Roberto Visentini - cyclist

One half of the Giro d’Italia’s most controversial duel

Roberto Visentini had the reputation of a
playboy in a working-class sport

Roberto Visentini, the Italian road racing cyclist who won the 1986 Giro d’Italia but the following year was a central figure in the most controversial race since the historic tour of Italy began, was born on this day in 1957 in Gardone Riviera.

The son of a wealthy undertaker from Brescia, Visentini had been an Italian and a world champion at junior level in 1975 and won the Italian national time-trial championship in 1977 as an amateur, before turning professional in 1978. Despite his success, he was not universally respected by his peers, some of whom felt his penchant for fast cars and a playboy lifestyle were not in keeping with what was traditionally a working-class sport.

The Giro was always his focus. Riding for the Inoxpran team, he was runner-up in the 1983 edition behind his fellow countryman Giuseppe Saronni and looked set to win the event two years later, holding the race leader’s pink jersey for nine consecutive stages to the half-way point, only to become unwell, dropping back to finish 49th overall behind the Frenchman Bernard Hinault.

In 1986, now with the Carrera team, Visentini finally claimed the prize as his own, taking the lead at stage 16 as he turned the tables on Saronni, with the 1984 winner Francesco Moser, another Italian, in third place.

Visentini was the 1986
Giro d'Italia champion

Come 1987, he felt he should begin the Giro, naturally, as team leader, and if he found himself positioned in the race well enough to have a chance of defending his title successfully, expected his teammates to do all they could to support him, as did the team management.

But one member of the team, the ambitious Irishman Stephen Roche, had other ideas. A high-profile signing in 1986, he had endured a wretched first year wrecked by a knee injury. He arrived at the Giro fresh from winning the Tour de Romandie in Switzerland and was in great form. He felt he also had a claim to be team leader.

Much to Visentini’s chagrin, Davide Boifava, the Carrera team manager, was reluctant to name a team leader when the race began in San Remo, announcing that “the road would decide”.

In the event, Visentini won the prologue but Roche claimed the overall lead on the third stage, a time trial between Lerici on the Ligurian coast and Camaiore, just over the border in Tuscany, and defended it for the next nine stages until the race reached Rimini, on the Adriatic coast.

Yet Visentini was never far behind and as the pair prepared for the uphill time trial from Rimini to San Marino, Roche’s lead over the defending champion was just 25 seconds. What’s more, he was suffering some pain after a crash a couple of days earlier.

Stephen Roche was an ambitious rider who failed to see
why he should not try to win the Giro in his own right

Now Visentini made his move and beat Roche decisively in the 46km climb, finishing 2 min 47 sec ahead of his teammate, taking the pink jersey as race leader in the process. He reasoned that with that the road had ‘decided’ and that the Giro was as good as his.

However, Roche was having none of it. There had been an assumption among the journalists reporting the race and the fans watching that an agreement had been reached where Roche would support Visentini in the Giro and the Italian would return the favour in the Tour de France the following month.

But Roche says he saw Visentini give an interview on the night of the San Marino stage in which he said he was not planning to ride in the Tour, something the Italian later denied.

Either way, on stage 15, which took the riders through the Dolomites, Roche broke away from the Carrera group, forming a new leading group with two other riders on the descent of Monte Rest. Despite Boifava sending his second-in-command to drive alongside Roche and tell him to abandon the move, he continued with the move, scrambling down the hill at speeds he admitted later were too fast.

The upshot was that though he did not win the stage his 12th place was enough for him to reclaim the pink jersey.  Encouraged by his Italian supporters, some of whom spat at or attempted to strike Roche as he went past them, Visentini tried to fight back on stage 16, between Sappada in the province of Belluno and Canazei, in Trento, but could not pass Roche. He ultimately faded and abandoned his race after a crash on the penultimate lap.

By the end, despite the opprobrium of the Italian newspapers, many supporters were applauding the Irishman as the stronger rider. Indeed, he went on to win the Tour de France and the road race at the World Championships, the first rider to win all three in the same year.

The career of Visentini, by contrast, went the other way. He never won another significant race and retired in 1990 to take over the running of the family firm, and thereafter had little to do with the sport, pointedly staying away from Carrera team reunions.

Sappada enjoys a picturesque setting in the foothills of
the Alps, developed largely by Germans 

Travel tip:

The small town of Sappada, also known as Bladen, is in an area of rich natural beauty in the Dolomites located at 1,245m (4,085ft) above sea level at the northeastern end of the range, on the border between Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Austria.  A tourist destination in winter and summer, despite being only 130km (81 miles) north of Venice it is largely German-speaking, with a Bavarian dialect known as Sappadino in Italian or Plodarsich in the local vernacular.

Gardone Riviera is an elegant resort on Lake Garda

Travel tip:

Gardone Riviera is a small resort about one third of the way along the western shore of Lake Garda, in the province of Brescia. Several hotels can be found along the waterfront, as well as a small piazza providing a peaceful lakeside setting to eat lunch or dinner or enjoy an ice cream at an outdoor table. The town was the home of the poet, soldier and revolutionary Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938), who built the extravagant monument named Il Vittoriale degli Italiani, an estate in the hills above Gardone Riviera, which he planned with the help of Giancarlo Maroni. It now houses a military museum and library.

More reading:

The launch of the Giro d'Italia

How Attilio Pavesi became Italy's first Olympic cycling champion on the road

The cycling champion who was a secret war hero

Also on this day:

1882: The death of unification hero Giuseppe Garibaldi

The Festa della Repubblica, commemorating Italy becoming a republic in 1946

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Iolanda of Savoy - banished princess

Sister of Italy’s last monarch lived quiet life in seaside villa

A photograph of Princess Iolanda of
Savoy as a young woman 

Princess Iolanda of Savoy, the eldest daughter of Italy’s wartime king Vittorio Emanuele III, was born on this day in 1901 in Rome.

Along with the other members of the Italian royal family, she left the country in 1946 after a referendum over whether to turn Italy into a republic gained the support of 54 per cent of those who voted.

The new constitution specifically banned the male heirs of the House of Savoy from setting foot on Italian soil.  Her brother, Umberto II, who had been made king when his father abdicated in May 1946, shortly before the vote, had the crown for just 27 days. He left for Portugal, never to return to his homeland.

The decision to send male members of the family into exile was essentially the new republic’s punishment for Vittorio Emanuele having allowed the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini to run the country as a dictator.

Vittorio Emanuele, who was king for 46 years, was tainted in particular by his approval of Mussolini's anti-semitic race laws by which all Jewish students were expelled from schools and Jews were banned from public office and forbidden to marry outside their race.

The collapse of the monarchy meant a dramatic change of lifestyle for Iolanda, who was one of five children born to her mother, Queen Elena of Montenegro.

The King and his young family: from the left Iolanda, Queen
Elena, Maria Francesca, Mafalda and Umberto

There were once plans to put her forward as a suitable match for the Crown Prince of England, the future Edward VIII.  In the event, Edward VIII gave up his throne for Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee, and Iolanda, a sporty girl who excelled at swimming and riding, was courted by Count Giorgio Carlo Calvi of Bergolo, a cavalry officer who would go on to become a general in the Italian army.

They were married at the Palazzo Quirinale in Rome in 1923 and lived in a Savoy residence in the town of Pinerolo, southwest of Turin, where they raised a family of five children.

Calvi was one of the officers closest to Vittorio Emanuele during the Second World War and was placed in control of Rome as it became an “open city” following the armistice the Italians signed with the Allies in 1943.

He was arrested by the Germans towards the end of the War and interned in a hotel in Austria before being allowed to join Iolanda and the family, who had by then moved to the relative safety of Switzerland.

Giorgio Carlo Calvi of Bergolo, who
was married to Iolanda in 1923

After the constitution was announced, Iolanda, Calvi and their children joined her father in exile in Egypt, where Vittorio Emanuele died in 1947.

Unlike the male descendants, who would remain in exile until Umberto II’s son, also called Vittorio Emanuele, and grandson Emanuele Filiberto, were allowed back in 2002, the female descendants were able to return to Italy without restriction.

There was no public role for Iolanda, but she and her husband were able to start a new life at a maritime villa on the coast of Lazio on the Copacotta estate, formerly owned by the Savoy family before being taken over by the state. She died in a clinic in Rome in 1986

Fate took Iolanda’s sisters on very different paths. Mafalda, who was a year and a half younger, married a grandson of the German Emperor Frederick III and went to live in a castle not far from Frankfurt.

Her husband was a member of the Nazi party, yet she was suspected by Hitler of being a spy, or at best a subversive, and after Italy’s surrender in 1943 she was arrested and placed in a concentration camp, where she died the following year from wounds suffered in an Allied bombing raid on a nearby armaments factory.

Iolanda's sister, Mafalda, whose life
was to end tragically in 1944

Giovanna survived but was possibly lucky to do so.  Born in 1907, she married Tsar Boris III of Bulgaria and while living in Sofia she helped facilitate the escape of many Jews from the country after Bulgaria announced they were siding with the Axis powers in the War.

After her husband died in 1943, suffering unforeseen heart problems soon after a meeting with Hitler, she remained in Sofia until the end of the conflict, only to be told by the new Communist government in 1946 that she had 48 hours to leave. She too went to Egypt, and from there to Madrid and finally Portugal, where she lived with her exiled brother, Umberto, who kept a house there for 37 years.

The youngest sibling, Maria Francesca, married Prince Luigi Carlo of Bourbon-Parma and lived in Cannes, France. Although she and her husband were briefly imprisoned by the Germans before the Allies liberated France, their life was relatively uneventful.

The Cathedral of San Donato at the heart of Pinerolo

Travel tip:

Nestling in an attractive setting among hills and valleys with an Alpine backdrop, Pinerolo is about 50km (31 miles) southwest of Turin. Positioned on what was an important trade route between Italy and France, the small city has a well preserved medieval centre and several important museums. The Cathedral of San Donato is an interesting church, having a symmetrical facade in three parts, featuring rose windows and a gothic style entrance with two statues. The city has a strong sporting tradition. It was a base for the Winter Olympics in 2006 and is a frequent stage in the Giro d'Italia cycle race.

The beach at Copacotta is a rare stretch of unspoilt sand

Travel tip:

The old Savoy hunting estate of Copacotta, which can be found only 25km (16 miles) or so to the southwest of Rome, not far from Ostia, is now part of the presidential estate of Castelporziano, one of the three residences of the President of the Italian Republic, together with the Palazzo Quirinale in Rome and Villa Rosebery in Naples. Adjoining the estate is Copacotta beach, a long sweep of natural, undeveloped shoreline that includes the best preserved unspoilt area of sand dunes in the whole of Italy.

More reading:

Vittorio Emanuele III abdicates

Umberto II, the last king of Italy

Mussolini's last stand

Also on this day:

1675: The birth of the great dramatist Francesco Scipione

1819: The birth of Francis V, the last reigning Duke of Modena

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Andrew Grima - royal jeweller

Rome-born craftsman favoured by the Queen of England

Andrew Grima was the Rome-born son of a Maltese
lace-maker and an Italian mother

The jewellery designer Andrew Grima, whose clients included the British Royal Family, was born on this day in 1921 in Rome.

Grima, whose flamboyant use of dramatically large, rough-cut stones and brilliant innovative designs revolutionised modern British jewellery, achieved an enviable status among his contemporaries.

After the Duke of Edinburgh had given the Queen a brooch of carved rubies and diamonds designed by Grima as a gift, he was awarded a Royal Warrant and rapidly became the jeweller of choice for London’s high society, as well as celebrities and film stars from around the world.

He won 13 De Beers Diamonds International Awards, which is more than any other jeweller, and examples of his work are kept by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths.

When a private collection of Grima pieces was sold at auction by Bonhams in London in September 2017, some 93 lots realised a total of more than £7.6 million (€8.6m), with one pear-shaped blue diamond alone making £2.685m (€3.034m).

Grima’s father, John Grima, was the Maltese owner of a large international lace-making business, designing his products as well as marketing them. His mother, Leopoldina Farnese, could trace her ancestry to the powerful Farnese family of the Renaissance, who left their mark on Roman art and architecture in several ways.

Three pictures showing Queen Elizabeth II wearing the ruby
and diamond Grima brooch give to her by Prince Philip

The family moved to London when Andrew, their first-born, was five. After going to school in southeast London, Grima studied mechanical engineering at Nottingham University, from which he joined the Royal Engineers, serving in Burma and India during the Second World War.

His move into the jewellery business came purely by chance.  His plans to attend art school after he was demobbed had to be put on hold because few art schools had reopened. Instead, he took a secretarial course and began going out with a classmate, Helène Haller, whose Viennese father owned a small jewellery workshop.

The relationship blossomed and they were married in 1947, after which Helène’s father gave Grima a job supervising his accounts. He was desperate for an opportunity to unleash his artistic talents.  It came, finally, when a pair of dealers arrived at the workshop one day with a suitcase of large stones imported from Brazil, including aquamarines, citrines, tourmalines and amethysts. 

Grima persuaded his father-in-law to buy them all and though he had no training he set about creating his own radical designs, experimenting with abstract shapes, different textural effects and making casts from nature, such as leaves, lichen and volcanic lava, to reproduce in gold.  The pieces he made were a great success.

Grima's created this unusual gold and diamond brooch
by making a cast from pencil shavings

In 1952, his father-in-law died and he inherited the business, which went from strength to strength.  After he was invited to exhibit at an exhibition of modern jewellery in London in 1961, he began to win awards, including the Duke of Edinburgh Award for Elegant Design, which was awarded to him in 1966 as the first jeweller to win the accolade.

The curator of the exhibition, Graham Hughes, introduced Grima to rich potential clients, although he made a smart move of his own when he invited Lord Snowdon to visit his workshop after reading a magazine interview in which Snowdon had complained about what he saw as a paucity of exciting jewellery available. In the event, Snowdon was so impressed he chose presents for his then wife Princess Margaret, the Queen’s sister.

It was not long afterwards that Grima received the Duke of Edinburgh award from Prince Philip in person, the Duke taking a brooch of carved rubies and diamonds from the winning collection as a gift for the Queen, who wore it on many different occasions in the years that followed, including her televised 2007 Christmas speech, coincidentally broadcast the day before Grima passed away at his home in Switzerland.

The Queen soon commissioned Grima to make state gifts and it was not long that he had the Royal Warrant and the Queen's Award for Industry as well as the Duke of Edinburgh's prize.

Snowdon, meanwhile, would some years later open Grima’s new shop at 80 Jermyn Street in London's St. James's, designed by his architect brothers, George and Godfrey, featuring an extraordinary and starkly eye-catching shopfront made from slabs of slate bolted to a steel framework, dotted with small, rectangular showcases, designed by sculptor Bryan Kneale.

Grima went on to open galleries in Zurich, New York, Tokyo and Sydney. As well as many of the British royals, Jacqueline Onassis was a fan of his pieces, as were many movie stars.

In 1977, Grima divorced Helène and married JoJo Maughan-Brown, the daughter of the diamond magnate, Sir Thomas Cullinan. After a planned business expansion failed, he decided to relinquish his royal warrant and in 1986 moved to Switzerland to work only on private commissions, living first in Lugano and then in Gstaad.  His daughter, Francesca, continued to design after his death.

The Palazzo Farnese in Rome is currently the home of
the French embassy in Italy

Travel tip:

The Farnese were among the great aristocratic families who turned Rome into a communal work of art from the 14th to the 17th centuries, along with the Barberini, the Colonna, the Chigi and the Borghese. Their most significant contributions was the Palazzo Farnese, the High Renaissance palace designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger in 1517, which is now owned by the Italian republic and currently serves as the French embassy. It can be found in Piazza Farnese, a short distance from the Tiber, which features two identical decorative fountains, on granite bases thought to have been brought from the Roman Baths of Caracalla.

The view across from the Janiculum Hill

Travel tip:

Another Farnese monument worth visiting is the Villa Aurelia, which sits on top of the Janiculum Hill, the highest point within Rome's ancient city walls. Built in the 17th century by a Farnese cardinal named Girolamo, because of its elevated position it was commandeered by Garibaldi as his headquarters when he came to Rome to defend the republic of 1849 from the invading French. It was severely damaged by French artillery but restored three decades later when it was bought by a Philadelphia heiress,  Clara Jessup Heyland.

Also on this day:

1594: The death of the great Renaissance artist Tintoretto

1914: The death of Angelo Moriondo, inventor of the world's first espresso machine

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Andrea Verga - anatomist and neurologist

Professor among founding fathers of Italian psychiatry

Andrea Verga was one of the first to see how criminal
behaviour could be driven by insanity

The anatomist and neurologist Andrea Verga, who was one of the first Italian doctors to carry out serious research into mental illness, was born on this day in 1811 in Treviglio in Lombardy.

Verga’s career was notable for his pioneering study of the criminally insane, for some of the first research into acrophobia - the fear of heights - which was a condition from which he suffered, and for the earliest known experiments in the therapeutic use of cannabis.

For a number of years, he held the post of Professor of Psychiatry at the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan. He also founded, in conjunction with another physician, Serafino Biffi, the Italian Archives for Nervous Disease and Mental Illness, a periodical in which research findings could be shared and discussed.

Verga also acquired an in-depth knowledge of the anatomy of the bone system and the nervous system, and was the first to identify an anomaly of the brain that occurs in only one in six people, which became known as ‘Verga’s ventricle’.

The son of a coachman, Verga was an enthusiastic student of classics whom his parents encouraged to pursue a career in the church, yet it was medicine that became his calling.  He went to the University of Pavia, graduating in 1832 and becoming assistant to Bartolomeo Panizza, whose previous students had included Italy’s first Nobel Prize winner, Camillo Golgi.

Verga was a driving force behind Milan's Provincial
Psychiatric Hospital at Mombello 

Verga spent much of his working life with sight in only one eye, the consequence, it might be said, of his failing to remember to take literally the biblical proverb ‘physician heal thyself’. During an outbreak of cholera, in which he attended many sick patients, he developed a serious eye infection, which he neglected to treat, and went blind in the affected eye.

Nonetheless, steering himself towards the field of psychiatry and mental illness, in 1843 he moved to Milan, where he worked at the private hospital of San Celso, which cared for mental patients from the city’s wealthier classes.

While working at San Celso, he is thought to have participated with other physicians in experiments on the therapeutic use of cannabis in mental health conditions. The plant had a history of medical use in a number of ancient civilisations.

In 1848, amid the chaos of the first Italian War of Independence, he became the director of the Pia Casa della Senavra, Milan’s first public mental hospital. For several years his movements came under the scrutiny of the occupying Austrians, yet in 1852 he was offered the chance to lead psychiatric research at the city’s Ospedale Maggiore.

Andrea Verga's tomb at the Monumental Cemetery in Milan

There he pushed for reforms that fundamentally improved the service of medicine and surgery in Milan. With Biffi he helped construct a more accurate definition of the symptoms of mental illness and the concept of insanity, and its recognition as grounds for a different interpretation, in some cases, of criminal behaviour.

Also, along with Biffi and Cesare Castiglioni, he argued the need for a more modern mental hospital in Milan. His arguments were rewarded when Senevra was closed and replaced, in 1878, by the Provincial Psychiatric Hospital of Milan at Mombello. 

Devoted to his work throughout his life, Verga never married. He did find time to become involved in local politics, however, as a councillor and in 1876 was appointed a Senator of the Kingdom of Italy.

He died in 1895 and was buried in the Monumental Cemetery in Milan.

The Basilica of San Martino in Treviglio

Travel tip:

The small city of Treviglio in Lombardy, where Verga was born, is about 20km (13 miles) south of Bergamo and 41km (26 miles) northeast of Milan. It developed from a fortified town in the early Middle Ages and, having been at times controlled by the French and the Spanish, became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1860.  Its most visited attraction is the Basilica of San Martino, originally built in 1008 and reconstructed in 1482, with a Baroque façade from 1740, which is in Piazza Luciano Manara. Opposite the basilica is the historic Caffè Milano, founded in 1896, which retains the original turn-of-the century furniture and a counter in Art Nouveau style.

The bust of Andrea Verga in Largo
Francesco Richini in Milan

Travel tip:

An enormous white marble bust, dedicated in 1903 to Andrea Verga, can be found in Largo Francesco Richini in the centre of Milan, opposite what was formerly the Ospedale Maggiore, which is now part of the campus of the University of Milan, created by the Milan sculptor Giulio Branca. The Ospedale Maggiore moved early in the 20th century to a vast new site not far away, opposite the university buildings on the other side, bordered by Via Francesco Sforza.

Also on this day:

1875: The birth of Giovanni Gentile, the so-called 'philosopher of Fascism' 

1924: The day tragic politician Giacomo Matteotti spoke out against Fascist thugs

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