Marie Josephine of Savoy

Italian noblewoman who became titular Queen of France

Detail from a portrait of Marie Josephine by the
French royal portraitist Jean-Martial Frédou

Marie Josephine Louise of Savoy, who married the future King Louis XVIII of France, was born Maria Giuseppina Luigia on this day in 1753 at the Royal Palace in Turin.

She became a Princess of France and Countess of Provence after her marriage, but died before her husband actually became the King of France.

Marie Josephine was the third child of prince Victor Amadeus of Savoy and Infanta Maria Antonio Ferdinanda of Spain.

Her paternal grandfather, Charles Emmanuel III, was King of Sardinia and so her parents were the Duke and Duchess of Savoy.  Her brothers were to become the last three Kings of Sardinia, the future Charles Emmanuel IV, Victor Emmanuel I and Charles Felix.

At the age of 17, Marie Josephine was married by proxy to Prince Louis Stanislas, Count of Provence, the younger brother of the Dauphin, Louis Auguste, who was fated to become Louis XVI of France and to be executed by guillotine.

After the outbreak of the French Revolution, the Count and Countess of Provence stayed in France with the King and Marie Antoinette, but when their situation became too dangerous they successfully escaped to the Austrian Netherlands.

Marie Josephine as a child before her marriage
to Prince Louis Stanislas, the future Louis XVIII

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette also tried to leave the country but were arrested in the small town of Varennes and were taken back to face charges of treason and ultimately to be executed.

In 1795, the only surviving son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who was regarded by the exiled French Court as Louis XVII, died in his prison. Marie Josephine’s husband was therefore proclaimed by loyalists as Louis XVIII and Marie Josephine then became regarded as titular Queen of France.

After years of moving from place to place, often separately, the couple were reunited in England and allowed to set up a French exile court in Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, where Marie Josephine died in 1810.

She had a magnificent funeral attended by many French royalist sympathisers, whose names were recorded by spies and sent to Napoleon.

Members of the British Royal family followed her funeral cortege in a carriage and saw her laid to rest in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey. But her body was removed a year later and taken to the Kingdom of Sardinia, where it was buried in Cagliari Cathedral.

The Palazzo Reale in Turin, by night

Travel tip:

The Royal Palace of Turin, the Palazzo Reale, where Maria Josephine was born, was built by Emmanuel Philibert, who was Duke of Savoy from 1528 to 1580.  He chose the location in Piazza Castello because it had an open and sunny position. In 1946 the building became the property of the state and in 1997 it became a Unesco World Heritage Site.

The Cattedrale di Santa Maria e
Santa Cecilia in Cagliari

Travel tip:

The Cathedral in Cagliari in Sardinia, which was the final resting place of Marie Josephine, is in the medieval quarter of the city called Castello. The Cattedrale di Santa Maria and Santa Cecilia was built in the 13th century. Marie Josephine’s brother, Charles Felix, had an imposing monument erected over her grave, where she is described as ‘wise, prudent, kindest’ and ‘Queen of the Gauls’.

More reading:

Charles Emmanuel IV - the King of Sardinia descended from Charles I of England

The first Victor Emmanuel

The reign of Victor Amadeus of Savoy

Also on this day:

1898: The birth of chocolatier Pietro Ferrero

1938: The birth of actor and stuntman Giuliano Gemma

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Vittorio Gassman - actor

Stage and screen star once dubbed ‘Italy’s Olivier’

Vittorio Gassman in the 1948 movie Riso amaro, which
provided him with his breakthrough as a screen actor

Vittorio Gassman, who is regarded as one of the finest actors in the history of Italian theatre and cinema, was born on this day in 1922 in Genoa.

Tall, dark and handsome in a way that made him a Hollywood producer’s dream, Gassman appeared in almost 150 movies but he was no mere matinée idol.

A highly respected stage actor, he possessed a mellifluous speaking voice, a magisterial presence and such range and versatility in his acting talent that the Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham once called him ‘the Lawrence Olivier of Italy’.

He enjoyed a career that spanned five decades. Inevitably, he is best remembered for his screen roles, although by the time he made his movie debut in 1945, he had appeared in more than 40 productions of classic plays by Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, and others.

On screen, his major successes included his portrayal of the handsome scoundrel Walter opposite Silvana Mangano in Giuseppe De Santis's neorealist melodrama Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1948), and several Commedia all’Italiana classics, including Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal On Madonna Street, 1958), La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959) and L'armata brancaleone (1965), and Dino Risi's Il sorpasso (1962).

With Silvana Mangano and Alberto Sordi (right), his co-stars
in the comedy classic La grande guerra (1959)

At this time, his popularity was rivalled only by Alberto Sordi, his co-star in La grande guerra, which shared the Golden Lion prize at Venice in 1959 with a Rossellini film.

Gassman’s portrayal of a blind military man in Risi’s 1974 film Profumo di donna received the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. Al Pacino played the same part and won an Oscar in the 1992 remake, Scent of a Woman.

His flirtation with Hollywood came after he met and fell in love with the American actress Shelley Winters while she was touring Europe.

When Winters returned to Hollywood because of contractual obligations, he followed her there and married her. With his natural charisma and fluency in English he landed a number of roles in Hollywood, including Charles Vidor’s Rhapsody opposite Elizabeth Taylor, and with Gloria Grahame in Maxwell Shane’s film noir The Glass Wall.

He was the only Italian star in the cast of King Vidor's epic War And Peace (1956), produced by Dino De Laurentiis in Rome and for which the Italian composer Nino Rota wrote the music score. Later, Gassman gave distinguished performances in the Robert Altman films A Wedding (1978) and Quintet (1979).

Gassman was the only Italian cast in the 1956 epic War and
Peace, in which he is pictured with Audrey Hepburn

Born to a German father and a Jewish Italian mother, Gassman had aspirations to be a lawyer. But his mother encouraged him to pursue his interest in acting and he remained devoted to his first love, theatre, throughout his career.

A student at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica in Rome, he made his stage debut in Milan in 1942 before moving back to Rome to work at the Teatro Eliseo.

Even after his film debut in 1946 was followed by his breakthrough role in Bitter Rice two years later, he devoted much energy to Luchino Visconti's theatre company in productions such as Tennessee Williams' Un tram che si chiama desiderio (A Streetcar Named Desire) and Come vi piace (As You Like It) by Shakespeare.

In 1952 he co-founded and co-directed the Teatro d'Arte Italiano, which produced the first complete version of Hamlet in Italy.  Later in his career, he created his own company, Teatro Popolare Itinerante, with which he toured Italy staging the works of 20th century authors and playwrights as well as the classics of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and the Greek tragicians. He also founded a theatre school in Florence.

For a while he was the star of a popular TV series, Il Mattatore, which was later turned into a movie.

Married three times - to actresses Nora Ricci, Shelley Winters and Diletta D'Andrea - he also had numerous affairs.  The father of two daughters and two sons - one of whom, Alessandro, became a film actor - Gassman died in June 2000, in Rome, following a heart attack.

The Piazza de Ferrari in the centre of Genoa

Travel tip:

Gassman’s home city of Genoa boasts Italy's largest sea port, its maritime power going back to the 12th and 13th centuries, when the Republic of Genoa ruled the Mediterranean. The old city is fascinating for its large maze of narrow caruggi (streets), opening out occasionally into grand squares such as Piazza de Ferrari, site of an iconic bronze fountain and Teatro Carlo Felice opera house. There is a Romanesque duomo, the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, recognisable for its black-and-white-striped facade and frescoed interior.

The Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatic in Rome

Travel tip:

The Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica "Silvio d'Amico", the dramatic arts academy where Gassman trained as an actor, can be found in Via Bellini, between Villa Borghese and the Parioli district, in an elegant four-storey building. Founded in 1936 by the critic and theatrical theorist Silvio D'Amico, in addition to Gassman it has seen students such as Rossella Falk, Anna Magnani, Paolo Stoppa, Nino Manfredi, Gian Maria Volonté, Monica Vitti, Michele Placido, Nicoletta Braschi and Luca Zingaretti attend lectures and workshops there.

More reading:

Mario Monicelli - the father of Commedia all'Italiana

The genius of Alberto Sordi

How Silvano Mangano's acting talents overcame her critics

Also on this day:

1878: The birth of conductor Tullio Serafin

1886: The birth of vaudeville star Guido Deiro


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Altiero Spinelli - political visionary

Drafted plan for European Union while in Fascist jail

Spinelli and two fellow prisoners were
the first to propose a united Europe

Altiero Spinelli, a politician who is regarded as one of the founding fathers of the European Union, was born on this day in 1907 in Rome.

A lifelong Communist who was jailed for his opposition to the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, he spent much of the Second World War in confinement on the island of Ventotene in the Tyrrhenian Sea, one of an archipelago known as the Pontine Islands.

It was there that he and two prisoners, Ernesto Rossi and Eugenio Colorni, agreed that if the forces of Fascism in Italy and Germany were defeated, the only way to avoid future European wars was for the sovereign nations of the continent to join together in a federation of states.

The document they drew up, which became known as the Ventotene Manifesto, was the first document to argue for a European constitution and formed the basis for the Movimento Federalista Europeo, which Spinelli, Rossi and some 20 others launched at a secret meeting in Milan as soon as they were able to leave their internment camp.

An official mugshot of Spinelli taken
during his confinement on Ventotene

In a nutshell, the Ventotene Manifesto put forward proposals for creating a European federation of states so closely joined together they would no longer be able to go to war with one another. It argued that if all of the European countries retained their complete national sovereignty in the post-war landscape then the possibility of a Third World War would still exist even if the Nazi attempt to establish the domination of the German race in Europe was defeated.

Throughout the 40s and 50s, Spinelli’s MFE was in the vanguard of the drive for European integration and Spinelli himself, who was elected as a Communist MEP in 1979, its most powerful voice.

By stages, he persuaded the Italian government and then the European Parliament of the wisdom of his proposals and his draft document, known as the Spinelli Plan, became the basis for the Single European Act of 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which formally agreed the establishment of a European Union.

Spinelli himself lived to see none of these developments. His health declined in his late 70s and he died in a Rome clinic in May 1986 at the age of 78.

However, his legacy was recognised when the main building of the European Parliament in Brussels was named after him in 1999.

Spinelli was buried on the island of
Ventotene, where his memory is preserved

Although born in Rome, Spinelli spent his early years in Brazil, where his father was the Italian Vice-Consul. On returning home he joined the Italian Communist Party at the age of 17 in 1924, the year of the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, with Fascism now in power and Communists forced underground.

He was arrested in Milan in June 1927, when the Fascists introduced legislation outlawing political opponents. He was convicted and sentenced to 16 years and eight months in prison.

After a decade, he was transferred to Rome and was led to believe he would be released, only to be told he was instead being transferred to confinement status, first on the island of Ponza, later on Ventotene, a smaller island midway between Ponza and Ischia, off the coast of Naples.

His release eventually came in 1943, after Mussolini had been expelled by the Fascist Grand Council and arrested on the orders of the king, Victor Emmanuel III. 

Ponza has some beautiful coastline and was once a haunt
for movie stars and other celebrities

Travel tip:

The island of Ponza has had a chequered history. Inhabited from neolithic to Roman times, it was abandoned during the middle ages due to frequent attacks by Saracens and pirates and not recolonised until the 18th century. Due to its remoteness, it was used as penal colony by several regimes in addition to the Fascists. Mussolini himself was confined there for a brief period after his arrest in 1943. In more recent years, it was developed for tourism and became a fashionable resort for celebrities, including Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. It has become less attractive since the death of several tourists due to falling rocks led to the permanent closure of the main beach, Chiaia di Luna, although there are many other smaller beaches and several picturesque bays.

The picturesque harbour on the island of Ventotene

Travel tip:

Closer to the mainland than Ponza and therefore more easy to reach, Ventotene attracts many tourists during the summer months but remains in some ways a permanent monument to Spinelli, who was returned to the island following his death and interred in the churchyard of the Parrocchia Santa Candida Vergine e Martire. The former prison has been converted into colorful summer homes and visitors can even sleep in Spinelli’s old apartment.  In 2016, Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi met with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande on the island, where they laid a wreath at the Spinelli’s tomb and staged a mini-summit meeting to discuss the future of the EU following the referendum staged in Britain.

More reading:

Victor Emmanuel III appoints Mussolini as prime minister

The murder of Giacomo Matteotti

How Alcide de Gasperi rebuilt Italy


Also on this day:

1834: The birth of opera composer Amilcare Ponchielli

1900: The birth of Gino Lucetti, anarchist famous for botched attempt to kill Mussolini


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Emanuele Filiberto – Duke of Savoy

Ruler who made Turin the capital of Savoy

A  portrait of Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of
Savoy, by an unknown artist

Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, who was nicknamed testa di ferro (iron head) because of his military prowess, died on this day in 1580 in Turin.

After becoming Duke of Savoy he recovered most of the lands his father Charles III had lost to France and Spain and he restored economic stability to Savoy.

Emanuele Filiberto was born in 1528 in Chambery, now part of France. He grew up to become a skilled soldier and served in the army of the emperor Charles V, who was the brother-in-law of his mother, Beatrice of Portugal, during his war against Francis I of France. He distinguished himself by capturing Hesdin in northern France in July 1553.

When he succeeded his father a month later he began the reacquisition of his lands.

His brilliant victory over the French at Saint Quentin in northern France in 1557 on the side of the Spanish helped to consolidate his power in Savoy.

Emanuele Filiberto, as portrayed by the
Italian painter Giorgio Soleri

The peace of Cateau-Cambresis in 1559 ended the wars between Charles V and the French Kings and restored part of the Duchy of Savoy back to Emanuele Filiberto on the understanding that he would marry Margaret of France, the sister of King Henry II. They had one child, Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy, who succeeded him as duke.

Emanuele Filiberto took advantage of the political struggles between the European powers to slowly increase his domain.

The city of Turin was part of the territory he recovered from the French and he moved Savoy’s capital from Chambery to Turin in 1562, fortifying and enlarging the city. He also substituted Italian for Latin as the official language of Savoy.

Just before his death in the city at the age of 52 he was arranging for Savoy to acquire the Marquisate of Saluzzo.

Emanuele Filiberto was buried in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud in Turin Cathedral.

Turin's duomo - the Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista

Travel tip:

Turin Cathedral, or the Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista as the Duomo is known in Italian, was built between 1491 and 1498 on the site of an old Roman theatre. Emanuele Filiberto is one of the members of the House of Savoy buried there, while others are buried in the Basilica di Superga on the outskirts of the city.

Emanuele Filiberto brought the Shroud of Turin (above)
to Turin from Chambery in France

Travel tip:

It is fitting that Emanuele Filiberto is buried in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud as he was responsible for having the Shroud brought from Chambery in France to the Duomo in Turin in 1578 and it has remained there ever since.  A project for the enlargement of the Duomo in order to create a more luxurious home for the Shroud was begun in 1649 by Bernardino Quadri and completed by Guarino Guarini.  In 2002 the Shroud was restored so that the reverse side of the cloth could be photographed for the first time. In 2013 high definition images of the Shroud were put out on the internet and on television. These could be magnified on computers to show details not visible to the naked eye.  Pope Francis urged people to contemplate the Shroud with awe but he stopped short of asserting its authenticity.

More reading:

The Duke of Savoy responsible for a notorious massacre

Why Savoy duke Victor Amadeus I may have been poisoned

Iolanda of Savoy - the banished princess

Also on this day:

1585: The death of composer Andrea Gabrieli

1860: The birth of New York crime fighter Joe Petrosino


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