St Francis Basilica struck by earthquake

Historic art works damaged in double tremor

The Basilica of St Francis at Assisi

The historic Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi suffered serious damage on this day in 1997 when two earthquakes struck in the central Apennines.

The quakes claimed 11 lives in the Assisi area and forced the evacuation of 70 per cent of buildings in the Umbrian town, at least temporarily, because of safety fears.

Many homes were condemned as unsafe for occupation and residents had to be housed in makeshift accommodation.

The event also caused considerable damage to frescoes painted in the 13^th century by Giotto and to other important works by Cimabue, Pietro Lorenzetti and Simone Martini.

The dramatic moment the vaulted ceiling came down

The first quake, measuring 5.5 on the Richter Scale, struck shortly after 2.30am and was felt as far away as Rome, some 170km (44 miles) to the south.  A series of smaller tremors kept residents on edge through the night.

Yet the biggest quake, measured at 5.7 initially but later revised upwards to 6.1, was still to come. With tragic consequences, it occurred at 11.43am, just as a party of Franciscan monks, journalists, town officials and experts from the Ministry of Culture had decided to venture inside the basilica to inspect the damage.

It is thought that between 20 and 30 people were inside the Upper Church when the shaking began, caused the vaulted ceiling to collapse, bringing down sections of Giotto’s fresco cycle depicting the Life of Saint Francis.

Most of them were able to escape by running away as the ceiling began to fall but 10 were trapped under the rubble for many hours. Six were pulled out alive but rescuers found that two of the friars and two of the government experts had been killed.

As well as the Giotto cycle, there was also damage to a cycle of frescoes by Cimabue that many experts regarded to be fundamental to the history of Western art.  These included portraits of the so-called Doctors of the Latin Church – St Ambrose, St Jerome, St Augustine and St Gregory the Great – and of the writers of the Gospels of the New Testament – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Detail from the Giotto cycle The Life of St Francis

The church, a significant tourist attraction in Italy, was immediately closed to visitors, yet it was reopened in just two years, which was considered exceptional by Italian standards. Giotto’s images of St Rufina and St Vittorino were reconstructed from more than 3,000 tiny fragments.

The government attracted criticism, however, for devoting much more money and energy to rebuilding the basilica and restoring art works than it had to rehousing people whose homes were destroyed by the quake.

On the day of the re-opening, a celebration that attracted live television coverage, 10,000 people in the area were still living in adapted metal containers, which had been provided as temporary accommodation.

It was revealed that whereas around €37 million had been spent on the restoration of the basilica, which dates back to 1228, and the Sacred Convent attached to it, only €4.75 million had been directed at rebuilding ruined homes and other buildings.

In the longer term, the broader restoration project was hailed as providing evidence to end a long-running argument over the authenticity of the works attributed to Giotto, which some experts believed were painted in the 14^th century, after his death.

A portrait thought to be
of Giotto di Bondone

In 2012, restorers uncovered previously unknown frescoes in a chapel within the basilica that had been closed and unused for many years. They discovered the initials “G.B” in one corner of the work, which they took to be the initials of Giotto di Bondone.

Giotto is considered to be the forefather of Italian Renaissance art, famous for the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and the Ognisanti Madonna, which hangs in the Uffizi gallery in Florence.

The second of the two Assisi quakes was the most powerful to hit Italy since the devastating seismic event of 1980, just outside Naples, which killed at least 2,500 people.

There have been two more powerful quakes since – at L’Aquila in Abruzzo in 2009 and the one that struck the central Apennines in 2016, about 45km (28 miles) north of L’Aquila, both of which claimed around 300 lives.

The Basilica of St Francis is built into the side of a hill

Travel tip:

The Basilica of St Francis, which was begun in 1228 and developed over a period of about 300 years, is unusual in that it is built into the side of a hill and comprises two churches known as the Upper Church and the Lower Church, and a crypt where the remains of the saint are interred. The frescoes are by numerous late medieval painters from the Roman and Tuscan schools, and include works by possibly Pietro Cavallini as well as Cimabue, Giotto, Martini and Lorenzetti.  The range and quality of the works gives the basilica a unique importance in demonstrating the development of Italian art in early Renaissance.

The Temple of Minerva on
Piazza del Comune

Travel tip:

There is more to Assisi than the Basilica of St Francis.  The town has several other notable churches, including the Cathedral of San Rufino and the Basilicas of Santa Chiara and Santa Maria degli Angeli, plus the remains of a Roman amphitheatre.  At the centre of the town is a charming square, the Piazza del Comune, where can be found the ancient Temple of Minerva, with its six Corinthian columns, built in the first century BC.

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Agostino Bassi – biologist

Scientist who rescued the silk industry in Italy

Agostino Bassi had lessons from
Lazzaro Spallanzani

Bacteriologist Agostino Bassi, who was the first to expound the parasitic theory of infection, was born on this day in 1773 at Mairago near Lodi in Lombardy.

He developed his theory by studying silkworms, which helped him discover that many diseases are caused by micro organisms.  This was 10 years in advance of the work of Louis Pasteur.

In 1807 Bassi began an investigation into the silkworm disease mal de segno, also known as muscardine, which was causing serious economic losses in Italy and France.

After 25 years of research and carrying out various experiments, Bassi was able to demonstrate that the disease was contagious and was caused by a microscopic parasitic fungus.

He concluded that the organism, at the time named botrytis paradoxa, but now known as beauvaria bassiana in his honour, was transmitted among the worms by contact and by infected food.

These findings enabled Bassi to rescue the economically important silk industry in Italy by recommending using disinfectants, separating the rows of feeding caterpillars and keeping farms clean.

A plaque outside the house in Paolo Gorini in Lodi, where
Bassi lived and studied, commemorates his life

Bassi announced his discoveries in his work Del mal del segno, calcinaccio o moscarduino, published in 1835.

He also produced scientific works on laboratory cultures of potatoes, on cheese and wine making, as well as the human diseases of leprosy and cholera, after which he made the important generalisation that many diseases of plants, animals and man are caused by animal or vegetable parasites.

Bassi preceded both Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in formulating a germ theory of disease. He prescribed methods for the prevention and elimination of muscardine, which earned him a lot of prestige.

His father, a wealthy farmer, had wanted Bassi him to look after the family property when he grew up, rather than become a biologist. But he was able to take science lessons from the biologist, Lazzaro Spallanzani, who was one of his relatives.

Louis Pasteur is reputed to have had the portraits of both Spallanzani and Bassi on the walls of his office.

After Bassi’s death in 1856 in Lodi, when the biologist was 82, he was buried in the Romanesque church of San Francesco in his home town.

In 1953 the Italian post office issued a stamp on the 180th anniversary of his birth in 1773, featuring a portrait of Bassi bordered by pictures of silkmoths.

Via Agostino Bassi is the main street in Mairago,
where the biologist was born

Travel tip:

The comune of Mairago, where Bassi was born, is in the province of Lodi about 40km (25 miles) south east of Milan and about 7km (4 miles) southeast of Lodi. Mairago is surrounded by fields of corn and barley and there is widespread beekeeping in the area.

Agostini Bassi's tomb in the church of San Francesco

Travel tip:

Agostino Bassi’s tomb is in the 13th century church of San Francesco in Piazza Ospedale in Lodi, set against a wall in the right transept. The church is distinctive because of its two ‘open sky’ double mullioned windows in the façade, an early example of a design that was often repeated in northern Italy during the 14th and 15th centuries.

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Maria Pia of Bourbon-Parma - exiled princess

Vote for republic forced King's daughter to leave

Princess Maria Pia of Bourbon-Parma,
pictured in 1963

Princess Maria Pia of Bourbon-Parma was born into the Italian royal family on this day in 1934, the grand-daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III.

Her father, Umberto of Savoy, would himself become King on her grandfather’s abdication but reigned for just 34 days in 1946 before Italy voted to become a republic and the royals were effectively thrown out of the country.

Italians could not forgive Victor Emmanuel III for not doing enough to limit the power of the Fascists and for approving Benito Mussolini’s anti-semitic race laws. The constitution of the new republic decreed that no male member of the House of Savoy could set foot in Italy ever again.

It meant that Princess Maria Pia, the eldest of Umberto’s four children, had to leave Italy immediately along with her brother and two sisters and all the other members of the family, bringing to an abrupt end the life she had known until that moment.

Born in Naples, where the Villa Rosebery, once the property of the British prime minister, the Earl of Rosebery, had been renamed Villa Maria Pia by her doting father, the 11-year-old princess was removed to Cascais in Portugal.

When her parents separated almost immediately after leaving Italy – as strict Catholics, Umberto and Marie-José never divorced – she divided her time between Portugal and her mother’s home in Switzerland.

Princess Maria Pia of Savoy, as she was then, pictured
with her first husband,  Alexander of Yugoslavia

This changed in 1954 after she was invited to a cruise hosted by Queen Frederica of Greece on the yacht Agamemnon, where she met Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia.  They were married the following year and settled in Paris.

They had four children – two sets of twins, born in 1958 and 1963 – and lived a comfortable life.  Maria Pia was much photographed and came to be regarded as a symbol of Italian style.  Unlike the males in the Savoy line, she was allowed to return to Italy, where she was a regular customer of the Sorelle Fontana fashion house in Rome and would buy shoes from Alberto Dal Cò, the uncle of the three Fontana sisters.

She also wore dresses designed by her fellow Neapolitan, Emilio Schuberth, and would go to Capri to the boutique of Emilio Pucci.

For a while she was a model for Vogue magazine and worked as a journalist on another magazine, Novella 2000, revealing a talent for writing she claimed she inherited from her mother.

Among the many people she interviewed was the artist Salvador Dalì, with whom she became close friends.

Princess Maria Pia is still actively involved with charities

Like that of her parents, however, her marriage to Prince Alexander ultimately broke down.  They divorced in 1967.

By that time she had begun an affair with Prince Michel of Bourbon-Parma and was already living with him when she and Alexander divorced. They have remained together since, although they were not married until 2003.

Michel, whose ancestry goes back to the establishment of the House of Bourbon-Parma in Italy in 1731, had been separated from his first wife, Yolande of Broglie-Revel, since 1966 but they did not divorce until 1999.

He and Maria Pia were married in a civil ceremony in Manalapan, Florida, close to the mansion they owned in Palm Beach.

In recent years they have divided their time between homes in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just outside Paris, and Palm Beach, although the 91-year-old Michel has recently become too frail to leave France.

Unlike her brother, Vittorio Emanuele, who did the reputation of the family no good in various scandals, Maria Pia had led a life free from controversy and is recognised, in Florida in particular, for her work with charities and her keen interest in promoting the preservation of the historic, architectural and cultural heritage of Palm Beach.

The Villa Rosebery overlooks the sea at Marechiaro

Travel tip:

The Villa Rosebery, which sits in 16.3 acres (6.6 hectares) of land in Marechiaro on the northern side of the Bay of Naples, came into the possession of the 5^th Earl of Rosebery, the former Liberal prime minister of Great Britain, in 1897.  In 1909, he presented the building to the British government for the use of the British Ambassador to Italy. In 1932 the British government in turn presented the building to the Italian State and the villa was used as a summer royal residence until the royal family were exiled in 1946.  It was then used by the Accademia Aeronautica until 1949, after which it was unoccupied until it became an official residence of the President of the Italian Republic in 1957.

Piazza di Spagna, viewed from the Spanish Steps

Travel tip:

The House of Fontana still exists today, with its headquarters close to Piazza di Spagna, one of the most famous squares in Rome, situated at the foot of the much-photographed Spanish Steps. The square and steps take their name from the Embassy of Spain, situated close by. The steps were built to provide access from the embassy to the church of Trinità dei Monti.

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Paolo Rossi - World Cup hero

Goalscorer who bounced back from two-year ban

(This article was written in 2017; sadly, Paolo Rossi passed away in 2020 at the age of 64)

Paolo Rossi celebrates his goal in the 1982
World Cup final in Spain

The footballer Paolo Rossi, whose goals steered Italy to World Cup glory in 1982, was born on this day in 1956 in Prato in Tuscany.

At the peak of his career in club football, in which his best years were with Juventus and Vicenza, Rossi scored almost 100 Serie A and Serie B goals in seven seasons.

Yet for many his exploits with the Italian national team define his career. In 48 appearances he scored 20 goals, including six in the 1982 finals in Spain, when he won the Golden Boot as the tournament’s top scorer and the Golden Ball as the best player.

In 1982 he also won the Ballon D’Or, the prestigious award given to the player of the season across all the European leagues, following in the footsteps of Omar Sivori and Gianni Rivera to become the third Italian player to win the vote, in which company he has since been joined by Roberto Baggio and Fabio Cannavaro.

His success story is all the more remarkable for the fact that he scaled so many personal peaks after being banned from football for two years in a match-fixing scandal, although he denied the accusations levelled at him.

The 1982 World Cup saved his career and his reputation, although the fairytale would never have happened but for the faith shown in him by the national coach, Enzo Bearzot.

Italy's coach, Enzo Bearzot, stood by Rossi

Bearzot’s selection of Rossi for the squad he took to Spain came barely a month after his suspension was lifted and sparked an outcry in Italy. Apart from those who thought he was unworthy of wearing the Azzurri shirt, others argued he would be too lacking in fitness to make an effective contribution.

Yet Bearzot not only believed in Rossi’s innocence, he also recalled the three goals the striker had scored in the 1978 World Cup finals in Argentina and was convinced he could make an impact again.

His faith was borne out totally.  Rossi looked off the pace at the start of the tournament but found his feet memorably in the second phase, scoring all three of Italy’s goals in a 3-2 win against a superior Brazil team that still ranks as one of the greatest matches in World Cup history.

He went on to score both Italy’s goals as they defeated Poland in the semi-finals and opened the scoring in Italy’s 3-1 victory over West Germany in the final.

As a boy, Rossi played his first football with an amateur team in the Santa Lucia area of Prato. At the age of 12, he was spotted by a scout from Juventus, who had also been interested in his brother, Rossano, but had sent him home after a year.

His mother, who had always been worried about Rossano having to fend for himself in Turin, was reluctant to suffer a similarly anxious time with Paolo, especially since Rossano’s dreams ultimately came to nothing.

Paolo Rossi in action for Juventus

But Juventus were persuasive, offering substantial inducements for him to sign, and ultimately in 1972 a deal was agreed.

It took a long time for his career to take off, however. He suffered a series of serious knee injuries and apart from a handful of Coppa Italia games he did not make any real progress towards a regular place in the first team at Juventus.

A spell on loan with Como did not change his fortunes and he might have been told to seek an alternative career had Lanerossi Vicenza, the Serie B club, not stepped in with another loan deal.

Rossi had, until then, been seen as a winger, slight in build but with the speed to beat defenders. Vicenza’s coach, Giovan Battista Fabbri, had other ideas, reckoning that Rossi’s pace could be deployed in the middle, despite his lack of physical stature. 

It proved a masterstroke.  Rossi scored 21 goals to help Vicenza win promotion to Serie A and followed it with 24 in the top flight as Vicenza finished second, a remarkable performance.  Rossi became the first player to be top scorer in Serie B and Serie A in consecutive seasons.

In the event, Vicenza’s flame went out as quickly as it had ignited. They paid 2.612 million lire to make Rossi their own player, making him the world’s most expensive footballer, which he rewarded with another 15 goals, despite missing many games through injury. Yet Vicenza were relegated.

Rossi (right) with Giovan Battista Fabbri, the
coach of Vicenza, who turned him into a striker

Had they stayed up, Rossi might never have been embroiled in the match-fixing allegations.  Instead, in order to continue playing in Serie A and continue his international career, he went on loan to Perugia, who were heavily implicated in what became known as the Totonero scandal after a match against Avellino, in which Rossi scored twice, was found to have been rigged to end in a draw.

Rossi admitted he had been approached by a third party interested in fixing the result but said he had agreed to nothing.  Nonetheless, he was found guilty and banned for three years, reduced on appeal to two.

Disillusioned, he threatened to leave Italy for a new life elsewhere but Juventus bought him back from Vicenza and the bianconeri finally saw the real Rossi.  He helped them win the Serie A title – the ‘Scudetto’ - the UEFA Cup and the European Cup during a period when his very presence in a team seemed to guarantee their winning a trophy.

Since retiring, Rossi has run a real estate company, opened an agritourism complex in Bucine, near Arezzo, taken part in Ballando con le Stelle – the Italian version of Strictly Come Dancing – and worked for several newspapers and television stations as a columnist and pundit.

He has also run for election to the European Parliament and worked on behalf of a number of charities.  Married to journalist Federica Cappelletti, he has three children.

The Castello dell'Imperatore in Prato

Travel tip:

Paolo Rossi’s home city of Prato is the second largest in Tuscany after Florence and has a considerable number of historic churches and palaces and two castles, yet is rarely part of anyone’s tourist itinerary.  Attractions include beautiful frescoes by Filippo Lippi inside the Duomo and the external pulpit by Michelozzo and Donatello, the beautiful Palazzo Pretorio and Piazza del Comune where it sits.  The remains of Castello dell’Imperatore are also worth exploring.  Prato’s traditional textile industry, which today employs many of the city’s large Chinese population, once saw it described as ‘the Manchester of Italy.’

Palladio's Villa Capra, known as La Rotonda

Travel tip:

Known as both the city of Palladio and, on account of its historical trade in precious metals, the ‘city of gold’, Vicenza is one of the gems of the Veneto, with a centre rich in beautiful architecture, much of which has been built or influenced by the 16^th century architect Andrea Palladio, who also left his mark on the area by building many impressive villas in the countryside around Vicenza, the most famous of which, the symmetrically four-sided Villa Almerico Capra, commonly known as La Rotonda. There are some 23 buildings in the city itself that were designed by Palladio, including perhaps the city’s most popular attraction, the Teatro Olimpico, which was his last work.

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