Pietro Frua - car designer

Built business from a bombed-out factory

Pietro Frua became one of Italy's leading
car designers in the 1960s

The car designer and coachbuilder Pietro Frua, who built some of Italy’s most beautiful cars without achieving the fame of the likes of Giovanni Bertone or Battista “Pinin” Farina, was born on this day in 1913 in Turin.

He is particularly remembered for his work with Maserati, for whom he designed the A6G and the Mistral among other models.

The son of a Fiat employee, Carlo Frua, Pietro was an apprentice draftsman with Fiat and from the age of 17 worked alongside Battista Farina for his brother, Giovanni Farina, who had a coachbuilding business in Turin. He became director of styling for Stabilimenti Farina at the age of just 22.

After being obliged to diversify during the war, when he designed electric ovens and children’s model cars among other things, Frua bought a bombed-out factory building in 1944, restored it to serviceable order and hired 15 workers to help him launch his own business.

The first car he designed in his own studio was the soft-top Fiat 1100C sports car in 1946.  Subsequent work for Peugeot and Renault came his way and in 1955 he was approached by Maserati for the first time, to work on the design of the two-litre A6G coupe.

Pietro Frua's Mistral, the sports car that helped propel
Maserati into the forefront of the luxury market

In 1957, he sold his company to Carrozzeria Ghia, another Turin coachbuilder, whose name would become synonymous with sporty excellence across the motor industry. The Ghia director Luigi Segre made Frua head of design. His big success there was the Renault Floride, of which more than 117,000 were sold.

They fell out, however, when Segre tried to take credit for the model’s success, leading Frua to open his own studio again.  An influence on Pelle Petterson’s design for the iconic Volvo P1800, he also designed several cars for Ghia-Aigle, the former Swiss subsidiary of Ghia, and for Italsuisse.

By the 1960s, Frua was one of Italy’s leading car designers in Italy, with a reputation for elegant, tasteful lines, a perfectionist who would often deliver his cars to motor shows around Europe himself, having treated the journey as a test drive.

In 1963, Frua designed a range of cars for Glas, Germany’s smallest car-maker, which included the Glas GT Coupé and Cabriolet as well as the V8-engined 2600, which was nicknames the "Glaserati" for its likeness with Frua's Maserati-designs.

The car became the BMW GT, after BMW had rescued Glas from financial difficulties with a 1966 buy-out.

Frua's Maserati A6G had a design that exuded power

Also in 1963, Frua returned to Maserati to build the four-door Quattroporte which, following on from the 3500GT and the 5000GT, saw him firmly back in the Maserati stable.

His Mistral, developed in 1965, propelled Maserati into the forefront of the luxury sports car market, the car finding a substantial following for its powerful, understated image.

In 1965, he began a successful association with the British-based AC car company, for whom his AC Frua Spyder drew on the Mistral’s shape.

In the 1970s Frua began to scale back his work, concentrating on small projects and one-offs, styling exclusive versions of a Chevrolet Camaro, a BMW 2000 TI, an Opel Diplomat, a BMW 2800, a Porsche 914/6 and a five-litre Maserati.

Hew worked with French racing driver Guy Ligier to create the Ligier JSI. Moving his workshop to Moncalieri, a town just south of Turin, he accepted commissions from wealthy individuals such as the Shah of Persia and the Aga Khan.

One of the last cars to enter series production based on Frua’s designs was the two-door GT Maserati Kyalami, which made its debut at the 1976 Geneva Motor Show.

In 1982, Frua underwent treatment for cancer but died in 1983, a short time after his 70th birthday.

Fiat's extraordinary factory in the Lingotto district of Turin
was once the largest car manufacturing plant in the world

Travel tip:

Frua’s apprenticeship for Fiat would have seen him become familiar with Fiat’s enormous, iconic factory in the Lingotto district of Turin, famous for a production line that progressed upwards through its five floors, with completed cars emerging on to a then-unique steeply banked test track at rooftop level. Opened in 1923, it was the largest car factory in the world, built to a starkly linear design by the Futurist architect Giacomo Matte Trucco. The factory was closed in 1982 but the building was preserved out of respect for the huge part it played in Italy’s industrial heritage. Redesigned by the award-winning contemporary architect Renzo Piano, it now houses concert halls, a theatre, a convention centre, shopping arcades and a hotel, as well as the Automotive Engineering faculty of the Polytechnic University of Turin.  The rooftop track, which featured in the Michael Caine movie, The Italian Job, has been preserved and can still be visited today.

The handsome castle at Moncalieri now houses
a training college for the Carabinieri

Travel tip:

Moncalieri, where Frua moved his studio in the 1970s, has a population of almost 58,000 people. About 8km (5 miles) south of Turin within the city’s metropolitan area, it is notable for its castle, built in the 12th century and enlarged in the 15th century, which became a favourite residence of King Victor Emmanuel II and subsequently his daughter, Maria Clotilde. The castle now houses a prestigious training college for the Carabinieri, Italy’s quasi-military police force.



More reading:

How little Battista Farina became a giant of car design

The insult that inspired Ferruccio Lamborghini

Dante Giacosa, father of the Cinquecento

Also on this day:

1660: The birth of composer Alessandro Scarlatti

1930: The birth of radical politician and campaigner Marco Pannella


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Laura Betti - actress and jazz singer

Long-time companion of director Pier Paolo Pasolini

Laura Betti made her screen debut in Fellini's 1960 classic
about fame and decadence, La Dolce Vita

The actress and singer Laura Betti, who appeared in a number of important Italian films in the 1960s and 1970s, including Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, was born on this day in 1927 in Casalecchio di Reno, in Emilia-Romagna.

In addition to Teorema, which won her the coveted Volpi Cup for best actress at the 1968 Venice Film Festival, Betti appeared in six other Pasolini films as the two developed a special and unlikely relationship.

Betti, a vivacious blonde with striking good looks, had no shortage of suitors among the authors, artists, singers and aspiring actors that made up her circle in Rome in the 1950s, but Pasolini was homosexual and had no interest in her in a romantic sense.

Yet he became a regular guest at her apartment near the Palazzo Farnese and she wrote many years later that a kind of love developed between them. They met while he was an unknown poet and it was with her encouragement that he realised his aspiration to become a director.

Betti the jazz singer was a popular
performer in Rome nightclubs

Over time she effectively became his cook and housekeeper and after his death in 1975, the victim of a brutal murder that was never fully explained, she devoted much of her time to preserving his memory and championing his work.

She was the driving force behind the establishment of the Pasolini Foundation in Bologna, where he was born. She also set up an annual literary prize in his name.

The daughter of a barrister, she was born Laura Trombetti. Her first interest was in singing, particularly jazz, and she moved to Rome at a young age, acquiring a following on the cabaret circuit, for which her husky voice was ideal.  Both Pasolini and Alberto Moravia supplied material for her act.

Her interpretations of jazz tunes and songs by Bertolt Brecht brought comparisons with the sultry-voiced French singer Juliette Greco. She released a number of albums, which sold well.

Betti's first venture into theatre came with a 1955 production of Arthur Miller's Crucible staged by Luchino Visconti, although the night clubs continued to be her domain for much of the late 1950s until Fellini launched her film career with a cameo role in La Dolce Vita (1960), as one of the authentic Roman eccentrics in the beach villa orgy sequence.  It was the first of 76 movies in her career.

Her first Pasolini film was La Ricotta, a controversial 40-minute short that featured Orson Welles as an American director shooting a film about the Passion of Christ in Rome, with Betti a temperamental Madonna.

Laura Betti was for many years the companion of
enigmatic director Pier Paolo Pasolini (left)

In 1968, her first substantial Pasolini role, as the peasant maid in a bourgeois household in Teorema, won the best actress award at the 1968 Venice festival.

After returning to the stage to give an electrifying performance in Samuel Beckett's Not I for the Rome Municipal Theatre, her next Pasolini film role was in The Canterbury Tales (1972), shot in England, in which she was the Wife of Bath.

In the early 1970s, she also appeared in films by Marco Bellocchio, Mauro Bolognini, Miklos Jancso and the Taviani Brothers. She was also in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris (1972), Novecento (1976) and La Luna (1979).

After Pasolini's murder, Betti was sceptical, like many, of the explanation for his death and the confession by Giuseppe Pelosi, a 17-year-old youth he had paid for sex, when the evidence suggested the involvement of more than one attacker.  She preferred the idea that, as a communist sympathiser, he had been the victim of a conspiracy of the political Right, perhaps because he knew damaging secrets about senior figures, a theory that gained credence when it emerged that the Italian secret services were involved in the investigation into his death.

She continued to appear in films for her whole life, although at the same time devoting much time to travelling in Italy, and around the world, to fight Pasolini's corner. In 2001, she made a 90-minute documentary, Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Reason For A Dream, emphasising what she considered to be his optimistic vision of the future.

Betti, who never married, struggled with her health in the early 2000s and died of a heart attack in 2004.

The Villa Marescalchi, outside Casalecchio di Reno

Travel tip:

Casalecchio di Reno, which takes its name from the Roman word for a small collection of houses, in this instance clustered around the Reno river, is nowadays effectively a suburb of Bologna. An important industrial area in the early part of the 20th century, it was heavily bombed by the Allies in the Second World War, its population growing rapidly as it was rebuilt after 1945. The Villa Marescalchi, just outside the town, once contained paintings by the noted Bolognese painter Cesare Baglioni, but these were destroyed in a bombing raid.

The Palazzo Farnese now houses the French Embassy

Travel tip:

The Palazzo Farnese is one of the most important High Renaissance palaces in Rome, which currently serves as the French Embassy in Italy. Designed in 1517 for the Farnese family, it was expanded when Alessandro Farnese became Pope Paul III in 1534. The palace was designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and the development involved input from Michelangelo, Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola and Giacomo della Porta, who were alls prominent in Rome in the 16th century.

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Andrea Dandolo - Doge of Venice

Reign tested by earthquake, plague and war

A bust of Andrea Dandolo, sculpted by
Lorenzo Larese Moretti in 1861

Andrea Dandolo, the fourth member of a Patrician Venetian family to serve as Doge of the historic Republic, was born on this day in 1306.

A notably erudite scholar, Dandolo wrote two chronicles of the history of Venice in Latin and reformed the Venetian legal code by bringing together all of the diverse laws applicable to the Venetian Republic within one legal framework.

He achieved these things despite his reign being marked by a devastating earthquake, a catastrophic outbreak of the Black Death plague and two expensive wars, against Hungary and then Genoa.

Dandolo studied at the University of Padua, where he became a professor of law, a position he maintained until he was elected Doge. He quickly rose to a position of prominence in Venetian life, being appointed Procurator of St Mark’s Basilica, the second most prestigious position in the Venetian hierarchy after the Doge, at the age of just 25.

He was elected Doge in 1343, aged 37.  It was a particularly young age at which to be given the leadership of the Republic, but his family history and the manner in which had conducted himself as Procurator gained the respect of the republic’s aristocratic elders.

Dandolo was a benefactor of the arts. He added the Chapel of San Isidoro to the Basilica of St Mark and oversaw improvements to the Pala d'Oro and the Baptistery.

Mosaics inside the Chapel of San Isidoro, which was
Andrea Dandolo's addition to the Basilica of St Mark

He became a close friend of the poet Petrarch, who described him as a “just and incorruptible man”, although they would later fall out over the latter’s attempt to mediate between Venice and Genoa after the third Venetian-Genoese War of 1350-55.

The first conflict began in 1345 after a revolt against the rule of the Republic by the people of what is now Zadar, a coastal city in Croatia, sometimes known in Italian as Zara.  The Venetian fleet laid siege to Zadar and eventually recaptured the city, but only after 16 months of fighting, during which between 2,000 and 3,000 Venetians died along with an unknown number of soldiers dispatched to support Zadar by the king of Hungary, Louis of Angevin.

Louis wished to gain control over the Kingdom of Croatia and in particular Dalmatia, the area controlled by Venice, and achieved his aim only a few years later, taking advantage of Venetian forced severely depleted by the third Venetian-Genoese War, in which a large Genoese fleet under the command of Paganino Doria devastated large areas of Venetian territory around the Adriatic and eventually captured the entire Venetian fleet. Peace was finally brokered by Dandolo’s successor as Doge, Marino Faliero.

The former Palazzo Dandolo, facing the lagoon on Riva degli
Schiavoni, now houses the luxurious Hotel Danieli

In the meantime, Dandolo had needed to support the people of Venice in recovering first from a violent earthquake in 1348, which destroyed many buildings and killed hundreds of citizens.

This was followed swiftly by the arrival of the Black Death, the plague spread by fleas living off black rats that would arrive in Europe in the hold of merchant ships importing goods from central Asia via the Black Sea.

The plague is thought to have killed between 75 and 200 million people all told. The outbreak in Venice, which lasted from 1348 until 1350, claimed the lives of a third of the population.

Dandolo survived both events, yet died in 1354 at the age of 48.  He was the last Doge from the Dandalo family and the last Doge to be interred in St Mark’s Basilica.

The Palazzo Dandolo, which was built towards the end of the 14th century as a grand family residence, today houses the exclusive Hotel Danieli.

The Basilica of St Mark is one of Venice's most
popular tourist attractions

Travel tip:

The Basilica of St Mark dates from the 11th century, although it was not open to ordinary Venetians to venture inside until the early 19th century, its Byzantine grandeur having previously been off limits to all but the Doges and other senior figures in the Venetian government.  The chief attraction for many visitors to St Mark’s today are the golden mosaics, which cover more than 8,000 square metres of the walls, vaults and cupolas.

The poet Petrarch's house in Arquà Petrarca

Travel tip:

Petrarch - whose given name was Francesco Petrarca - the poet and diplomat who was a contemporary of Dandolo and was for a long time his close friend, was born in Arezzo in Tuscany but travelled widely.  He spent the last four years of his life in the small town of Arquà, about 25km (16 miles) southwest of Padua, in the Colli Euganei (Euganean Hills). The town added his name to its own to become Arquà Petrarca in 1870. The house where he lived (and died, in 1374) is now a museum dedicated to the poet.

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Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini - painter

Venetian artist who made mark in England

Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini's self-portrait,
painted in about 1717

The painter Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, who is regarded as one of the most important Venetian painters of the early 18th century, was born on this day in 1675 in Venice. 

He played a major part in the spread of the Venetian style of large-scale decorative painting in northern Europe, working in Austria, England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

With a style that had influences of Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese and the Baroque painters Pietro da Cortona and Luca Giordano, he is considered an important predecessor of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in the development of Venetian art.

A pupil of the Milanese painter Paolo Pagani, Pellegrini began travelling while still a teenager, accompanying Pagano to Moravia and Vienna.

After a period studying in Rome, he returned to Venice and married Angela Carriera, the sister of the portraitist Rosalba Carriera.

Soon afterwards, he accepted the commission to decorate the dome above the staircase at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in 1709.

Pellegrini spent a significant part of his career in England, where he was invited, along with Marco Ricci, the nephew of Sebastiano Ricci, by Charles Montagu, the future Duke of Manchester.  He and Ricci were the first Venetians to work in England.

A copy of Pellegrini's original work in the reconstructed
dome of Castle Howard in Yorkshire

Pellegrini made his mark in England by painting murals in a number of English country houses, including at Kimbolton Castle for the Montagu, Castle Howard, and Narford Hall, Norfolk, for Sir Andrew Fontaine.

His paintings in the dome at Castle Howard in Yorkshire were unfortunately largely destroyed in a fire in 1940.

In London he worked at 31 St James's Square for the Duke of Portland, and became a director of Sir Godfrey Kneller's Academy in London in 1711.

He submitted designs for decorating the interior dome of the new St Paul's Cathedral, and is said to have been Christopher Wren's favourite painter. However, he did not win the commission, losing out to Sir James Thornhill.

Pellegrini subsequently travelled through Germany and the Netherlands on his way back to Italy.

He completed works in many European cities, including Düsseldorf, The Hague, Prague, Dresden, Vienna and Paris.

Pellegrini died in Venice in November 1741.

The Ospedale degli Incurabili, which houses the
 Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice

Travel tip:

Pellegrini is thought to have lived in the Dorsodoro sestriere of Venice, in which the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia was founded in September 1750. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo became the first president. The academy was at first housed in a room on the upper floor of the Fonteghetto della Farina, a flour warehouse and market on the Grand Canal, close to Piazza San Marco.

The facade of the historic Scuola Grande di San Rocco

Travel tip:

The Scuola Grande di San Rocco is a lay confraternity founded in 1478, named after San Rocco, who was popularly regarded as offering protection against the plague. It quickly became the richest Scuola of the city.  Jacopo Tintoretto was engaged to produce a large number of paintings to decorate the walls and ceilings, which included what is regarded as his celebrated pictorial cycle illustrating episodes from the New and Old Testaments.  More than over 60 paintings are preserved in their original setting in a building that has undergone very little alteration since its construction.



More reading:

The brilliant miniatures of Rosalba Carriera

Pietro da Cortona - outstanding exponent of Baroque

Why Luca Giordano was renowned as a fast worker

Also on this day:

1945: Brazilian soldiers liberate an Italian town

1987: The birth of tennis champion Sara Errani


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