12 April

Giorgio Cantarini - actor

Child star of Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful

Giorgio Cantarini, who delivered an award-winning performance in the triple Oscar-winning movie Life Is Beautiful when he was just five years old, was born on this day in 1992 in Orvieto. Cantarini was cast as Giosuè, the four-year-old son of Roberto Benigni’s character, Guido, in the 1997 film, which brought Academy Awards for Benigni as Best Actor and, as the director, for Best Foreign Film. For his own part, Cantarini was rewarded for a captivating performance in the poignant story with a Young Artist award. Three years later, in Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning blockbuster Gladiator, Cantarini was given another coveted part as the son of Russell Crowe’s character, Maximus. Cantarini went to an audition for the part of Giosuè after an uncle read a description in a newspaper article of the kind of child Benigni wanted and told him he was a perfect match. Read more…

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Marcello Lippi - World Cup winning coach

Former Juventus manager also won the Champions League

Marcello Lippi, one of Italy's most successful football managers and a World Cup winner in 2006, was born on this day in 1948 in Viareggio on the Tuscan coast, where he still lives. Lippi, who as Juventus coach won five Serie A titles and the Champions League before taking the reins of the national team, subsequently had a successful career in China, where his Guangzhou Evergrande team won three Chinese Super League championships and the Asian Champions League. He is the only manager to have won both the European Champions League and the Asian Champions League. After winning his third league title with Guangzhou in November 2015 he announced his retirement, claiming he was too old to continue coaching.  He stayed at the club as director of football but resigned from that position the following February. Read more...

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Flavio Briatore - entrepreneur

From clothing to luxury resorts via Formula One

The colourful and controversial entrepreneur Flavio Briatore was born on this day in 1950 in Verzuolo, a large village in the Italian Alps near Saluzzo in Piedmont. Briatore is best known for his association with the Benetton clothing brand and, through their sponsorship, Formula One motor racing, but his business interests have extended well beyond the High Street and the race track. His empire includes his exclusive Sardinian beach club Billionaire, Twiga beach clubs in Tuscany and Apulia, the Lion under the Sun spa resort in Kenya, the upmarket Sumosan, Twiga and Cipriani restaurants, and the Billionaire Couture menswear line. Briatore was also for three years co-owner with former F1 chief executive Bernie Ecclestone and steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal of the English football club Queen’s Park Rangers. Read more…

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Caffarelli – opera singer

Tempestuous life of a talented male soprano

The castrato singer who performed under the stage name of Caffarelli was born Gaetano Maiorano on this day in 1710 in Bitonto in the province of Bari in Apulia. Caffarelli had a reputation for being temperamental and for fighting duels with little provocation, but he was popular with audiences and was able to amass a large fortune for himself. It is thought that his stage name, Caffarelli, may have been taken from his teacher, Caffaro, who gave him music lessons when he was a child. When Maiorano was ten years old he was given the income from two vineyards owned by his grandmother to enable him to study music. The legal document drawn up mentioned that the young boy wished to be castrated and become a eunuch. Maiorano became a pupil of Nicola Porpora, the composer and singing teacher, who is reputed to have told him eventually there was no more he could be taught because he was the greatest singer in Europe. Read more…

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Giorgio Cantarini - actor

Child star of Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful

Cantarini's performance as Roberto Benigni's son in Life Is
Beautiful captivated cinema audiences

Giorgio Cantarini, who delivered an award-winning performance in the triple Oscar-winning movie Life Is Beautiful when he was just five years old, was born on this day in 1992 in Orvieto.

Cantarini was cast as Giosuè, the four-year-old son of Roberto Benigni’s character, Guido, in the 1997 film, which brought Academy Awards for Benigni as Best Actor and, as the director, for Best Foreign Film. For his own part, Cantarini was rewarded for a captivating performance in the poignant story with a Young Artist award.

Three years later, in Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning blockbuster Gladiator, Cantarini was given another coveted part as the son of Russell Crowe’s character, Maximus.

Born to parents who separated soon after his fifth birthday, Cantarini went to an audition for the part of Giosuè after an uncle read a description in a newspaper article of the kind of child Benigni wanted and told him he was a perfect match.

Cantarini remains a close friend of
the director Roberto Benigni (above)

Cantarini recalled in an interview in 2018 that the audition consisted simply of a conversation with Benigni, with no acting involved. Once shooting began, he was told what to do on a scene-by-scene basis.

Despite the success of Life Is Beautiful and Gladiator, and the acclaim he received, Cantarini went back to school with no thought of becoming an actor when he grew up. His ambition was to become a footballer. Once he was in high school, however, his friends and teachers convinced him he should not let his acting talent go to waste.

After appearing in a small number of films and tv dramas - plus an appearance on the the popular tv show Ballando con le Stelle - he joined hundreds of hopefuls in applying for a place at the prestigious Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia - the national film school - in Rome and to his surprise and delight was accepted as one of just six boys and six girls to be admitted in 2012.

After graduation, he was immediately cast in the lead role of AUS- adotta uno studente - Adopt a Student - the first online-only series produced by Rai.

Following a period working in Paris, he returned to Italy in 2016 to perform, direct and produce Harold Pinter's play The Dumb Waiter for theatres in Rome and Vicenza, in collaboration with his friend and colleague, Miguel Gobbo Diaz.

Giorgio Cantarini today

In 2017, he played the lead role in Il dottore dei pesci - The Fish Doctor - an Italo-American short film directed by Susanna Della Sala, which was presented at numerous film festivals in Europe and Canada.

At the beginning of 2018 he moved to New York to study at the New York Film Academy and later in the year  was selected for the cast of Lamborghini - the Legend, directed by Bobby Moresco, filmed in Italy and starring Antonio Banderas and Alec Baldwin.

Cantarini’s home in Italy is in Viterbo in Lazio, where his mother and brother Lorenzo live. He remains in touch with Roberto Benigni, who provided a reference for his application for a visa to work in the United States.

Travel tip:

Orvieto, where Cantarini was born, is a small city in Umbria with a population of just 20,000, built on the top of a cliff of volcanic tuff stone. Surrounded by defensive walls built by the Etruscans, it makes an imposing sight. Situated about 120km (75 miles) north of Rome, it boasts one of Italy’s finest cathedrals in Italy - the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta - with a stunningly beautiful Romanesque Gothic facade inlaid with gold mosaics fronting a building constructed from alternate layers of black and white marble.  The city’s medieval streets are known as a cultural paradise - busy with cafés and restaurants, bookshops, artisans' workshops and antique emporia.

Travel tip:

Viterbo, where Cantarini now lives when in Italy, is the largest town in northern Lazio, situated about 80km (50 miles) north of Rome. It is regarded as one of the best preserved medieval towns in Italy, with many buildings in the San Pellegrino quarter featuring external staircases. The town’s impressive Palazzo dei Papi, was used as the papal palace for about 20 years during the 13th century. Completed in about 1266, the palace has a large audience hall, which connects with a loggia raised above street level by a barrel vault.

More reading:

How Life Is Beautiful turned Roberto Benigni into a household name

Dino De Laurentiis – the Campanian pasta seller helped make Italian cinema famous 

The brilliance of Life Is Beautiful cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli

Also on this day:

1710: The birth of the famed castrato opera singer Caffarelli

1948: The birth of World Cup-winning coach Marcello Lippi

1950: The birth of controversial entrepreneur Flavio Briatore



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11 April

Primo Levi - Auschwitz survivor

Celebrated writer killed in fall in Turin

Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor who wrote a number of books chronicling his experiences of the Holocaust, died on this day in Turin in 1987.  He was 67 years old and his body was found at the foot of a stairwell in the apartment building where he lived, having seemingly fallen from the third floor. A chemist by profession, Levi died in the same building in which he was born in July 1919, in Corso Re Umberto in the Crocetta district of the northern Italian city.  Apart from his periods of incarceration, he lived in the same apartment, a gift from his father to his mother, almost all his life. His death was officially recorded as suicide, the verdict supported by his son's statement that his father had suffered from depression in the months leading to his death.  Read more…

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Rachele Mussolini - wife of Il Duce

Marriage survived 30 years despite dictator's infidelity

Rachele Mussolini, the woman who stayed married to Italy’s former Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini for 30 years despite his simultaneous relationship with his mistress, Claretta Petacci, and numerous affairs, was born on this day in 1890. The daughter of Agostino Guidi, a peasant farmer, and Anna Lombardi, she was born, like Benito Mussolini, in Predappio, a small town in what is now Emilia-Romagna.  They met for the first time when the future self-proclaimed Duce had a temporary teaching job at her school. They were married in December 1915 in a civil ceremony in Treviglio, near Milan, although by that time she had been his mistress for several years, having given birth to his eldest daughter, Edda, in 1910.  Mussolini had actually married another woman, Ida Dalser, in 1914 but the marriage had broken down despite her bearing him a son. Read more...

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Battle of Ravenna

Thousands die in pointless conflict of the Italian Wars

French forces inflicted appalling casualties upon a largely Spanish Holy League army on this day in 1512 at Molinaccio just outside Ravenna. The French, under the command of their brilliant 21-year-old leader Gaston de Foix, had taken Brescia in Lombardy by storm in February and then marched on Ravenna intending to provoke the papal Holy League army into battle. It was estimated that the French lost 4,500 men and the Holy League 9,000 in this battle, part of the War of the League of Cambrai, which took place during the long period of the Italian Wars. The victory failed to help the French secure northern Italy and they were forced to withdraw from the region entirely by August of the same year. De Foix himself was killed. Read more…

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10 April

Agostino Bertani - physician and politician

Compassionate doctor was Garibaldi’s friend and strategist

Agostino Bertani, who worked with Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi to liberate Italy, died on this day in 1886 in Rome. He had been a surgeon in Garibaldi’s corps in the Austro-Sardinian War of 1859 and personally treated Garibaldi’s wounds after the military leader lost the Battle of Aspromonte in 1862 and eventually would become one of his major strategists in planning the historic Expedition of the Thousand, the military operation that would eventually unite the peninsula. Bertani became a hero to the Italian people for his work organising ambulances and medical services during Garibaldi’s campaigns and he became a close friend to the military leader.  Read more...

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From Rome to the North Pole

Aeronautical history launched from Ciampino airport

On this day in 1926, an airship took off from Ciampino airport in Rome on the first leg of what would be an historic journey culminating in the first flight over the North Pole. The expedition was the brainchild of the Norwegian polar explorer and expedition leader Roald Amundsen, but the pilot was the airship's designer, aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile, who had an Italian crew. They were joined in the project by millionaire American explorer Lincoln Ellsworth who, along with the Aero Club of Norway, financed the trip which was known as the Amundsen-Ellsworth 1926 Transpolar Flight.  The trip was fraught with difficulties but eventually the airship crossed the pole on May 11. Read more…

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Giovanni Aldini - physicist

Professor thought to given Mary Shelley the idea for Frankenstein

The physicist and professor Giovanni Aldini, whose experiment in trying to bring life to a human corpse is thought to have inspired Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, was born on this day in 1762 in Bologna. The nephew of Luigi Galvani, who discovered the phenomenon that became known as galvinism, one of Aldini’s goals in life was to build on his uncle’s work in the field of bioelectricity. Galvani’s discovery that the limbs of a dead frog could be made to move by the stimulation of electricity sparked an intellectual argument with his rival physicist Alessandro Volta. Aldini essentially picked up his uncle’s mantle and was determined to discover whether the effect of an electrical impulse on the body of a frog could be reproduced in a human being. His most famous experiment came in 1803, when he was given permission to test his electrical equipment on the corpse of George Forster shortly after he had been hanged at Newgate Prison in London. Read more…

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The Moby Prince disaster

Tragic toll of collision between ferry and tanker

The worst maritime catastrophe to occur in Italian waters in peacetime took place on this day in 1991 when a car ferry collided with an oil tanker near the harbour entrance at Livorno on the coast of Tuscany. The collision sparked a fire that claimed the lives of 140 passengers and crew and left only one survivor. The vessels involved were the MV Moby Prince, a car ferry en route from Liverno to Olbia, the coastal city in north-east Sardinia, and the 330-metres long oil tanker, Agip Abruzzo. The ferry departed Livorno shortly after 22.00 for a journey scheduled to last eight and a half hours but had been under way for only a few minutes when it struck the Agip Abruzzo, which was at anchor near the harbour mouth. Read more…

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