Pope Gregory XI returns the papacy to Rome

Important date in Roman and papal history

Pope Gregory XI was the last French pope
and the last to rule from Avignon

The French Pope, Gregory XI, returned the papacy to Rome, against the wishes of France and several of his cardinals, on this day in 1377.

The move back to Rome was a highly significant act in history as the papacy, from that date onwards, was to remain in the city.

Gregory was born Pierre-Roger De Beaufort in Limoges. He was the last French pope, and he was also the last pope to reign from Avignon, where he had been unanimously elected in 1370.

He immediately gave consideration to returning the papacy to Rome in order to conduct negotiations for reuniting the Eastern and Western Churches and to maintain papal territories against a Florentine revolt being led by the powerful Visconti family.

But Gregory had to shelve his Roman plan temporarily in order to strive for peace between England and France after another phase in the Hundred Years’ War started.

However, in 1375, he defeated Florence in its war against the Papal States and the following year, he listened to the pleas of the mystic Catherine of Siena, later to become a patron saint of Italy, to move the papacy back to Rome.

Giovanni di Paolo's painting depicts the meeting
of Catherine of Siena with Gregory XI at Avignon

After peace was concluded against Florence, Gregory returned the papal court to Rome, entering the city on 17 January 1377, ending nearly 70 years of popes residing in Avignon.

His last few months in Rome were marred by conflict and at one stage he had to flee to Anagni, a town outside the city. Gregory died in March 1377 in Rome and was interred in the church of Santa Maria Nuova.

But the move back to Rome he brought about was important in papal history. Since then, the papacy, despite the reigns of antipopes in other cities, has always remained in Rome.

After Gregory’s death, the College of Cardinals was threatened by a Roman mob that broke into the voting chamber to try to force an Italian pope into the papacy.

The Italians chose Urban VI, but the Cardinals were against him and withdrew to Fondi, the city between Rome and Naples that was the home of the powerful Caetani family, where they annulled the election of Urban and elected a French pope, Clement VII.

This election of rival popes caused the split known as the Western Schism, forcing Europe into a dilemma about papal allegiance.

The Schism was not resolved fully until the Council of Constance was held by the College of Cardinals between 1414 and 1418. The Council deposed both popes and elected the Roman-born Martin V.

After a long stay in Florence, Martin V entered Rome in 1420 and immediately set to work restoring order and repairing dilapidated churches and palaces.

The papal residence in Anagni was a retreat for many
popes seeking refuge from Rome

Travel tip:

Anagni, where Pope Gregory XI briefly sought refuge, is an ancient town in the province of Frosinone in Lazio. It is south east of Rome in an area known as Ciociaria, named after the primitive footwear, ciocie, a type of sandal, worn by people living in the area. During medieval times many popes chose to reside in Anagni, considering it safer and healthier than Rome. The town produced four popes, the last one being Boniface VIII, who was hiding out there in 1303 when he received the famous Anagni slap, delivered by an angry member of the fiercely antipapal Colonna family after he refused to abdicate. After his death the power of the town declined and the papal court was transferred to Avignon. The medieval Palace of Boniface VIII, is near the Cathedral in the centre of the town. Close by there is a restaurant named Lo Schiaffo - The Slap.

Gregory XI's tomb at the Basilica di Santa
Francesca Romana, near the Roman Forum

Travel tip:

The church of Santa Maria Nuova, where Pope Gregory XI is buried, adjoins the Roman Forum and is now known as the Basilica di Santa Francesca Romana, off the piazza of the same name. The tomb of Pope Gregory XI is in the south transept of the church and was reconstructed in 1584 to a design by Per Paulo Oliviero.

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Niccolò Piccinni – opera composer

Writer drawn into 18^th century Paris rivalry

Niccolò Piccinni was one of Italy's most
popular composers in the 18th century

The composer Niccolò Piccinni, one of the most popular writers of opera in 18^th century Europe, was born on this day in 1728 in Bari.

Piccinni, who lived mainly in Naples while he was in Italy, had the misfortune to be placed under house arrest for four years in his 60s, when he was accused of being a republican revolutionary.

He is primarily remembered, though, for having been invited to Paris at the height of his popularity to be drawn unwittingly into a battle between supporters of traditional opera, with its emphasis on catchy melodies and show-stopping arias, and those of the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, who favoured solemnly serious storytelling more akin to Greek tragedy.

Piccinni’s father was a musician but tried to discourage his son from following the same career. However, the Bishop of Bari, recognising Niccolò’s talent, arranged for him to attend the Conservatorio di Sant’Onofrio in Capuana in Naples.

He was a prolific writer. His first opera, a comedy entitled Le donne dispettose (The mischievous women) was staged at the Teatro dei Fiorentini in Naples in 1755 and after he had formed a working partnership with the acclaimed librettist Pietro Metastasio his catalogue of works was already well into double figures when the success of one particular composition won him popularity across Europe.

La buona figliuola (The good daughter), also known as La Cecchina, was essentially an opera buffa – a light-hearted comedy – for which the libretto was written by the famous playwright Carlo Goldoni.

Carlo Goldoni, the Venetian playwright, wrote
the libretto for Piccinni's first major success

It premiered at the Teatro delle Dame in Rome in 1760 and was so popular it enjoyed a two-year run, acquiring such a reputation as a crowd pleaser that it was soon attracting packed houses in every capital city in Europe.  What set it apart was that it was a comedy with dramatic elements and a soft sentimentality designed to touch the emotions of the audience.

The public enthusiasm for the story was such that a commercial spin-off industry developed around it almost in the manner of box-office successes of today, with fashion houses and shops trading on the La Cecchina name.

The new sentimental style caught on with other composers, eager to match Piccinni’s success, but at the same time there was a backlash among conservatives, who felt music, and opera in particular, should be about strength and manliness and saw this brand of modern Italian music as rather effete, promoting effeminacy and cowardliness rather than courage and moral virtue.

Among those composers who had their support was Gluck, the German who had found favour with the Hapsburg court in Vienna.  Gluck moved to Paris in the 1770s and when Queen Marie Antoinette invited Piccinni to live and work in the French capital, the directors of the Academie Royale de Musique, as the Paris Opera was then known, saw the commercial potential in pitting the two against one another.

They invited each to compose his own interpretation of the same texts and deliberately encouraged the Parisian public to fall into one or the other of two camps – the Gluckists and the Piccinnists. The antagonism between some factions became quite ugly.

The Piccinni statue in his
home city of Bari

The irony was that Piccinni admired Gluck and while in Paris, excited by the chance to compose pieces of greater substance, he collaborated with the celebrated French dramatist Jean-Francois Marmontel on several projects that he hoped would advance the cause of operatic reform that Gluck and his intellectual supporters were proposing.

The French Revolution in 1789 – two years after the death of Gluck - brought to an end Piccinni’s time in Paris and he returned to Naples, where he was given a warm welcome by King Ferdinand IV, whose wife Maria Carolina was the ill-fated Marie Antoinette’s sister, only to fall out of favour when his daughter’s marriage to a French democratic republican brought him under suspicion of connections and sympathies with the revolutionaries whose influence Ferdinand feared.

The king’s attitude towards any suspected republicans in Naples had been uncompromising and many were rounded up and shot. Piccinni was spared that fate but remained under house arrest for four years.

His fame long since faded, he spent the years after his release eking out an uncertain living in Naples, Venice and Rome before returning to Paris in 1798, where he was received with enthusiasm but struggled to make much money, although with the support of friends he was able to settle in the comfortable suburb of Passy, where he died in 1800 at the age of 72.

Piccinni’s life is commemorated with a statue in the Piazza della Prefettura in his home city of Bari in Puglia.

Porta Capuana in Naples used to be part of the city's
ancient Aragonese walls

Travel tip:

Capuana is the area of Naples close to Porta Capuana, a now free-standing gateway that was once part of the Aragonese walls of the city.  Situated roughly between the city’s main railway station and the Duomo.  The Conservatorio di Sant’Onofrio, which was in time absorbed into the Naples Conservatory, used to be close to the Castel Capuano, originally a 12^th-century fortress which has been modified several times.  Until recently, the castle was home to the city’s Hall of Justice, also known as the Vicaria, comprising legal offices and a prison.

The pretty Via Margutta in Rome, close to where the
Teatro delle Dame stood in the 18th and early 19th centuries

Travel tip:

In the 18^th century, Rome’s Teatro delle Dame vied with the Teatro Capranica for the right to be called the city’s leading opera house, staging many premieres of works by the leading composers of the day. Built in 1713 specifically to stage opera seria – as opposed to opera buffa – and remained a major venue until the early 19^th century, when it was used more often for public dancing, acrobatic shows and plays in local Roman dialect.  Completely destroyed by fire in 1863, it stood where Via Aliberti joins Via Margutta in an area of pretty, narrow streets close to Piazza di Spagna in the direction of Piazza del Popolo.

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Paolo Sarpi – writer and statesman

Patriotic Venetian who the Pope wanted dead

Paolo Sarpi was an outspoken critic of
the Catholic Church

Historian, scientist, writer and statesman Paolo Sarpi died on this day in 1623 in Venice.

He had survived an assassination attack 16 years before and was living in seclusion, still preparing state papers on behalf of Venice, writing, and carrying out scientific studies.

The day before his death he had dictated three replies to questions about state affairs of the Venetian Republic.

He had been born Pietro Sarpi in 1552 in Venice. His father died while he was still a child and he was educated by his uncle, who was a school teacher, and then by a monk in the Augustinian Servite order.

He entered the Servite order himself at the age of 13, assuming the name of Fra Paolo. After going into a monastery in Mantua, he was invited to be court theologian to Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga.

He then went to Milan, where he was an adviser to Charles Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan, before being transferred back to Venice to be professor of philosophy at the Servite convent.

At the age of 27, Sarpi was sent to Rome, where he interacted with three successive popes. He then returned to Venice, where he spent 17 years studying. His writings were highly critical of the Catholic Church.

Pope Paul V, who plotted to have
Sarpi killed

Sarpi was a defender of the liberties of Republican Venice and a proponent of the separation of the church and state.

After Paul V was made pope, Venice adopted measures to restrict papal prerogative, but Paul V excommunicated the Venetians. Sarpi entered the argument and set out principles, which struck radically at papal intervention in secular matters. A compromise was finally arranged between the Pope and Venice through Henry IV of France

Afterwards, however, Sarpi became the target of an assassination attempt instigated by the Pope. In 1607, an unfrocked friar assisted by two other people agreed to kill Sarpi for the sum of 8,000 crowns, but the plot was discovered and they were arrested and imprisoned after crossing into Venetian territory.

The following month Sarpi was attacked and left for dead with 15 stiletto thrusts. His attackers were welcomed back into papal territory but the pope’s enthusiasm for them cooled after he discovered Sarpi had survived his injuries.

His would-be assassins settled in Rome and were granted a pension by the viceroy of Naples.

Plots continued to be formed against Sarpi and he occasionally occasionally spoke of taking refuge in England.

But he stayed in Venice and served the state until the end. His last words are said to have been: ‘Esto perpetua,’ or ‘May she endure forever.’

These words were later adopted as the state motto of American state of Idaho and appear on the back of the 2007 Idaho quarter.

The statue of Parlo Sarpi in Campo
Santa Fosca in Cannaregio in Venice

Travel tip:

A bronze statue of Paolo Sarpi stands on a monument to him in Campo Santa Fosca in the Cannaregio district of Venice near Strada Nova. It is close to the place where he was stabbed by the Pope’s would-be assassins.

Travel tip:

Liceo Classico Paolo Sarpi, established in 1803, is a public high school in Bergamo’s Città Alta, which is ranked highly nationally because of the teaching methods and the subjects studied. Students shared their experience in a 2012 television documentary film, Gli anni e I giorni.

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Franchino Gaffurio – composer

Musician whose name has lived on for centuries in Milan

Da Vinci's Portrait of a Musician, of which
Gaffurio is thought to have been the subject 

Renaissance composer Franchino Gaffurio was born on this day in 1451 in Lodi, a city in Lombardy some 40km (25 miles) southeast of Milan.

He was to become a friend of Leonardo da Vinci later in life and may have been the person depicted in Leonardo’s famous painting, Portrait of a Musician.

The oil on wood painting, which Da Vinci is thought to have completed in around 1490, is housed in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.

Gaffurio was born into an aristocratic family, who sent him to a Benedictine monastery, where he acquired musical training.

He later became a priest and lived in Mantua and Verona before setting in Milan, where he became maestro di cappella (choirmaster) at the Duomo in 1484. He was to retain the post for the rest of his life.

Gaffurio was one of Italy’s most famous musicians in the late 15^th and early 16^th centuries and as such met composers from all over Europe while working in Milan and wrote books of instruction for young composers.

One of his most famous comments was that the tactus, the tempo of a semibreve, is equal to the pulse of a man who is breathing quietly, at about 72 beats per minute.

The entrance to the Franco Gaffurio
Music School in Lodi

During his years in Milan, Gaffurio wrote masses, motets and hymns, many for ceremonial occasions held by the Sforza family.

Some of his music shows the influence of Josquin des Prez, a French composer he became friends with, and also the many composers from the Netherlands, who were drawn to Milan, which was a centre of musical activity at the time.

The Duomo in Milan to this day has a school for choirboys known as The Franchino Gaffurio School, named after the choirmaster, composer and teacher, whose music had resounded in the Duomo 600 years before.

Gaffurio died in 1522 in Milan and was buried in the Church of San Marcellino at Porta Comasina, one of the gates to the city, which was renamed Porta Garibaldi in 1860.

The Piazza della Vittoria in Lodi

Travel tip:

One of the main sights in Lodi, where Gaffurio was born, is Piazza della Vittoria, listed by the Italian Touring Club as one of the most beautiful squares in Italy, as it features porticoes on all four sides. Accademia Gaffurio in Via Solferino teaches music and dance and organises musical events and concerts. It was founded as the Franchino Gaffurio Music School in 1917.

The Duomo in Milan, where Gaffurio was maestro di
cappella from 1484 until his death in 1522

Travel tip:

The Duomo in Milan, where Gaffurio was maestro di cappella, was built in 1386 using Candoglia marble, which was transported along the Navigli canals. It was consecrated in 1418, yet remained unfinished until the 19th century, when Napoleon had the façade completed, before being crowned King of Italy there.

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