Gianluca Ginoble – singer

Versatile baritone helps make Il Volo’s magical sound

As a small boy, Gianluca Ginoble used to
sing in the bar owned by his grandfather

Gianluca Ginoble, a member of the hugely successful and award-winning Italian pop and opera trio Il Volo, was born on this day in 1995 in Roseto degli Abruzzi, in the Abruzzo region.

He is the youngest of the trio and the only baritone. The other two singers, Piero Barone and Ignazio Boschetto, are both tenors.

Gianluca’s family lives in Montepagano, a hilltop village overlooking Roseto degli Abruzzi. He is the oldest son of Ercole Ginoble and Eleonora Di Vittorio and has a younger brother, Ernesto.

Gianluca started to sing when he was just three years old with his grandfather, Ernesto, in the Bar Centrale, which Ernesto owns, in the main square of the town.

While still young, he took part in music festivals and competitions in his area, winning some and being distinguished in them all because of his beautiful deep voice.

In 2009, he won the talent show Ti Lascio Una Canzone on Rai Uno, singing  Il mare calmo della sera, which had been Andrea Bocelli's winning song at the 1994 Sanremo Music Festival. He was then just 14 years old.

Ginoble won a TV talent show
when he was just 14 years old

Piero Barone and Ignazio Boschetto also took part in the show and in one episode the trio performed together for the first time, singing the Neapolitan classic, O sole mio.

Afterwards, the director, Roberto Cenci, came up with the idea of putting them together to create music similar to The Three Tenors - Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti - when they occasionally performed together.

They were initially named I Tre Tenorini - The Three Little Tenors -  but this was later changed to The Tryo. In 2010 their name was changed to Il Volo, meaning The Flight.

After producing several successful albums, singing in Italian, English and Spanish, Il Volo won the Sanremo Festival of 2015. They represented Italy in the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, finishing in third place, although they were the overwhelming 'winners' of the televoting element of the contest, with viewers in 14 countries awarding them the maximum 12 points, compared with only four maximums from the national juries.

In 2016, in collaboration with Placido Domingo, the trio released a live album, Notte Magica – A Tribute to the Three Tenors, featuring many of the songs performed by the famous threesome in their first appearance together on the eve of the 1990 World Cup in Italy.

Gianluca Ginoble (left), with Ignazio Boschetto and Piero
Barone on the cover of Il Volo's latest album

Gianluca Ginoble has been described as a ‘lyric baritone with a warm timbre.’ He is able to sing very low notes but also sing at the top of the baritone register with ease.

He has also been labelled a ‘Heldentenor’, a baritone with a strong upper register, suitable for singing roles in operas by Wagner.

Gianluca is known for his impersonations of the pop singer Eros Ramazzotti, but also among his favourite singers are Andrea Bocelli, Frank Sinatra and Mario Lanza.

A football fan, Gianluca used to play for his home town and has been referred to as the 'Maradona of Montepagano'. He supports AS Roma and is a fan of Francesco Totti.

Buy Il Volo's latest album 10 Years: The Best of Il Volo

Roseta degli Abruzzi, notable for its wide, sandy beach, is
sometimes known as Lido delle Rose.

Travel tip:

Roseto degli Abruzzi, where Gianluca Ginoble was born, is a town of the province of Teramo in Abruzzo. It is a beach resort on the Adriatic Sea and with a population of around 24,000 is the largest municipality in the province. A railway line running along the coast connects it with Pescara, about 30km (19 miles) to the south. The city of Teramo is about 30km (19 miles) inland, at the foot of the Gran Sasso mountain range. Roseto is a popular holiday location because of its lovely beach and is sometimes referred to as Lido delle Rose.

One of the ancient medieval gates of Ginoble's home village
of Montepagano, in the hills above Roseta degli Abruzzi

Travel tip:

Montepagano, where the Ginoble family lives, is a medieval hamlet of Roseto degli Abruzzi, on top of a hill overlooking the sea. It is only six kilometres inland from the seaside resort but visitors feel they have stepped back in time when they go through the ancient city gates. There are winding streets with old palazzi and small squares to explore and stunning views of the sea and the mountains at different points. The vineyards below the town produce excellent wines that feature on the menus in the local restaurants. The 15th century Church of Santissima Annunziata, with its 40m (131ft) bell tower, is a major landmark.


More reading:

How grandfather discovered Piero Barone's singing talent

Andrea Bocelli - singer with perfect voice for opera or pop

How Eros Ramazzotti became one of Italy's biggest stars

Also on this day:

1791: The birth of architect Louis Visconti

1881: The birth of Futurist painter Carlo Carrà

1929: The Vatican becomes an independent state

1948: The birth of footballer Carlo Sartori


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10 February

Ernesto Teodoro Moneta – Nobel Prize winner

Supporter of Garibaldi was also an ‘apostle for peace’

Ernesto Teodoro Moneta, who was at times both a soldier and a pacifist, died on this day in 1918.  Moneta was only 15 when he was involved in the Five Days of Milan uprising against the Austrians in 1848, but in later life he became a peace activist.  He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1907, but publicly supported Italy’s entry into the First World War in 1915. On the Nobel Prize official website he is described as ‘a militant pacifist’.  Moneta was born in 1833 to aristocratic parents in Milan. He fought next to his father to defend his family home during the revolt against the Austrians and then went on to attend the military academy in Ivrea.  In 1859 Moneta joined Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand and fought in the Italian army against the Austrians in 1866.  He then seemed to become disillusioned with the struggle for Italian unification and cut short what had been a promising military career.  For nearly 30 years Moneta was editor of the Milan democratic newspaper, Il Secolo. Through the columns of his newspaper he campaigned vigorously for reforms to the army which would strengthen it and reduce waste and inefficiency.  Read more…

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ENI – oil and gas multinational

Italian energy company 67 years old today

The Rome-based multinational oil and gas company ENI, one of the world’s largest industrial concerns, was founded on this day in 1953.  The company, which operates in 79 countries, is valued at $52.2 billion (€47.6 billion) and employs almost 34,000 people.  It is the 11th largest oil company in the world.  Its operations include exploration for and production of oil and natural gas, the processing, transportation and refining of crude oil, the transportation of natural gas, the storage and distribution of petroleum products and the production of base chemicals and plastics.  A wholly state-owned company until 1995, ENI is still to a large extent in the control of the Italian government, which owns just over 30 per cent of the company as a golden share, which includes preferential voting rights, almost four per cent through the state treasury, and a further 26 per cent through the Italian investment bank, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti.  ENI came into being as Italy was rebuilding after the Second World War, which had left its economy in ruins. Enrico Mattei, an industrialist and a Christian Democrat deputy, was assigned the task of winding down the existing state-owned oil company Agip, which was seen as unsustainable.  Read more…

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Andrea Silenzi - footballer

Forward was the first Italian to play in the English Premier League

The footballer Andrea Silenzi, who made history in 1995 when he became the first Italian to be signed by a Premier League club, was born on this day in 1966 in Rome.  A 6ft 3ins centre forward, Silenzi had enjoyed Serie A success with Torino in particular, his form persuading Nottingham Forest to offer £1.8 million - the equivalent of about £3.5 million (€4 million) today - to bring him to England.  When Forest manager Frank Clark proudly announced his new man before the 1995-96 season, it was seen as an important moment for the fledgling Premier League, then only three seasons old.  The Italian League at the time was the most glamorous in Europe, wealthy enough to hire stars from all around the world, including many British players; it was rare for Italian players to move abroad. Yet Silenzi, a teammate of Diego Maradona during a two-year stay with Napoli who had won a call-up to the Italian national team after his 17 goals for Torino in the 1993-94 season, had agreed to come to England.  Forest gave Silenzi a contract worth £360,000 a year, a considerable sum at that time.  Read more…

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Raffaele Lauro – author and politician

Sorrentine's talents include writing, film directing and song

Italian Senator and journalist Raffaele Lauro was born on this day in 1944 in the resort of Sorrento in Campania.  A prolific writer, Lauro has also been an important political figure for more than 30 years.  He was born in Sorrento and as a young man worked as a receptionist at a number of hotels along the Sorrento peninsula.  After finishing school he went to the University of Naples where he was awarded degrees in Political Science, Law and Economics.  Lauro then won a scholarship from Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and studied first at their diplomatic institute and later in Paris.  He later studied for a degree in journalism in Rome and became director of a scientific magazine, moving from there to become a commentator on new technology for Il Tempo in Rome and Il Mattino in Naples. He also studied film directing while living in Rome and taught Law of Mass Communications at Rome University.  His political career began when he was elected as a Councillor for Sorrento in 1980. He went on to become Deputy Mayor and Councillor for finance, personnel and culture, in which role he opened the Public Library of Sorrento.  Read more…


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9 February

NEW - Pietro Nenni - politician

Orphan who became influential leader of Italian Socialist Party

The politician Pietro Sandro Nenni, who was a major figure of the Italian left for five decades, was born on this day in 1891 in Faenza in Emilia-Romagna.  Nenni was general secretary of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) on three occasions and rose to high office in the Italian government, twice serving as foreign affairs minister and several times as deputy prime minister, notably under the progressive Christian Democrat Aldo Moro in the centre-left coalitions of the 1960s.  He was a recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951 but returned the $25,000 that came with the honour in protest at the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.  Born into a peasant family, Nenni lost both his parents before he was five years old and grew up in an orphanage, having been placed there by the aristocratic landowners for whom his father had worked.  His experiences there seemed to stir in him a desire to rebel against authority.  He was only nine years old when, on learning of the assassination of King Umberto I by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci, he is said to have written ‘Viva Bresci’ on a wall in the orphanage.   Read more…

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Vito Antuofermo - world champion boxer

Farmer's son from deep south who won title in Monaco

Vito Antuofermo, who went from working in the fields as a boy to becoming a world champion in the boxing ring, was born on this day in 1953 in Palo del Colle, a small town in Apulia, about 15km (9 miles) inland from the port of Bari.  He took up boxing after his family emigrated to the United States in the mid-1960s.  After turning professional in 1971, he lost only one of his first 36 fights before becoming European light-middleweight champion in January 1976.  In his 49th fight, in June 1979, he beat Argentina's Hugo Corro in Monaco to become the undisputed world champion in the middleweight division.  Antuofermo's success in the ring, where he won 50 of his 59 fights before retiring in 1985, opened the door to a number of opportunities in film and television and he was able to settle in the upper middle-class neighbourhood of Howard Beach in New York, just along the coast from John F Kennedy Airport.  He and his wife Joan have four children - Lauren, Vito Junior, Pasquale and Anthony.  He grew up in rather less comfort. The second child of Gaetano and Lauretta Antuofermo, who were poor tenant farmers, he was working in the fields from as young as seven years old.  Read more…

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Ezechiele Ramin – missionary

Priest from Padua who was murdered in Brazil

Ezechiele Ramin, a Comboni missionary who was shot to death by hired killers after standing up for the rights of peasant farmers and traditional tribesmen in a remote rural area in Brazil, was born on this day in 1953 in Padua.  Ramin was only 32 when he was murdered in July 1985, having worked in the South American country for about a year and a half.  He had already completed missionary assignments in North and Central America, worked to help victims of the Irpinia earthquake in Campania and organised a demonstration against the Camorra in Naples before being posted to Brazil.  He was based in the state of Rondônia, an area in the northwest of Brazil next to the border with Bolivia, where small farmers found themselves oppressed, by legal and illegal means, by wealthy landowners, and where government measures had been introduced to curb the freedom of the indigenous Suruí tribes.  Ramin, an easy-going and popular man who amused himself by making sketches and playing the guitar, tried to solve the problems by arranging for a lawyer, paid for by the Brazilian Catholic Church through the Pastoral Land Commission, to act on behalf of the peasant farmers to see that their legal rights were properly observed.  Read more…

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Ferdinando Carulli - classical guitarist and composer

Neapolitan wrote first guide to playing the instrument

The composer Ferdinando Carulli, who published the first complete method for playing the classical guitar as well as writing more than 400 works for the instrument, was born on this day in 1770 in Naples.  Carulli was also influential in changing the design of the guitar, which had a smaller body and produced a less resonant sound when he started out, to something much more like the classical guitars of today.  The son of an intellectual advisor to the Naples Jurisdiction, Carulli first trained as a cellist and received instruction in musical theory from a local priest.  He became interested in the guitar in his 20s and became so enthusiastic about the instrument he decided to devote himself to it entirely.  The guitar was little played and there were no guitar teachers in Naples in the late 18th century, so Carulli had to devise his own method of playing.  In time, he began to give concerts in Naples, playing some pieces of his own composition. These were popular, attracting large audiences who enjoyed the different sound that the guitar produced.  This encouraged Carulli to venture further afield and he engaged on a tour of Europe.  Read more…

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Pope Gregory XV

Legally-trained pontiff was against witchcraft and for secret ballots

Gregory XV, who was christened Alessandro Ludovisi, became Pope on this day in 1621.  He was the last Pope to issue a papal ordinance against witchcraft with his ‘Declaration against Magicians and Witches’, put out in March 1623.  He was already 67 years of age and in a weak state of health when he was chosen as Pope and relied heavily on his 25-year-old nephew, Ludovico Ludovisi, to assist him in his duties.  Born in Bologna in 1554, the young Alessandro Ludovisi was educated at a Jesuit college in Rome before going to Bologna University to study law.  He worked in various roles for the church until he was appointed Archbishop of Bologna in 1612, having at some stage been ordained.  In 1616 he was sent by Pope Paul V to mediate between Charles Emmanuel 1, Duke of Savoy and Philip III of Spain, who were involved in a dispute. The Pope elevated him to the rank of Cardinal in the same year.  He went to Rome after the death of Pope Paul V to take part in the conclave. He was chosen as Pope on February 9, 1621, the last Pope to be elected by acclamation.  His nephew, Ludovico, was made a cardinal.  Read more…


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Pietro Nenni - politician

Pietro Nenni led the Italian Socialist
Party for 22 years in total

Orphan who became influential leader of Italian Socialist Party

The politician Pietro Sandro Nenni, who was a major figure of the Italian left for five decades, was born on this day in 1891 in Faenza in Emilia-Romagna.

Nenni was general secretary of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) on three occasions and rose to high office in the Italian government, twice serving as foreign affairs minister and several times as deputy prime minister, notably under the progressive Christian Democrat Aldo Moro in the centre-left coalitions of the 1960s.

He was a recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951 but returned the $25,000 that came with the honour in protest at the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Born into a peasant family, Nenni lost both his parents before he was five years old and grew up in an orphanage, having been placed there by the aristocratic landowners for whom his father had worked.

His experiences there seemed to stir in him a desire to rebel against authority.  He was only nine years old when, on learning of the assassination of King Umberto I by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci, he is said to have written ‘Viva Bresci’ on a wall in the orphanage.

Nenni volunteered to fight for his country
in the First World War

As soon as he was old enough to make his own way in the world he became involved in protest movements. By the age of 16 he was editing a Republican party newspaper in nearby Forlì, where the local Socialist newspaper was edited by Benito Mussolini.  He and Mussolini would become linked when both were arrested and briefly jailed after taking part in a strike against the Italo-Turkish War in Libya.

Both he and Mussolini supported Italy’s entry in the First World War, however. After the conflict, in which Nenni volunteered, was wounded, and returned to frontline service again, their paths diverged.

Both formed fascii - the Italian word in use at the time for political groups - but where Mussolini’s evolved into what would become the National Fascist Party, Nenni’s was soon dissolved. In the same year - 1921 - as Mussolini’s Fascists came into being, Nenni left the Italian Republican Party and joined the PSI, from which a breakaway group had recently left to form the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

Their opposition could not have been more clear when Mussolini was appointed prime minister in 1922 and Nenni, by now editor of the PSI newspaper Avanti!, attacked Mussolini’s ideology on a regular basis.

Mussolini looked for a way to silence Nenni, as he did with most of his political opponents, and he found one in 1925 when Nenni published a booklet whipping up anti-Fascist sentiment following the murder of Socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti.  Mussolini had Nenni arrested for anti-Fascist activity, and though he was soon released it was not long before Avanti!’s offices were damaged in an arson attack and a law brought in to ban its publication.

Nenni served as deputy prime minister in three
governments led by the Christian Democrat Aldo Moro

Nenni fled the country and spent the next 17 years in exile, first in France and then Spain, where he fought on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War as co-founder of the Garibaldi Brigade.  He returned to France in 1943, by then under Nazi occupation, and was arrested by the Germans. He was held first in Vichy but then returned to Italy to continue his imprisonment on the island of Ponza.

After Italy was liberated later in 1943, he was able to resume his political career, his determination to bring about change hardening after learning of the death of his daughter, Vittoria, who had been taken prisoner by the Nazi regime earlier in the Second World War.

He became leader of the PSI and after the surrender of Italy to the Allies became a member of the National Liberation Committee, the political element of the Italian Partisans.  He was deputy prime minister in the interim government of Ferruccio Parri and the first government of Alcide De Gasperi. He became minister for foreign affairs in  the second De Gasperi government, the first administration after Italians voted to make their country a republic in 1946, for which Nenni had been a prominent campaigner.

For several years, the PSI worked closely with the Communists but Nenni broke with them again after Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary, which was an embarrassment to Nenni not only as a recipient of the Stalin Prize but also because he had returned from a meeting with the Russian leader before the invasion and proclaimed Stalin as a man of peace.

As a consequence, Nenni gradually shifted his party’s support away from the Soviet Union in favour of NATO, of which he advocated membership.

After the overwhelming victory of De Gaspari’s Christian Democrats in the divisive 1948 elections, it was not until the 1960s that Nenni’s Socialists were part of government again.  Now a veteran political figure in his 70s, he served as deputy leader under Aldo Moro in three centre-left coalitions that he had helped to broker.

Following poor results in the 1968 elections, Nenni began to release his grip on the PSI and resigned as leader the following year. He was made a senator for life in 1970 but his bid to become President of the Republic in 1971 was unsuccessful. He died in 1980, aged 88.

Faenza's cathedral still has a simple brick facade, and as
such is regarded as an unfinished project

Travel tip:

Faenza is in the Emilia-Romagna region, about 50km (31 miles) southeast of Bologna and 35km (22 miles) southwest of Ravenna. The city is famous for the manufacture of a type of decorative majolica-ware known as faience. It is also home to the International Museum of Ceramics, which has examples of ceramics from ancient times, the Middle Ages and the 18th and 19th centuries as well as displaying work by important contemporary artists. The museum is in Viale Baccarini.  Although the origins of the city go back further, Faenza preserves traces of its Roman rectangular plan, surrounded by 15th-century walls. Notable landmarks include the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where the city’s cathedral, begun in 1474 by Giuliano da Maiano, can be found. Construction finished in 1515 but was never completed, inasmuch as the front of the building is plain brick, with no stone or marble facade.

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A Linea A metro train crosses the Ponte Pietro Nenni,
which carries trains over the River Tiber in Rome

Travel tip:

Not all architecture in Rome is classical. One example is the Ponte Pietro Nenni, which spans the Tiber as a link between the Flaminio and Prati districts and is known by many as the Metro Bridge, on account of its primary purpose, which was to carry Linea A of the Rome metro from one side of the river to the other in the only section of the line that is above ground.  It carries vehicular traffic on both sides of the metro tracks. The bridge, a concrete cantilever structure with two supporting V-shaped piles, was designed by the architect Luigi Moretti and the engineer Silvano Zorzi and built between 1969 and 1972. It was inaugurated in 1980 and dedicated to Nenni, who died a month before the inauguration.

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More reading:

Giuseppe Saragat - the Socialist leader who became president

The kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro

Giacomo Matteotti - the martyr of freedom

Books:

Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks

Also on this day:

1621: Alessandro Ludovisi becomes Pope Gregory XV

1770: The birth of classical guitarist Ferdinando Carulli

1953: The birth of boxer Vito Antuofermo

1953: The birth of missionary Ezechiele Ramin

(Picture credits: Top portrait by senato.it; Faenza cathedral by Tecsis; metro train by Lucaf1; via Wikimedia Commons)

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