserved the commission.

He began work early in the morning of September 13, 1501. The resulting statue of a nude David produced nearly three years later is thought to represent the hero after he had made the decision to fight Goliath but before the battle has actually taken place. It is one of the most recognised works of sculpture from the Renaissance period and is a symbol of strength and youthful beauty.

On completion, the statue was moved the half mile from Michelangelo’s workshop to Piazza della Signoria, a journey that took four days. It was to remain there for more than 300 years.

But in 1873 David was removed from the piazza, allegedly to protect the statue from damage, and put on display in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, where it has attracted many thousands of visitors over the years. A replica of the original statue now stands outside the Palazzo Vecchia.

The L-shaped Piazza della Signoria in Florence

Travel tip:

Piazza della Signoria is an L-shaped square in the centre of Florence, important as the location of the 14th century Palazzo Vecchio, the focal point for government in the city. Citizens gathered here for public meetings and the religious leader Girolamo Savonarola was burned at the stake in the square in 1498. The piazza is a unique outdoor sculpture gallery filled with statues, some of them copies, commemorating major events in the city’s history.

Travel tip:

The Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence has become famous as the home of Michelangelo’s statue of David. It is the second most visited museum in Italy, after the Uffizi, the main art gallery in Florence. The Galleria dell’Accademia was established in 1784 in Via Ricasoli in Florence. For more information about the gallery visit galleriaaccademiafirenze.beniculturali.it

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