6 March

Giovanni Battista Bugatti - executioner

‘Mastro Titta’ ended 516 lives in long career

Giovanni Battista Bugatti, who served as the official executioner for the Papal States from 1796 to 1864, was born on this day in 1779 in Senigallia, a port town on the Adriatic coast about 30km (19 miles) northwest of the city of Ancona.  Bugatti, who became known by the nickname Mastro Titta - a corruption of the Italian maestro di giustizia - master of justice - in Roman dialect, carried out 516 executions in his 68-year career.  He was the longest-serving executioner in the history of the Papal States.  The circumstances of him being granted such an important role in Roman life at the age of just 17 are not known.  What is documented is that while not carrying out his grim official duties he kept a shop selling painted umbrellas and other souvenirs next to his home in the Borgo district, in Vicolo del Campanile, a short distance from Castel Sant’Angelo, which served as a prison during the time of the Papal States.  It seemed an incongruous day job for someone whose very name struck a chill among Rome’s criminal fraternity. Yet he treated his responsibilities with the utmost solemnity, leaving his home early in the morning on the days an execution was to take place, dressed in his scarlet executioner’s coat.  Read more…

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Augusto Odone – medical pioneer

Father who invented ‘Lorenzo’s Oil’ for sick son

Augusto Odone, the father who invented a medicine to treat his incurably ill son despite having no medical training, was born on this day in 1933 in Rome.  Odone’s son, Lorenzo, was diagnosed with the rare metabolic condition ALD (Adrenoleukodystrophy) at the age of six. Augusto and his American-born wife, Michaela, were told that little could be done and that Lorenzo would suffer from increasing paralysis and probably die within two years.  Refusing simply to do nothing, the Odones, who lived in Washington, where Augusto was an economist working for the World Bank, threw themselves into discovering everything that was known about the condition and the biochemistry of the nervous system, contacting every doctor, biologist and researcher they could find who had researched the condition and assembled them for a symposium.  Drawing on this pooled knowledge, and with the help of Hugo Moser, a Swiss-born professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, they eventually came up with the idea of combining extracts of olive oil and rapeseed oil in a medicine that would break down the long-chain fatty acids in the human body that were considered a major cause of the nerve damage suffered by people with ALD.  Read more…

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La traviata - the world's favourite opera

Verdi's masterpiece performed for the first time

Giuseppe Verdi's opera, La traviata, was performed in front of a paying audience for the first time on this day in 1853.  The premiere took place at Teatro La Fenice, the opera house in Venice with which Verdi had a long relationship, one that saw him establish his fame as a composer.  La traviata would ultimately cement his reputation as a master of opera after the success of Rigoletto and Il trovatore.  La traviata has become the world's favourite opera, inasmuch as no work has been performed more often, yet the reception for the opening performance was mixed, to say the least.  Reportedly there was applause and cheering at the end of the first act but a much changed atmosphere in the theatre in the second act, during which some members of the audience jeered.  Their displeasure was said to be aimed in part at the two male principals, the baritone Felice Varesi and the tenor Lodovico Graziani, neither of whom was at his best.  There was also criticism of the soprano Fanny Salvini-Donatelli, the first to be given the role of Violetta, the opera's heroine.   Although an acclaimed singer, Salvini-Donatelli was 38 years old and somewhat overweight.  Read more…

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Francesco Guicciardini - writer and diplomat

Friend of Machiavelli among first to record history in context

The historian and statesman Francesco Guicciardini, best known for writing Storia d'Italia, a book that came to be regarded as a classic history of Italy, was born on this day in 1483 in Florence.  Along with his contemporary Niccolò Machiavelli, Guicciardini is considered one of the major political writers of the Italian Renaissance.  Guicciardini was an adviser and confidant to three popes, the governor of several central Italian states, ambassador, administrator and military captain.  He had a long association with the Medici family, rulers of Florence.  Storia d'Italia - originally titled 'La historia di Italia' - was notable for Guicciardini's skilful analysis of interrelating political movements in different states and his ability to set in context and with objectivity events in which sometimes he was a direct participant.  Born into a prominent Florentine family who were influential in politics and long-standing supporters of the Medici, Giucciardini was educated in the classics before being sent to study law at a number of universities, including Padua, Ferrara and Pisa.  He was interested in pursuing a career in the priesthood but his father, Piero, considered the church to have become decadent.  Read more…

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5 March

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo – artist

Painter’s decorative work can be seen all over Venice

Painter and printmaker Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was born on this day in 1696 in Venice.  Also sometimes known as Gianbattista or Giambattista Tiepolo, his output was prolific and he enjoyed success not only in Italy, but in Germany and Spain as well.  Highly regarded right from the beginning of his career, he has been described by experts as the greatest decorative artist of 18th century Europe. Although much of his work was painted directly on to the walls and ceilings of churches and palaces in his native Venice, many of Tiepolo’s paintings on canvas are now in art galleries all over the world.  Tiepolo was the youngest child of a Venetian shipping merchant who died a year after his birth leaving his mother to struggle to bring up her six children alone.  In 1710 he became a pupil of Gregorio Lazzarini, a successful established painter, but Tiepolo quickly developed a style of his own.  His earliest known works are depictions of the apostles, which form part of the decoration of the interior of the Church of Santa Maria dei Derelitti at Ospedaletto in Venice, painted in 1717.  Tiepolo was commissioned to produce portraits for the Doge and he started painting frescoes directly on to the walls of churches in 1717.  Read more…

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Pier Paolo Pasolini - writer and film director

Controversial figure who met violent death

The novelist, writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini was born on this day in 1922 in Bologna.  Pasolini's best-known work included his portrayal of Jesus Christ in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), his bawdy adaptations of such literary classics as Boccaccio’s Decameron (1971) and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1972), and and his brutal satire on Fascism entitled Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).   He also wrote novels and poetry, made documentaries, directed for the theatre and was an outspoken columnist for the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera, expressing political views that would regularly spark heated debate.  A former member of the Communist Party and openly homosexual, Pasolini died in violent circumstances in Ostia, near Rome, in November 1975, supposedly murdered by a young man he had picked up at the city’s Termini railway station, although there was some mystery around the incident and speculation over motives continues to this day.  The son of an army lieutenant, Pasolini lived in various northern Italian towns in his childhood, determined by his father’s postings. Family life was somewhat turbulent.  Read more…

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Marietta Piccolomini – soprano

Popular star who found fame as Violetta

The operatic soprano Marietta Piccolomini, who was most famous for her performances as Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata, was born on this day in 1834 in Siena.   Her career was relatively brief, spanning just 11 years. Yet she managed to achieve unprecedented popularity, to the extent that crowds of fans would gather outside her hotel and men would volunteer to take the place of horses in pulling her carriage through the streets.  Some critics said that the adulation she enjoyed was more to do with her youthful good looks and her acting ability than her voice, who they argued was weak and limited.  Nonetheless, she was seldom short of work and she was the first Violetta to be seen by opera goers in both Paris and London.  She had a particularly enthusiastic following in England, where she undertook several tours of provincial theatres as well as appearing in the capital.  Born Maria Teresa Violante Piccolomini Clementini, she came from a noble Tuscan family. Her musical mother, a talented amateur, would sing duets with her. However, while her family were happy to arrange lessons for her with Pietro Romani, one of Italy’s first professional singing teachers, her father was reluctant to allow her to make opera singing a career.  Read more…

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Alessandro Volta – scientist

Invention sparked wave of electrical experiments

Alessandro Volta, who invented the first electric battery, died on this day in 1827 in Como.  His electric battery had provided the first source of continuous current and the volt, a unit of the electromotive force that drives current, was named in his honour in 1881.  Volta was born Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta in 1745 in Como.  He became professor of physics at the Royal School of Como in 1774. His interest in electricity led him to improve the electrophorus, a device that had been created to generate static electricity. He discovered and isolated methane gas in 1776, after finding it at Lake Maggiore and was then appointed to the chair of physics at the University of Pavia.  Volta was a friend of the scientist Luigi Galvani, a professor at Bologna University, whose experiments led him to announce in 1791 that the contact of two different metals with the muscle of a frog resulted in the generation of an electric current.  Galvani interpreted that as a new form of electricity found in living tissue, which he called animal electricity.  Volta felt that the frog merely conducted a current that flowed between the two metals, which he called metallic electricity.  Read more…

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4 March

NEW - Giorgio Bassani - writer and novelist

Best-known work reflected plight of wealthy Jewish Italians in 1930s

Giorgio Bassani, rated by many critics as alongside the likes of Cesare Pavese, Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia among the great postwar Italian novelists, was born on this day in 1916 in Bologna.  Bassani’s best-known work, his 1962 novel Il giardino dei finzi-contini - The Garden of the Finzi-Continis - was turned into an Oscar-winning movie by the director Vittorio De Sica.  Like much of his fiction, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is semi-autobiographical, drawing on his upbringing as a member of an upper middle-class Jewish family in Ferrara, the city in Emilia-Romagna, during the rise of Mussolini’s Fascists and the onset of World War Two.  Bassani, who was the editor of a number of literary journals and a respected screenplay writer, had already achieved recognition for his work through his Cinque storie ferraresi - Five Stories of Ferrara - which won the prestigious Strega Prize in 1956.  But it was The Garden of the Finzi-Continis that won him international acclaim. The novel was part of a series that expanded on the same theme in presenting a picture of the world during the author's formative years, against a background of state-promoted antisemitism.  Read more…

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Antonio Vivaldi – Baroque composer

The success and the sadness in the life of musical priest 

Violinist, teacher, composer and cleric Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was born on this day in Venice in 1678.  Widely recognised as one of the greatest Baroque composers, he had an enormous influence on music throughout Europe during his own lifetime.  His best-known work is a series of beautiful violin concertos called The Four Seasons.  Vivaldi was a prolific composer who enjoyed a lot of success when his career was at its height.  As well as instrumental concertos he composed many sacred choral works and more than 40 operas.  Vivaldi’s father taught him to play the violin when he was very young and he became a brilliant performer. At the age of 15 he began studying to be a priest and he was ordained at the age of 25. He soon became nicknamed ‘Il Prete Rosso’, the red priest, because of his red hair.  He became master of violin at the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage in Venice, and composed most of his works while working there during the next 30 years.  The orphaned girls received a musical education and the most talented pupils stayed on to become members of the Ospedale’s orchestra or choir. Vivaldi wrote concertos, cantatas and sacred vocal music for them to perform.  Read more…

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Birth of the Italian Constitution

Celebrations in Turin for historic Statute

The Albertine Statute - Statuto Albertino - which later became the Constitution of the Kingdom of Italy, was approved by Charles Albert, King of Sardinia, on this day in 1848 in Turin.  The Constitution was to last 100 years, until its abolition in 1948 when the Constitution of the new Italian republic came into effect.  The Statute was based on the French Charter of 1830. It ensured citizens were equal before the law and gave them limited rights of assembly and the right to a free press.  However, it gave voting rights to less than three per cent of the population.  The Statute established the three classic branches of government: the executive, which meant the king, the legislative, divided between the royally appointed Senate and an elected Chamber of Deputies, and a judiciary, also appointed by the king.  Originally, it was the king who possessed the widest powers, as he controlled foreign policy and had the prerogative of nominating and dismissing ministers of state.  In practice, the Statute was gradually modified to weaken the king’s power. The ministers of state became responsible to the parliament and the office of prime minister, not provided for in the Constitution, became prominent.  Read more…

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Lucio Dalla - musician

Cantautore inspired by the great Caruso

The singer/songwriter Lucio Dalla was born on this day in 1943 in Bologna. Dalla is most famous for composing the song, Caruso, in 1986 after staying in the suite the great tenor Enrico Caruso used to occupy overlooking the sea at the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria in Sorrento.  Dalla started playing the clarinet when he was young and joined the Rheno Dixieland Band in Bologna along with the future film director, Pupi Avati.  Avati was later to say that his film Ma quando arrivano le ragazze? was inspired by his friendship with Dalla.  In the 1960s the band won first prize in the traditional jazz band category at a festival in Antibes. After hearing Dalla’s voice, his fellow cantautore - the Italian word for singer/songwriter - Gino Paoli suggested he try for a solo career as a soul singer, but his first single was a failure.  Dalla had a hit with 4 Marzo 1943, originally entitled Gesù Bambino, but the title was changed to the singer’s birth date so as not to cause offence.  In the 1970s Dalla started a collaboration with the Bolognese poet Roberto Roversi, who wrote the lyrics for three of his albums.  Read more…

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Giorgio Bassani - writer and novelist

Best-known work reflected plight of wealthy Jewish Italians in 1930s

Giorgio Bassani's novels drew on his
own background in Ferrara

Giorgio Bassani, rated by many critics as alongside the likes of Cesare Pavese, Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia among the great postwar Italian novelists, was born on this day in 1916 in Bologna.

Bassani’s best-known work, his 1962 novel Il giardino dei finzi-contini - The Garden of the Finzi-Continis - was turned into an Oscar-winning movie by the director Vittorio De Sica.

Like much of his fiction, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is semi-autobiographical, drawing on his upbringing as a member of an upper middle-class Jewish family in Ferrara, the city in Emilia-Romagna, during the rise of Mussolini’s Fascists and the onset of World War Two.

Bassani, who was the editor of a number of literary journals and a respected screenplay writer, had already achieved recognition for his work through his Cinque storie ferraresi - Five Stories of Ferrara - which won the prestigious Strega Prize in 1956.

But it was The Garden of the Finzi-Continis that won him international acclaim. The novel was part of a series that expanded on the same theme in presenting a picture of the world during the author's formative years, against a background of state-promoted antisemitism.

The son of a doctor and an aspiring singer, Bassani was born in Bologna. His father, Angelo Enrico Bassani, had served with the Italian Army as a medical officer in World War One and was on furlough in Bologna, where his pregnant wife, Dora, joined him but went into labour during the visit.

They were both from Ferrara, where they returned after the war ended. Giorgio was named after the patron saint of the Po Valley city, on whose feast day his parents had become engaged.

Bassani's most famous novel is
a Penguin Modern Classic

With his younger brother, Paolo, and their little sister, Jenny, Bassani had a childhood that was, at first, idyllic. They lived in a big family home on Via Cisterna del Follo, receiving their education at the Liceo Ludovico Ariosto and spending many hours outdoors, playing tennis or football, taking their summer holidays in the seaside resorts of the northern Adriatic coastline, and going skiing in the winter.

There was wealth on both sides of the family. Their paternal grandfather had been a landowner and cloth merchant; their maternal grandfather was a professor of medicine and head of the main hospital in Ferrara, an expert in gastroenterology who was still working right up to his death, aged 99. 

Yet the ambitions of all three siblings were thwarted by Mussolini’s anti-semitic Racial Laws. Giorgio, a talented pianist, completed his degree at the Faculty of Arts and Letters at the University of Bologna, but with Jews barred from most professions the only work he could find was as a teacher at the Jewish School in Via Vignatagliata.

Paolo hoped to become a doctor, like his father and grandfather, but with Jews barred from Italian universities, he was forced to go to France, where he studied engineering instead, before being expelled following the German invasion. Jenny became one of Giorgio’s pupils at the Jewish School but, with little prospect of making a career in Ferrara, fled to Florence.

It was while he was teaching, in 1940, that Bassani published his first novel,  Una città di pianura  - A City of the Plain - which he wrote under a pseudonym, Giacomo Marchi, so as to evade the race laws. It was around this time that he became a political activist, joining the anti-Fascist resistance. He was arrested in May 1943 but thankfully spent only a couple of months in jail, freed after Italy formally surrendered to the allies and Mussolini was arrested.

Dominique Sanda and Lino Capolicchio, stars of the
film version of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

The threat to the safety of Jews was not over, however.  With his new wife, Valeria, whom he married soon after his release from prison, he too fled to Florence, where they lived under assumed names with forged passports.  Bassani managed somehow to rescue his parents, and his sister Jenny, from the advancing Germans; Paolo, who eventually returned to Italy after a spell on the run in Spain, fought in the resistance and survived, settling in Rome. Sadly, most of their extended family left in Ferrara died at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Bassani, too, drifted south to Rome, where his literary career gathered pace. As an editorial director of the publisher Feltrinelli, he was responsible for the posthumous publication of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel Il Gattopardo - The Leopard. He published some poetry and short stories of his own before his Cinque storie ferraresi raised his profile following the award of the Premio Strega.

His 1958 novel, Gli occhiali d'oro - The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, which was later also made into a film, examined the marginalisation of Jews and homosexuals and ultimately became the first in a series of books known as Il romanzo di Ferrara - the Ferrara Stories.  

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which was one of the series, is narrated by a young middle-class Jew in the Italian city of Ferrara, who is fascinated with the Finzi-Continis, a wealthy Jewish family, and especially by their beautiful daughter Micòl, with whom he becomes infatuated.

The Finzi-Continis live in a lavish walled estate, which becomes a meeting place for other wealthy Jews, who find sanctuary there. The narrator - himself called Giorgio - finds his love for Micòl ultimately unrequited in a poignant portrait of a family and friends enjoying their final days of freedom before the horrors of the world outside the walls close in on them. 

After Dietro la porta - Behind the Door (1964), L'airone - The Heron (1968) and L'odore del fieno - The Smell of May (1972) completed his series of Ferrara stories, Bassani wrote very little more in the way of fiction.

Estranged from his wife, he spent the final years of his life with his companion, Portia Prebys, an American-born professor of literature, whom he met in 1977. Suffering from Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and a heart complaint, he died in 2000 at the age of 84. 

De Sica’s film of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which starred Lino Capolicchio as Giorgio and Dominique Sanda as Micòl, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1972.

The centre of the city of Ferrara, looking
down from the Castello Estense

Travel tip:

Ferrara is a city in Emilia-Romagna, about 50 km (31 miles) to the north-east of Bologna. It was ruled by the Este family between 1240 and 1598. Building work on the magnificent Este Castle in the centre of the city began in 1385 and it was added to and improved by successive rulers of Ferrara until the end of the Este line.  The castle was purchased for 70,000 lire by the province of Ferrara in 1874 to be used as the headquarters of the Prefecture.   Ferrara is also notable for Palazzo dei Diamanti, a palace in Corso Ercole I d’Este, that takes its name from the 8500 pointed diamond shaped stones that stud the façade, diamonds being an emblem of the Este family. It was designed by Biagio Rossetti and completed in 1503. The palace now houses the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara on its first floor.

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The bustling Via Giuseppe Mazzini is part of
what used to be Ferrara's Ghetto

Travel tip:

Via Vignatagliata in Ferrara, where Giorgio Bassani found work as a teacher at the Jewish School - formerly at No 79 - is part of what used to be the city’s Jewish Ghetto, established in 1624, when about 1,500 Jews lived in Ferrara. Centrally situated, only about 500km (546 yards) from the Castello Estense, it remained open, on and off, until 1859, when it was permanently closed, although it remained the heart of the city’s Jewish community for many years afterwards. Criss-crossed by cobbled streets, the area maintains much of its structure and character. Its main street, Via Giuseppe Mazzini, which begins at Piazza della Cattedrale, is largely pedestrianised and has evolved into one of Ferrara’s main shopping streets.

Also on this day:

1678: The birth of composer Antonio Vivaldi

1848: The approval of the Albertine Statute, which became the basis for the Italian Constitution

1943: The birth of singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla

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