8 July

Gian Giorgio Trissino – dramatist and poet

Innovative playwright spotted the potential of Palladio

Literary theorist, philologist, dramatist and poet Gian Giorgio Trissino was born on this day in 1478 in Vicenza.  As well as his contribution to Italian culture, Trissino is remembered for educating and helping Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, a young mason he discovered working on his villa in Cricoli, just outside Vicenza.  He took the young man on two visits to Rome that profoundly influenced his development into a great architect and he gave him the name Palladio, after the Greek goddess of wisdom, Pallas Athene. Trissino had been born into a wealthy family and was able to travel widely, studying Greek in Milan and philosophy in Ferrara. He was part of Niccolò Machiavelli’s literary circle in Florence before he settled in Rome, where he associated with the humanist and poet, Pietro Bembo. He became a close friend of the dramatist, Giovanni Rucella, and served Popes Leo X and Clement VII. Read more…

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Ernest Hemingway – American novelist

War wounds sustained in Italy inspire the great American novel

An 18-year-old American Red Cross driver named Ernest Hemingway was severely wounded by shrapnel from an Austrian mortar shell on this day in 1918 at Fossalta di Piave in the Veneto. Hemingway was taken to a field hospital in Treviso, from where he was transferred by train to a hospital in Milan. While in the hospital and recovering after two operations, he fell in love with his nurse, 26-year-old Agnes von Kurowsky.  His experiences of being wounded in Italy and falling in love later inspired him to write the novel, A Farewell to Arms.  On leaving school Hemingway had worked briefly as a reporter for The Kansas City Star before leaving for the Italian front in World War One to enlist as an ambulance driver.  While stationed at Fossalta di Piave he was bringing chocolates and cigarettes to the men on the front line when he was seriously injured by mortar fire. Despite his own wounds, Hemingway assisted some Italian soldiers to safety, for which he later received the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery.  After his release from hospital, he returned to the United States in January 1919. Read more…

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Death of the poet Shelley

Dramatic storm took the life of young literary talent

English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley died on this day in 1822 while travelling from Livorno in Tuscany to Lerici in Liguria in his sailing boat, the Don Juan.  Just a month before his 30th birthday, the brilliant poet of the Romantic era drowned during a sudden, dramatic storm in the Gulf of La Spezia that caused his boat to sink.  His body was later washed ashore and, in keeping with the quarantine regulations at the time, was cremated on the beach bear Viareggio on the Tuscan coast.   Shelley had been living with his wife, the writer Mary Shelley, at a rented villa in Lerici and was returning to his home from Livorno, where he had been arranging the start up of a new literary magazine to be called The Liberal.  He had set sail with two other people on board the Don Juan at about noon on Monday 8 July.  His companions were a retired naval officer, Edward Ellerker Williams, and a boatboy, Charles Vivien.  A friend had watched Shelley’s departure until he was about ten miles out of the harbour and then there had been a storm and he had lost sight of the boat.  Read more…

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Artemisia Gentileschi – painter

Brilliant artist who survived torture by thumbscrews 

Artemisia Gentileschi, who followed in the footsteps of the Baroque painter Caravaggio by painting biblical scenes with dramatic realism, was born on this day in 1593 in Rome.  As a young woman she was raped by an artist friend of her father who had been entrusted with teaching her, and when he was brought to trial by her father she was forced to give evidence under torture.  This event shaped her life and she poured out her horrific experiences into brutal paintings, such as her two versions of Judith Slaying Holofernes.  Gentileschi was notable for pictures of strong and suffering women from myths, allegories, and the Bible. Some of her best known themes are Susanna and the Elders, Judith Slaying Holofernes, the most famous of which, painted between 1614 and 1620, is in the Uffizi in Florence, and Judith and Her Maidservant.  She had an ability to produce convincing depictions of the female figure, anywhere between nude and fully clothed, that few male painters could match.  Read more…

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Gian Giorgio Trissino – dramatist and poet

Innovative playwright spotted the potential of Palladio

Vincenzo Catena's portrait of the
dramatist Gian Giorgio Trissino

Literary theorist, philologist, dramatist and poet Gian Giorgio Trissino was born on this day in 1478 in Vicenza.

As well as his contribution to Italian culture, Trissino is remembered for educating and helping Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, a young mason he discovered working on his villa in Cricoli, just outside Vicenza.

He took the young man on two visits to Rome that profoundly influenced his development into a great architect and he gave him the name Palladio, after the Greek goddess of wisdom, Pallas Athene.

Trissino had been born into a wealthy family and was able to travel widely, studying Greek in Milan and philosophy in Ferrara. He was part of Niccolò Machiavelli’s literary circle in Florence before he settled in Rome, where he associated with the humanist and poet, Pietro Bembo. He became a close friend of the dramatist, Giovanni Rucella, and served Popes Leo X and Clement VII.

Trissino’s most important dramatic work was the blank verse tragedy Sofonisba, published in 1524 and first performed in 1562.

Andrea Palladio was Gian
Giorgio Tressino's protégé

The play was based on a story about the Carthaginian wars by the Roman historian Livy. It employed the dramatic techniques of Sophocles and Euripides. It was the first time blank verse had been used extensively in Italian drama and many later European tragedies were modelled on it. The play was translated into French and performed in 1556 at the Château de Blois.

Trissino later wrote a verse comedy based on a work by the Roman playwright Plautus. He wrote the first Italian odes modelled on the verse of the Greek poet, Pindar, and the first Italian versions of the Horatian ode.

Trissino died in Rome in 1550. An edition of his collected works was published in Verona in 1729.

Vicenza's Piazza dei Signori

Travel tip:

Vicenza, where Gian Giorgio Trissoni was born, has become known as the city of his protégé, Andrea Palladio, and the buildings the great architect designed are all around the city. There is a statue of Palladio close to Piazza dei Signori, the main square. Palazzo del Valmarana and Loggia del Capitaniato are examples of his work that can be seen close to the centre.

Andrea Palladio worked as a stonemason on the Villa
Trissoni, which can be found at Cricoli, near Vicenza

Travel tip:

The Villa Trissoni is located at Cricoli, just outside the centre of Vicenza. Most of it was built in the 16th century and it is associated with Andrea Palladio, who worked on it as a mason. Since 1994 the villa has been part of a World Heritage Site designated to protect the Palladian buildings of Vicenza. Gian Giorgio Trissoni was personally responsible for organising the remodelling of the villa at Cricoli, which he had inherited from his father.

Read more:

Andrea Palladio - the world's famous architect

The poet who was Lucrezia Borgia's lover

Leo X - visionary Renaissance pope

More reading:

1593: The birth of painter Artemisia Gentileschi

1822: The death of the English poet Shelley

1918: American author Ernest Hemingway injured by Austrian mortar fire in the Veneto

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7 July

1990 World Cup - Italy’s consolation prize

Azzurri beat England for third place

Italy beat England 2-1 in Bari to claim third place in the World Cup finals, of which they were the host nation, on this day in 1990.  It was a small consolation for the team, managed by Azeglio Vicini, who had played some of the best football of all the competing nations to reach the semi-finals, only to be held to a 1-1 draw by Argentina in Naples and then lose the match on a penalty shoot-out.  Their heartbreak mirrored that suffered by England, who had also suffered a defeat on penalties in their semi-final against West Germany in Turin.  Many neutrals believed that Italy and England would have been more worthy finalists, particularly in retrospect after West Germany had beaten Argentina by a penalty five minutes from the end of 90 minutes in a match of cynical fouls and attritional football that is seen as the poorest World Cup final in the competition’s history.  The play-off for third place lacked the intensity of a final, reflecting the heavy weight of disappointment each set of players was carrying.  Yet it was important to the Azzurri to finish on a high note in front of a crowd of 51,426. Read more…

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Vittorio De Sica - film director

Oscar-winning maestro behind 1948 classic Bicycle Thieves

Vittorio De Sica, the director whose 1948 film Bicycle Thieves is regarded still as one of the greatest movies of all time, was born on this day in 1901 in Sora in Lazio.  Bicycle Thieves, a story set in the poverty of post-War Rome, was a masterpiece of Italian neorealism, the genre of which the major figures, in addition to De Sica, were Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini and Giuseppe de Santis and, to a smaller degree, Federico Fellini.  The movie was one of four that landed Academy Awards for De Sica. Another of his great neorealist movies, Shoeshine (1948), won an honorary Oscar, while Bicycle Thieves won a special award as an outstanding foreign language film in the days before the Best Foreign Language Film category was introduced.  De Sica would later win Oscars in that section for Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) – a comedy starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni – and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970).   His Marriage Italian Style (1964), also starring Loren and Mastroianni, also earned a nomination as Best Foreign Language Film and for Loren as Best Actress. Loren did win Best Actress for her role in his 1961 movie La Ciociara, which was released outside Italy as Two Women.  Read more...

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Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola - architect

Legacy of beautiful Renaissance buildings throughout Italy

One of the great architects of the 16th century, Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, died on this day in 1573 in Rome.  Often referred to simply as Vignola, the architect left the world with a wealth of beautiful buildings and two acknowledged masterpieces, the Villa Farnese at Caprarola and the Church of the Gesù in Rome.  Along with Andrea Palladio and Sebastiano Serlio, Vignola was responsible for spreading the style of the Italian Renaissance throughout Europe.  He was born at Vignola near Modena in Emilia-Romagna in 1507. He began his career as an architect in Bologna and then went to Rome to make drawings of Roman temples. He was invited to Fontainbleu  to work for King Francois I, where it is believed he first met the Bolognese architect, Serlio.  Back in Italy he designed the Palazzo Bocchi in Bologna and then moved to Rome to work for Pope Julius III. He later worked alongside the artist Michelangelo, who greatly influenced his architectural style.  Read more...

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6 July

Goffredo Mameli - writer

Young poet wrote the stirring words of Italian national anthem

Patriot and poet Goffredo Mameli died on this day in 1849 in Rome.  A follower of political revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini and a supporter of the Risorgimento movement, Mameli is the author of the words of the Italian national anthem, Fratelli d’Italia.  Mameli was the son of a Sardinian admiral and was born in Genoa in 1827 where his father was commanding the fleet of the Kingdom of Sardinia.  As he grew up he became interested in the theories of Mazzini and he joined a political movement that supported the idea of a united Italy.  Mameli was a 20-year-old student when he wrote the words that are still sung today by Italians as their national anthem.  They were sung to music for the first time in November 1847 to celebrate the visit of King Charles Albert of Sardinia to Genoa.  The anthem is known in Italian as L’inno di Mameli or Mameli’s hymn.  Mameli became involved in the movement to expel the Austrians from Italy and joined Garibaldi’s army. He died after being accidentally injured in the leg by the bayonet of one of his colleagues during a battle.  Read more…

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Pietro Valpreda - the ‘bomber’ who never was

Jailed suspect acquitted after 16 years

Pietro Valpreda, who was arrested following the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan in December 1969 and was held for 16 years awaiting trial as a terrorist before being acquitted, died on this day in 2002.  The Piazza Fontana bombing killed 17 people and injured 88 others after a device was detonated inside the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura on Piazza Fontana, which is just a few streets away from the Duomo in the centre of Milan.  Valpreda was an anarchist sympathiser but insisted he was at home on the afternoon of the incident, being cared for by an aunt, who swore under police questioning that her nephew, who was a dancer with a vaudeville company, was suffering from flu.  He was charged, however, on the evidence of a taxi driver, Cornelio Rolandi, who said he dropped a man fitting Valpreda’s description in the vicinity of the bank before the bomb went off and picked him up again afterwards, minus a briefcase he had been carrying when he dropped him.  Despite considering Rolandi’s evidence to be unreliable on the grounds of inconsistencies in his description of events, prosecuting magistrates held Valpreda. Read more...

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Cesare Mori - Mafia buster

'Iron Prefect' who 'eliminated' the Cosa Nostra

Cesare Mori, the prefect of police credited with crushing the Sicilian Mafia during the inter-War years, died on this day in 1942 at the age of 70.  At the time of his death he was living in retirement in Udine, in some respects a forgotten figure in a country in the grip of the Second World War.  Yet during his police career his reputation as a hard-line law enforcer was such that the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini personally appointed him as prefect of Palermo, charged with breaking the Mafia’s hold over Sicily and re-establishing the authority of the State by any means necessary.  Mori was born in Pavia in Lombardy, by then part of the new Kingdom of Italy, in 1871.  His upbringing was difficult.  His first years were spent living in an orphanage, although his parents were not dead and looked after him after he had turned seven.  He attended the Military Academy in Turin and was set on a career in the army but after marrying Angelina Salvi in 1897 he quit and joined the police, taking up a posting in Ravenna.  His first experience of Sicily came with a brief posting to Castelvetrano, near Trapani, where he captured a notorious bandit, Paolo Grisalfi, before moving to Florence in 1915.  Read more...

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