28 January

Gianluigi Buffon – goalkeeper

Record-breaking footballer still playing at 43

Juventus goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon was born on this day in 1978 in Carrara in Tuscany.  Widely considered by football experts at his peak to be the best goalkeeper in the world, he is known for his outstanding ability to stop shots.  He holds the record for the most clean sheets, both in Serie A and the national side, and he has won numerous awards.  Now aged 43, Buffon retired from international football after Italy failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup finals in Russia, having played a record 176 times for the Azzurri.  Buffon, whose nickname is Gigi, was born into a family of athletes. His mother, Maria, was a discus thrower and his father, Adriano, was a weightlifter. His two sisters both played volleyball for the Italian national team and his uncle was a prominent basketball player.  His grandfather’s cousin, Lorenzo Buffon, was also a top goalkeeper, playing for AC Milan and Italy, representing his country at the 1962 FIFA World Cup.  Gianluigi Buffon began his career with the Parma youth team at the age of 13 as an outfield player. When both of the team’s goalkeepers were injured he was asked to deputise in goal and within two weeks he had been promoted to first team 'keeper.  Read more…

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Simonetta Vespucci – Renaissance beauty

Noblewoman hailed as embodiment of female perfection

Simonetta Vespucci, a young noblewoman who became the most sought-after artist’s model in Florence in the mid-15th century, is thought to have been born on this day in 1453.  Born Simonetta Cattaneo to a Genoese family, she was taken to Florence in 1469 when she married Marco Vespucci, an eligible Florentine nobleman who was a distant cousin of the explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci.  She quickly became the talk of Florentine society. Soon known as La Bella Simonetta, she captivated painters and young noblemen alike with her beauty.  It is said that, shortly before her arrival, a group of artists had been discussing their idea of the characteristics of perfect female beauty and were stunned, on meeting Simonetta, to discover that their idealised woman actually existed.  The Medici brothers, Lorenzo and Giuliano, were said to have been besotted with her, Giuliano in particular, while she is thought to have been the model for several of Sandro Botticelli’s portraits of women.  The female figure standing on a shell in Botticelli’s masterpiece, The Birth of Venus, so closely resembles the woman in the paintings accepted as being Simonetta Vespucci that some critics insist he must have based his Venus on her.   Read more…

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Giovanni Alfonso Borelli – physiologist and physicist

Neapolitan was the first to explain movement

The scientist who was the first to explain muscular movement according to the laws of statics and dynamics, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, was born on this day in 1608 in Naples.  Borelli was also the first to suggest that comets travel in a parabolic path.  He was appointed professor of mathematics at Messina in 1649 and at Pisa in 1656. After 1675 he lived in Rome under the protection of Christina, the former Queen of Sweden. She had abdicated her throne in 1654, had converted to Catholicism and gone to live in Rome as the guest of the Pope.  Remembered as one of the most learned women of the 17th century, Christina became the protector of many artists, musicians and intellectuals who would visit her in the Palazzo Farnese, where she was allowed to live by the Pope.  Borelli’s best known work is De Motu Animalium - On the Movement of Animals - in which he sought to explain the movements of the animal body on mechanical principles. He is therefore the founder of the iatrophysical school. He dedicated this work to Queen Christina, who had funded it, but he died of pneumonia in 1679 before it was published.  Read more…

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Paolo Gorini – scientist

Teacher invented technique for preserving corpses

Mathematician and scientist Paolo Gorini, who made important discoveries about organic substances, was born on this day in 1813 in Pavia.  He is chiefly remembered for preserving corpses and anatomical parts according to a secret process he invented himself. His technique was first used on the body of Giuseppe Mazzini, the politician and activist famous for his work towards the unification of Italy.  Gorini was orphaned at the age of 12, but thanks to financial help from former colleagues of his father, who had been a university maths professor, he was able to continue with his studies and he obtained a mathematics degree from the University of Pavia.  He paid tribute in his autobiography to his private teacher, Alessandro Scannini, who he said first inspired his interest in geology and volcanology.  Gorini went to live in Lodi, just south of Milan, in 1834, where he became a physics lecturer at the local Lyceum.  As well as teaching, he dedicated his time to geology experiments, actually creating artificial volcanoes to illustrate their eruptive dynamics. He also made his first attempts at the preservation of animal substances.  Read more…

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27 January

NEW - Italy elects its first parliament

1861 vote preceded proclamation of new Kingdom

Italians went to the polls for the first time as a nation state on this day in 1861 to elect a government in anticipation of the peninsula becoming a unified country.  The vote was a major milestone in the Risorgimento - the movement to bring together the different states of the region as one country - enabling there to be a parliament in place the following month and for deputies to declare Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia as the first King of Italy in March.  The first parliament convened in Turin as Rome remained under the control of the Papal States until it was captured by the Italian army in 1870.  The body comprised 443 deputies representing 59 provinces. Some provinces, such as Benevento, near Naples, elected just one deputy, whereas the major cities elected many more. Turin, for example, chose 19 deputies, Milan and Naples 18 each.  The eligibility rules were so specific that of a population of around 22 million, only 418,696 people were entitled to vote.  In line with the procedures set down in the electoral laws of the Kingdom of Sardinia, only men could vote - women were not fully enfranchised in Italy until 1945 - and only men aged 25 and above who were literate and paid a certain amount of taxes.  Read more…

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Trajan - Roman emperor

Military expansionist with progressive social policies

Marcus Ulpius Traianus succeeded to the role of Roman Emperor on this day in 98 AD.  The 13th ruler of the empire and known as Trajan, he presided over the greatest military expansion in Roman history, the consequence of which was that in terms of physical territory the empire was at its largest during his period in office.  Despite his taste for military campaigns - he conquered Dacia (the area now called Romania), Armenia, Mesopotamia, and the Sinai Peninsula - Trajan was seen as the second of the so-called Good Emperors to rule during the years known as Pax Romana, a long period of relative peace and stability.  He was credited with maintaining peace by working with rather than against the Senate and the ruling classes, introducing policies aimed at improving the welfare of citizens, and engaging in massive building projects that were to the benefit of ordinary Romans.  Marcus Ulpius Traianus was born in the Roman province of Baetica, which approximates to the area now known as Andalusia in southern Spain. His father was a provincial governor who then turned soldier, commanding a legion in the Roman war against Jews. Read more…

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Giuseppe Verdi – composer

How Italy mourned the loss of a national symbol

Opera composer Giuseppe Verdi died on this day at the age of 87 in his suite at the Grand Hotel et de Milan in 1901.  The prolific composer who had dominated the world of opera for a large part of the 19th century was initially buried privately at Milan’s Cimitero Monumentale.  But a month later Verdi’s body was moved to its final resting place in the crypt of a rest home for retired musicians that he had helped establish in Milan.  An estimated crowd of 300,000 people are reported to have turned out to bid Verdi farewell and ‘Va, pensiero’, a chorus from his 1842 opera Nabucco, was performed by a choir conducted by Arturo Toscanini.  Verdi meant a great deal to the Italian people because his composition, ‘Va, pensiero’ had been the unofficial anthem for supporters of the Risorgimento movement, which had sought the unification of Italy.  In his early operas Verdi had demonstrated sympathy with the cause of the Risorgimento and people had come to associate him with the movement’s ideals.  But as he became older and more prosperous he had chosen to withdraw from public life and had established himself on a country estate just outside Busseto, the town of his birth, near Parma in Emilia-Romagna.  Read more...

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Frank Nitti - mobster

Barber who became Al Capone’s henchman

The mobster who achieved notoriety as Frank Nitti was born Francesco Raffaele Nitto it is thought on this day in 1881, although some accounts put the year of his birth as 1886.  Nitti, who was raised in Brooklyn, New York, where he and Al Capone - his cousin - grew up, would eventually become Capone’s most trusted henchman in the Chicago mob he controlled.  After Capone was jailed for 11 years for tax evasion, Nitti was ostensibly in charge of operations.  Unlike many of the American Mafia bosses in the early part of the 20th century, Nitti was not a Sicilian.  His roots were in the heart of Camorra territory in the shadow of Vesuvius, his birthplace the town of Angri, 8km (5 miles) from nearby Pompei.  Angri was also the hometown of Capone’s parents.  Francesco’s father died while he was still a small child. His mother, Rosina, married again within a year to Francesco Dolengo, who emigrated to the United States in 1890.  Nitti, his mother and his sister, Giovannina, left Italy to join him in 1893, settling in Navy Street, Brooklyn.  He was enrolled in a local school but left at around age 13, taking a job as a pinsetter in a bowling alley before becoming a barber.  Read more…

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Roberto Paci Dalò – composer and film maker

Music maker coined the definition ‘media dramaturgy’

The award-winning contemporary musician and composer Roberto Paci Dalò was born on this day in 1962 in Rimini.  Paci Dalò is the co-founder and director of the performing arts ensemble Giardini Pensili and has composed music for theatre, radio, television and film.  After completing musical, visual and architectural studies in Fiesole, Faenza and Ravenna, Paci Dalò focused on sound and design and their use in film, theatre and collaborative projects.  He has been a pioneer in the use of digital technologies and telecommunication systems in art and has been particularly interested in performing arts as a meeting point of languages.  Since 1985 he has written, composed and directed more than 30 groundbreaking music-theatre works which have been presented worldwide.  Paci Dalò has composed music for acoustical ensembles, electronics and voices and has produced radio works for the main European broadcasting corporations.  His films and videos have been regularly presented in international festivals.  Paci Dalò taught Media Dramaturgy at the University of Siena.  Read more…

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Giovanni Arpino - writer and novelist 

Stories inspired classic Italian films

The writer Giovanni Arpino, whose novels lay behind the Italian movie classics Divorce, Italian Style and Profumo di donna – later remade in the United States as Scent of a Woman – was born on this day in 1927 in the Croatian city of Pula, then part of Italy.  His parents did not originate from Pula, which is near the tip of the Istrian peninsula about 120km (75 miles) south of Trieste. His father, Tomaso, was a Neapolitan, while his mother, Maddalena, hailed from Piedmont, but his father’s career in the Italian Army meant the family were rarely settled for long in one place.  In fact, they remained in Pula only a couple of months. As Giovanni was growing up, they lived in Novi Ligure, near Alessandria, in Saluzzo, south of Turin, and in Piacenza in Emilia-Romagna. His father imposed a strict regime on Giovanni and his two brothers, who were required to spend a lot of their time studying.  In fact, Giovanni was separated from his family for a while during the Second World War, when his mother returned to the Piedmontese town of Bra, not far from Saluzzo in the province of Cuneo, to deal with the estate of her father, who passed away in 1940.  Read more…

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Italy elects its first parliament

1861 vote preceded proclamation of new Kingdom

Count Camillo Benso di Cavour was
named Italy's first prime minister

Italians went to the polls for the first time as a nation state on this day in 1861 to elect a parliament in anticipation of the peninsula becoming a unified country.

The vote was a major milestone in the Risorgimento - the movement to bring together the different states of the region as one country - enabling there to be a parliament in place the following month and for deputies to declare Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia as the first King of Italy in March.

The first parliament convened in Turin as Rome remained under the control of the Papal States until it was captured by the Italian army in 1870.

The body comprised 443 deputies representing 59 provinces. Some provinces, such as Benevento, near Naples, elected just one deputy, whereas the major cities elected many more. Turin, for example, chose 19 deputies, Milan and Naples 18 each.

The eligibility rules were so specific that of a population of around 22 million, only 418,696 people were entitled to vote.

In line with the procedures set down in the electoral laws of the Kingdom of Sardinia, only men could vote - women were not fully enfranchised in Italy until 1945 - and only men aged 25 and above who were literate and paid a certain amount of taxes, in most cases at least 40 lire per year. 

The new parliament proclaimed
Victor Emmanuel II as king

The election was in two stages, the voting on 27 January being followed by, where necessary, a second ballot a week later on 3 February.  A second vote took place only when no candidate received more than 50 per cent of the vote or the equivalent of one-third of the registered voters in the constituency.

Of the 418,696 who could have voted, only 239,583 actually did and 10,000 votes were declared invalid, which meant that the first government was decided by barely one percent of the population.  The turnout was not helped by the Pope demanding that Catholics take no part.

In the absence of political parties as would be recognised today, the candidates representing blocs according to their values.

The group known as the Destra Storico - the Historical Right - comprised conservatives and monarchists and was led by Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, the former prime minister of Sardinia, an experienced statesman who had been an important figure in the drive to unification.

Against the Right, the Sinistra Storica - the Historical Left - was made up of liberals and centrists, led by Urbano Rattazzi.

The election was also contested by the Historical Far Left - also known as the Partito d’Azione - the radical grouping led by the revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini and with which Giuseppe Garibaldi also alligned himself.

Mazzini and Garibaldi were also key figures in the Risorgimento, but in a different way from Cavour.  Mazzini, often described as the movement's ideological inspiration, had been behind many uprisings from the 1830s onwards as Italians rebelled against the rule of oppressive foreign powers and Garibaldi led the military campaign to unite the peninsula. Mazzini, in particular, wanted the new country to be a republic.

Mazzini's party was not
widely supported

In the event, perhaps not surprisingly given the natural political alliances of those eligible to vote, Mazzini’s group polled a mere 2.3 percent of the popular vote, which swung heavily behind Cavour’s Historical Right, which received 46.1 percent against 20.4 percent for Rattazzi’s Historical Left.

Cavour was duly elected prime minister and parliament convened for the first time on 4 March in Turin, where 13 days later they proclaimed the new Kingdom of Italy and confirmed Victor Emmanuel as the first monarch.

As King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel had appointed Cavour as prime minister of Sardinia-Piedmont. The new king’s insistence on ruling as Victor Emmanuel II - as he had called himself in Sardinia in respect of his ancestor Victor Emmanuel I - upset some factions, who felt it implied that Italy was actually ruled by the House of Savoy.

Cavour’s term in office proved to be brief, in the event, as the stress of the job, dominated by the question of how to bring Rome and Venice into the new kingdom to make it fully unified, took its toll. He succumbed to malaria and died after only 75 days in office, at the age of just 50.

Palazzo Carignano, birthplace of the King, where
Italy's first parliament met in 1861

Travel tip:

The first Italian parliament met in Palazzo Carignano in Turin, the house in which Victor Emmanuel II was born. Designed by the Piedmontese architect Guarino Guarini, the Baroque palace in Via Accademia delle Scienze dates back to 1679. It now houses the National Museum of the Risorgimento, the biggest of 23 museums in Italy devoted to the movement.  The building has a lavish interior with many frescoes, some by Stefano Legnani, a painter of the Baroque period who was known in his native Milan as Legnanino.

The medieval Grinzane Castle was Cavour's
home for 31 years until his death

Travel tip:

Camillo Benso di Cavour, Italy’s first prime minister, hailed from a background in Turin nobility. He was the second son of the fourth Marquess of Cavour and for a large part of his life lived at the 13th century castle of Grinzane Cavour near Turin, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Born in 1810, Cavour lived there from 1830 until his death in 1861. During his stays there he restored the building and improved the cultivation of the vines in the area. Today, the castle has rooms dedicated to Cavour as well as the Cavour Regional Enoteca, which showcases the best wines produced in the region.

More reading:

How Giuseppe Mazzini was the ideological inspiration for the Risorgimento

Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand

How the capture of Rome completed Italian unification

Also on this day:

98: Trajan becomes Emperor of Rome

1881: The birth of mobster Frank Nitti

1901: The death of composer Giuseppe Verdi

1962: The birth of composer and film director Roberto Paci Dalò

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Find out more:

A Concise History of Italy, by Christopher Duggan. Buy from

(Picture credit: Grinzane Castle by Sbisolo via Wikimedia Commons)

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26 January

Giovanni Lanfranco - painter

Artist from Parma whose technique set new standards

The painter Giovanni Lanfranco, whom some critics regard as the equal of Pietro da Cortona and Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) among the leading masters of High Baroque painting in Rome, was born on this day in 1582 in Parma.  A master of techniques for creating illusion, such as trompe l'oeil and foreshortening, he had a major influence on 17th century painting in Naples also, inspiring the likes of Mattia Preti, Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena.  Lanfranco is best known for his Assumption of the Virgin (1625-7) in the duomo of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome, the altar fresco of the Navicella (1627-28) in St Peter’s Basilica, the cupola of the Gesù Nuovo church (1634-36) in Naples and the fresco of the Cappella del Tesoro, in Naples Cathedral (1643).  His St Mary Magdalen Transported to Heaven (c.1605), currently housed in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, is another outstanding example of his work, as is The Ecstasy of the Blessed Margaret of Cortona (1622), in the Pitti Palace in Florence.  Lanfranco’s dome frescoes were influenced by the work of Antonio da Correggio, the master of chiaroscuro.  Read more…

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Valentino Mazzola – footballer

Tragic star may have been Italy’s greatest player

The footballer Valentino Mazzola, captain of the mighty Torino team of the 1940s, was born on this day in 1919 in Cassano d’Adda, a town in Lombardy about 30km (19 miles) northeast of Milan.  Mazzola, a multi-talented player who was primarily an attacking midfielder but who was comfortable in any position on the field, led the team known as Il Grande Torino to five Serie A titles in seven seasons between 1942 and 1949. He scored 109 goals in 231 Serie A appearances for Venezia and Torino and had become the fulcrum of the Italy national team, coached by the legendary double World Cup-winner Vittorio Pozzo.  In just over a decade at the top level of the Italian game he achieved considerable success and some who saw him play believe he was the country’s greatest footballer of all time.  His life was cut short, however, when he and most of the Grande Torino team – and at the same time the Italian national team – were killed when a plane carrying them home from a friendly in Portugal crashed in thick fog on its approach to Turin airport on May 4, 1949.  The Superga Disaster – so-called because the aircraft collided with the rear wall of the Basilica of Superga, which stands on a hill overlooking the city – claimed the lives of 18 players.  Read more…

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Gabriele Allegra – friar and scholar

Sicilian who learnt Chinese to carry out his life’s work

The Blessed Gabriele Allegra, a Franciscan friar who translated the entire Catholic Bible into Chinese, is remembered on this day every year.  He was born Giovanni Stefano Allegra in San Giovanni la Punta in the province of Catania in Sicily in 1907 and he entered the Franciscan seminary in Acireale in 1918.  Gabriele Allegra was inspired to carry out his life’s work after attending a celebration for another Franciscan who had attempted a translation of the Bible into Chinese in the 14th century. For the next 40 years of his life the friar devoted himself to his own translation.  Gabriele Allegra was ordained a priest in 1930 and set sail for China. On his arrival he started to learn Chinese.  With the help of his Chinese teacher he prepared a first draft of his translation of the Bible in 1947 but it was not until 1968 that his one volume Chinese Bible was published for the first time.  Gabriele Allegra died on 26 January 1976 in Hong Kong. Although he was primarily a scholar, he had also helped the poor, the sick and lepers along the way.  He was declared Venerable in 1994.  Read more…

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Hebrew Bible in print for first time

Bologna printer makes history

The first printed edition of the Hebrew Bible was completed in Bologna on this day in 1482.  Specifically, the edition was the Pentateuch, or Torah, which consists of the first five books of the Christian and Jewish Bibles - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.  Torah, in Hebrew, means 'instruction'.  The book was given that name because the stories within it, which essentially form the opening narrative of the history of the Jewish people, and the interpretations offered of them, were intended to set out the moral and religious obligations fundamental to the Jewish way of life.  The book was the work of the Italian-Jewish printer Abraham ben Hayyim dei Tintori, from Pesaro.  The text consisted of large, clear square letters, accompanied by a translation in the Jewish biblical language Aramaic and a commentary by Rashi, who had been the foremost biblical commentator of the Middle Ages.  It was published and financed by Joseph ben Abraham, a member of the Caravita banking family in Bologna. The editor was the Hebrew scholar Yosef Hayyim ben Aaron, of Strasbourg.  The printing press had been invented in Germany in 1439.  Read more…

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