Feast day of Ercolano – patron saint of Perugia

Bishop was martyred after trying to save city

Herculanus, Bishop of Perugia, in a painting by the
artist Pietro Vannucci, known as Perugino

Today sees the Umbrian city of Perugia celebrate one of the two annual feast days of one of its patron saint, Ercolano, who according to legend was martyred on this day in 549 at the hands of the Ostrogoths, who ruled much of Italy at that time and had placed the city under siege.

Herculanus, as he is also known, was the Bishop of Perugia and as such was charged with trying to bring comfort to his flock in the face of inevitable capture by the Ostrogoths, the tribe, thought to have originated in Scandinavia, which had swept into Italy at the beginning of the sixth century.

They had a large, well-equipped army – more powerful than the army Perugia possessed, although it had enough soldiers to deter an advance – and the Ostrogoth leader, Totila, was prepared to wait outside the walls of the city for as long as it would take to starve the population into surrender.

Perugia’s authorities did all they could to prolong the siege, rationing supplies and ensuring none were wasted, but days passed into months and years and there was no evidence that the amply fed army at the gates of the city was planning to move on.

Perugia's Etruscan walls were a formidable barrier

Ercolano knew more than the ordinary people about how much longer the stalemate could be maintained and inevitably the point was reached at which there was nothing left for anyone to eat.

He knew that his own soldiers, while capable of maintaining guard on top of the walls, would be no match for Totila’s men in close combat, and he was also aware that even if all the money held in the city was gathered together, it probably would not be enough to persuade Totila to look for somewhere else to capture.

In a desperate gamble, Ercolano fell back on a traditional ruse in sieges – the art of deception.

Hoping he could fool Totila into thinking they were still well off for supplies, he wandered outside the walls, under the cover of archers, to feed the sheep that had until that point remained untouched by the besieging forces, who were reluctant to risk coming under arrow fire.

He hoped that Totila might assume that if the Perugians could still feed their animals they must have plenty left for their people.

Ercolano and Lorenzo, the twin patron
saints of Perugia, venerate the Madonna

Ercolano retreated inside the walls and waited.  But there was no immediate movement from the Ostrogoths, nor was there any in the days ahead.  By now at the point of starvation, the city had no alternative but to surrender.

It is said that on learning who was behind the attempted deception, Totila ordered Ercolano’s execution, but only after putting him through the agony of having a length of skin torn from his body, from head to toe.

Some accounts have it that he was spared that torture by being beheaded directly and his body thrown over the wall.  Either way, according to the legend, his body was recovered by some brave citizens and hastily buried where he lay.

Some 40 days later, when Totila allowed them to recover the body in order to have a proper interment, they are said to have found it was miraculously intact, the head reunited with the body, and with no evidence of any injury.

The legend also has it that a another miracle took place, either when his body was found or at a later date, in that a boy, a victim of disease, who was buried by his mother at the side of the Bishop, came back to life.

The church of Sant'Ercolano in Perugia

Travel tip:

The remains of Sant’Ercolano originally resided in Perugia’s Duomo, which was originally dedicated as the Cattedrale di San Lorenzo and Sant’Ercolano, but were transferred to a new church, the Chiesa di Sant’Ercolano, which was built between 1297 and 1326 on the spot on which he was believed to have been martyred.  The altar is a Roman sarcophagus taken from the original Duomo, which contains his remains.

Travel tip:

Perugia is a city of around 170,000 inhabitants built on a hill in Umbria, of which it is the regional capital.  Established in the Etruscan period, it remained an important city, always a target for invading armies because of its strategic value.  Nowadays, it is home to some 34,000 students at the University of Perugia and is a notable centre for culture and the arts, hosting the world-renowned Umbria Jazz Festival each July. It also hosts a chocolate festival – Perugia being the home of the Perugina chocolate company, famous for Baci.  The artist Pietro Vannucci, commonly known as Perugino, lived in nearby Città della Pieve and was the teacher of Raphael.

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Cesare Lombroso – criminologist

Professor who first encouraged study of criminal mind

Cesare Lombroso changed the way the
world thought about criminals

Cesare Lombroso, a university professor often referred to as ‘the father of criminology’ was born on this day in 1835 in Verona.

Although many of his views are no longer held to be correct, he was the first to establish the validity of scientific study of the criminal mind, paving the way for a generation of psychiatrists and psychologists to create a greater understanding of criminal behaviour.

In broad terms, Lombroso's theory was that criminals could be distinguished from law-abiding people by multiple physical characteristics, which he contended were throwbacks to primitive, even subhuman ancestors, which brought with them throwbacks to primitive behaviour that went against the rules and expectations of modern civilized society.

Through years of postmortem examinations and comparative studies of criminals, the mentally disturbed and normal non-criminal individuals, Lombroso formed the belief that ‘born criminals’ could be identified by such features as the angle of their forehead, the size of their ears, a lack of symmetry in the face or even arms of excessive length. He even argued that certain characteristics – he called them “stigmata” – were common to particular types of offenders.

He also believed that criminals had less sensitivity to pain, sharper vision, a lack of normal morals, were more vain, vindictive and cruel, although he did not suggest that there was no prospect of anyone born with “stigmata” leading a blameless life.

Lombroso at work at the University of Pavia

Indeed, he proposed reforms to the Italian penal system that included more humane and constructive treatment of convicts through the use of work programmes intended to make them more productive members of society.

Lombroso’s theories were initially widely influential in Europe and the United States, even though over time the idea that criminal behaviour had hereditary causes was largely rejected in favour of environmental factors, and the idea that someone could be born a criminal was established as implausible.

At the time, however, Lambroso was a respected figure. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Verona, descended from a long line of rabbis, Lombroso studied at the universities of Padua, Vienna, and Paris.

From 1862 until 1876 he was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pavia and of forensic medicine and hygiene (1876), psychiatry (1896) and criminal anthropology (1906) at the University of Turin. He was also the director of a mental asylum in Pesaro. 

The monument to Lombroso in his home town of Verona

He published books entitled L’uomo delinquente (The Criminal Man; 1876) and Le Crime, causes et remèdes (Crime, Its Causes and Remedies; 1899).

In addition to his work in the field of criminology, Lambroso devoted much time to studying his belief that genius was closely related to madness.  He wrote a book in 1889, The Man of Genius, in which he argued that artistic genius was a form of hereditary insanity and in which he claimed that, in his exploration of geniuses descending into madness, he could find only six men who exhibited no tendencies towards madness - Galileo, Da Vinci, Voltaire, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Darwin – but that Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, Mozart and Dante all displayed what he called "degenerate symptoms".

The Roman amphitheatre in Verona

Travel tip:

Verona, Lombroso’s home town – under Austrian rule at the time of his birth – is now the third largest city in the northeast of Italy, with a population across its whole urban area of more than 700,000. Famous now for its wealth of tourist attractions, of which the Roman amphitheatre known the world over as L’Arena di Verona is just one, the city was also the setting for three plays by Shakespeare – one of those geniuses Lambroso believed sat on the cusp of madness.  Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew all had Verona as their backdrop, although it is unknown whether the English playwright ever actually set foot in the city.  There is a monument to Cesare Lombroso in a park also named after him on the banks of the Adige river opposite the Cathedral of Santa Maria Matricolare.

The Courtyard of the Statues inside the University of Pavia

Travel tip:

Situated only 35km (22 miles) from Milan, Pavia has the advantages of close proximity to all the services and opportunities on offer in northern Italy’s principal city yet itself offers a calmer way of life amid its ancient streets and elegant buildings, which remain as a legacy of its stature as the one-time capital of the Lombardy region. It is a city of rich cultural heritage with 19 museums, four public libraries, four cinemas and theatres, two schools of music arts and a music conservatory. Its university, home to 24,000 students, was founded in 1361 and now has 13 faculties.

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Alessandro Malaspina - explorer

Mapped Pacific on four-year epic journey

Alessandro Malaspina spent much of his
life in the employ of the Spanish navy

Alessandro Malaspina, an explorer not so well known as his compatriots, Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Colombus, but whose contribution to mankind’s knowledge of the globe was no less important, was born on this day in 1754 in Mulazzo, a village now in the province of Massa-Carrara, about 120km (75 miles) northwest of Florence.

Like Vespucci and Columbus, Malaspina sailed under the flag of Spain, whose king, Charles III, was an enthusiastic supporter of scientific research and exploration.

He spent much of his life as an officer in the Spanish navy, and it was after completing an 18-month circumnavigation of the world on behalf of the Royal Philippines Company between September 1786 and May 1788 that he proposed to the Spanish government that he make an expedition to the Pacific similar to those undertaken by the British explorer James Cook and the Frenchman Comte de la Pèrouse.

His proposal was accepted in part after word reached Spain that a Russian expedition was being prepared with the objective of claiming territory on the northwest coast of North America that had already been claimed by Spain.

After two years of preparation, the Malaspina Expedition, made up of two frigates - one named Descubierta in honour of Cook's Discovery - that he had built specially for the expedition, set sail from Cadiz on July 30, 1789, bound for South America. They rounded Cape Horn and sailed up the Pacific coast to Mexico.

The route followed by Malaspina's party

At this point, Malaspina received word that King Charles IV, who had inherited the throne following the death of Charles III in 1788, wanted him to detour to Alaska and survey the coastline to find out whether a rumoured northwest passage from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic existed.

Malaspina’s vessels anchored off Alaska for a month, studying local tribespeople and collecting and recording numerous plants. Today, a glacier between Yakutat Bay and Icy Bay is known as the Malaspina Glacier.

Malaspina knew that Cook had surveyed the west coast of Prince William Sound about 15 years earlier had not found a northwest passage. He was not convinced it did exist and, rather than spend more time looking after failing to find evidence of it, the Italian set sail for the Spanish outpost at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, established two years earlier.

His men surveyed and mapped the area around Nootka Sound more accurately than had previously been achieved, and made more botanical studies. He moved south again to explore the mouth of the Columbia River, near where Seattle is now.

Malaspina's two frigates, drawn by Fernando Brambilla, one
of a number of artists who accompanied the expedition

Eventually, he headed back along the coast to Acapulco in Mexico, before crossing the ocean to explore the Philippines, New Zealand and Australia, before returning to Spain, arriving in arriving in Cadiz in September 1793, to be greeted with great acclaim.

Malaspina was elevated to fleet-brigadier in the Spanish navy but his status as a national hero collapsed, however, over the next few years as the political climate in Spain changed following the French Revolution. He became involved with a plot to overthrow the prime minister and was arrested.

He was stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released after eight years when Napoleon Bonaparte, who had taken control of the territory around his home town in Italy, intervened on his behalf. But the years in jail, often in solitary confinement, had destroyed his health.

Malaspina’s documentation from the expedition was taken from him during his incarceration and his proposed seven-volume account of the journey was left unpublished.

He returned to Italy, settling in Pontremoli in the area of northern Tuscany at that time known as the Kingdom of Etruria, where he died in 1810 at the age of 55.  Although some of his journals had by then been published, it was not until 1987 – 177 years after his death - that the first volume of his full account was published by the Spanish Naval Museum.

The last of the seven was published in 1999 and the full extent of Malaspina’s achievement could finally be appreciated, so that he could take his place alongside Columbus and Vespucci as one of history’s great explorers.

Mulazzo has a monument to the poet Dante Alighieri

Travel tip:

Mulazzo is a village in the part of northwestern Tuscany known as Lunigiana, an area of great beauty that was a favourite of the poet Dante Alighieri.  Although he would often retreat to the Monastery of Santa Croce Corvo on the coast near Marina di Carrara, he also enjoyed the peace and solitude of the mountain regions inland and visited Mulazzo, which stages a Dante celebration every year.  Mulazzo also has a study centre dedicated to the career of Alessandro Malaspina.

Pontremoli sits alongside the Magra river

Travel tip:

Pontremoli has the status of city even though its population is fewer than 8,000.  Built on the site of a settlement first noted in 1,000 BC, its position and fertile landscape in the Magra valley made it a strategically important location and consequently it changed hands many times, owned by a succession of powerful families until 1508, when it became part of an area controlled by the French.  Subsequently it was taken over by the Holy Roman Empire, the Spanish, the Republic of Genoa, the Medici Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the French again before becoming part of the unified Italy.  Malaspina had a palace there.

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Sandrone Dazieri – crime writer

Best-selling novelist in Italy now has first title in English

Sandrone Dazieri has written more than a dozen crime
thrillers and has a big following in Italy 

Sandrone Dazieri, an Italian author and screenwriter whose first novel published in English received enthusiastic reviews, was born in Cremona on this day in 1964.

A former chef, Dazieri became a best-selling novelist in his mid-30s with Attenti al Gorilla (Beware of the Gorilla), which introduced a complex character, based on himself and even named Sandrone, who suffers from a personality disorder that makes his behaviour unpredictable yet who solves crimes and tackles injustices.

The book spawned a series featuring the same character that not only gained Dazieri enormous popularity among Italian readers but helped him get work as a screenwriter, especially in the area of TV crime dramas.

He is the main writer on the hugely popular Canale 5 series Squadra Antimafia, to which he contributed for seven seasons.

Now, for the first time, with the help of an American translator, Dazieri has moved into the English language market with Kill the Father, published by Simon & Schuster in London in January 2017.

Already a top-selling title in Italy, the dark crime thriller received such good reviews in the literary sections of English newspapers and magazines that it made the Sunday Times best-sellers list.

The novel features new characters in Colomba Caselli, the chief of the Rome police’s major crimes unit, and Dante Torre, a man who spent 10 years of his childhood imprisoned by a masked kidnapper and is called in to help Caselli solve a crime with all the hallmarks of the one committed by his own captor.

A second title in a planned series featuring the same lead characters, entitled Kill the Angel, is due to be published in English next year.

Although he was always an enthusiastic reader of gialli – the word Italians use for crime novels, based on the tradition of publishing them with yellow covers – and a fan of crime shows on TV, Dazieri’s education after high school pointed him in the direction of a career in catering.  After graduating from hotel management school at San Pellegrino Terme, in Lombardy, he spent the next 10 years working as a chef, at locations all around Italy.

Ultimately, he decided to move to Milan in the hope of finding work in publishing or journalism and eventually succeeded, getting a job as a proof reader and writing pieces for the left-wing newspaper, Il Manifesto, about culture and literature, largely about the crime, thriller and espionage genres. He enrolled to study political science at college.

Dazieri's novel Kill the Father features high-ranking Rome
policeman Colomba Caselli

When he began writing his own novels, Dazieri drew heavily on his own life experiences.  For a while after arriving in Milan, he had so little money he could not afford proper accommodation and often resorted to sleeping in empty train carriages at Milano Centrale railway station, or squatting in unoccupied houses. His main characters share many of his own characteristics, too.

He also became politically active, particular campaigning against the expansion of nuclear power stations.

Since his success as a writer, with several screenplays to his name as well as a dozen or so novels, Dazieri has become a more mainstream figure in the publishing world.

Along with Italian film director Gabriele Salvatores and producer Maurizio Totti, he set up the Colorado Noir publishing house in 2004 and after four years as chief editor of the Gialli Mondadori crime series, he now works for the Mondadori company as a literary consultant.

The facade of Cremona's Romanesque cathedral

Travel tip:

Cremona, a city at the heart of the Po Valley in Lombardy, has an outstanding Romanesque-Gothic cathedral, its façade and the adjoining baptistry regarded as among the finest examples of Romanesque architecture in Italy. Inside there are a number of notable paintings, including fresco decorations on the side walls of the nave by Giovanni Antonio de’ Sacchis, who painted under the name of Il Pordenone.  Cremona is also famous for its tradition for violin making, being the home of Giuseppe Guarneri, Antonio Stradivari and several members of the Amati family.

The majestic Art Nouveau Grand Hotel at San Pellegrino  

Travel tip:

San Pellegrino Terme, which can be found in Val Brembana in the province of Bergamo, is well known as the birthplace of the mineral waters bearing the name of the town. San Pellegrino water is to be found in supermarkets and on restaurant tables all over the world.  The water was always held to have health-enhancing properties and its reputation helped San Pellegrino became a fashionable spa town in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, a favourite haunt with wealthy industrialists from Bergamo.  Some wonderful Art Nouveau architecture remains as a legacy, in the shape of the San Pellegrino Thermal Baths, the Casino and the Grand Hotel.  The resort’s popularity declined somewhat in the mid-20^th century and these fine buildings were closed, but efforts have been made recently to restore them and allow the public back inside for a glimpse of the opulence of the town in its heyday.

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