7 September

Kidnapping of Pope Boniface VIII

When the Pope was slapped down by a disgruntled landowner

An army, representing King Philip IV of France and the anti-papal Colonna family, entered Anagni in Lazio and captured Pope Boniface VIII inside his own palace on this day in 1303.  The Pope was kept in custody for three days and was physically ill-treated by his captors until the local people rose up against the invaders and rescued him.  Boniface VIII returned to Rome, but he was physically and mentally broken after his ordeal and died a month later.  The Pope had been born Benedetto Caetani in Anagni in 1230. He became Pope Boniface VIII in 1294 after his predecessor abdicated. He organised the first Catholic Jubilee Year to take place in Rome in 1300 and founded Sapienza University in the city in 1303, the year of his death.  But Boniface VIII is mainly remembered for his conflicts with Philip IV of France. In 1296 Boniface VIII issued the bull Clericis Laicos which forbade under the sanction of automatic excommunication any imposition of taxes on the clergy without express licence by the Pope. Then in 1302 he issued a bull proclaiming the primacy of the Pope and insisting on the submission of the temporal to the spiritual power.  Read more…

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Genoa Cricket and Football Club

Italy's historic first football club

Italy's oldest surviving football club was founded on this day in 1893 in Genoa.  Originally named Genoa Cricket and Athletic Club, it was established by British Consular officials and for a number of years football was a minor activity.  Initially, Italians could not be members.  Football became more its focus after an English maritime doctor, James Spensley, arrived in Genoa in 1897 and organised a match against Football Club Torinese, which had been formed in Turin in 1894. Spensley insisted the club's rules be altered to allow Italians to play.  The match took place in January 1898 and although the attendance was only around 200 spectators, it was deemed a success by those who took part, particularly the Turin side, who won.  After a return match, plans were drawn up to form an Italian Football Federation and to organise a first Italian Championship.  Genoa were the inaugural champions, although only four teams took part and the competition was completed in the course of one day, in May, at the Velodromo Umberto I in Turin.   Spensley's team beat Internazionale of Milan in the final.  Read more…

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Giuseppe Gioachino Belli – poet

Sonnet writer satirised life in 19th century Rome

The poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli was born on this day in 1791 in Rome and was christened Giuseppe Francesco Antonio Maria Gioachino Raimondi Belli.  He was to become famous for his satirical sonnets written in Romanesco, the dialect of Rome.  After taking a job in Civitavecchia, a coastal town about 70km (44 miles) northwest of Rome, Belli’s father moved the family to live there, but after he died - of either cholera or typhus - his wife returned to Rome with her children and took cheap lodgings in Via del Corso.  Living in poor circumstances, Belli began writing sonnets in Italian at the suggestion of his friend, the poet Francesco Spada.  In 1816, Belli married a woman of means, Maria Conti, and went to live with her in Palazzo Poli, the palace that forms the backdrop to the Trevi Fountain. This gave him the freedom to develop his literary talents. They had a son, Ciro, in 1824.  The palace was Belli’s home for 21 years, from 1816 to 1837, but he was able to travel to other places in Italy where he came into contact with new ideas. It was during a stay in Milan that he first encountered dialect poetry and satire.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Papal Genealogy: The Families and Descendants of the Popes, by George L Williams

The papacy has often resembled a secular European monarchy more than a divinely inspired institution. Roman pontiffs bestowed great wealth on their families and forged strategic alliances with other powerful families to increase their power. Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), for example, forced his daughter Lucrezia into a series of marriages for political reasons. When her marital alliance was no longer advantageous, as was the case in her second marriage, her husband was brutally murdered. Many papal families also intermarried in hopes of forming a hereditary papacy; at least two members of the Fieschi, Piccolomini, Della Rovere, and Medici families served as pope. Papal families since the early history of the church are fully covered in this comprehensive work. Papal Genealogy’s genealogical charts graphically show the descendants of the popes, presenting in many cases the interrelationships between the papal families and their relationships with many of the leading families of Europe. Detailed histories examine the impact of the papacy on each pope's family and how each influenced the history of the church.

George L Williams was a historian, educator, and former Fulbright scholar to Italy, who lived in New York.  His other books include Fascist Thought and Totalitarianism in Italy's Secondary Schools: Theory and Practice, 1922-1943.

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6 September

NEW - Nino Castelnuovo - actor

Starred in sumptuous French musical and TV adaptation of literary classic

The actor Nino Castelnuovo, best known for playing opposite a young Catherine Deneuve in a Palme d’Or-winning French musical and as the star of a celebrated TV adaptation of Alessandro Manzoni’s classic novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), died on this day in 2021 at the age of 84.  Castelnuovo’s talent came to the fore during a golden age of Italian cinema, working with leading directors such as Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, Pietro Germi, Luigi Comencini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and starring opposite such luminaries as Alberto Sordi, Monica Vitti and Claudia Cardinale.  Yet it was the visually beautiful, deeply sentimental French musical, Le parapluies de Cherbourg - The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - that catapulted him to fame in 1964, five years after his screen debut.  Directed by Jacques Demy, the musical, in which the dialogue is entirely sung (although by voice dubbers rather than the actors appearing on screen), Castelnuovo played the handsome Guy, a mechanic, who is in love with Deneuve’s character, Geneviève, who works in her mother’s umbrella shop.  Read more…

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Andrea Camilleri – author

Creator of Inspector Montalbano

Writer and film producer Andrea Camilleri, who died in 2019, was born on this day in 1925 in Porto Empedocle in Sicily.  Famous for creating the fictional character Inspector Montalbano, Camilleri is a prolific, best-selling novelist who has generated worldwide interest in the culture and landscapes of Sicily.  Camilleri studied literature and although he never completed his course he began to write poems and short stories. He was taught stage and film direction and became a director and a screenwriter. He worked on several television productions for RAI, including the Inspector Maigret series.  He wrote his first novel in 1978 but it was not until 1992 that one of his novels, La stagione della caccia - The Hunting Season - became a bestseller.  In 1994 Camilleri published La forma dell’acqua - The Shape of Water - which was the first novel to feature the character of Inspector Montalbano, a detective serving the police in Vigàta, an imaginary Sicilian town.  The book was written in Italian but had a real Sicilian flavour, with local phrases and sayings and descriptions of the classic Sicilian dishes particularly favoured by Montalbano.  Read more…

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Giovanni Fattori - painter

Landscape artist who painted Risorgimento battle scenes 

The painter Giovanni Fattori, who campaigned to free Italy from Austrian domination and captured Risorgimento battle scenes on canvas, was born on this day in 1825 in Livorno.  Fattori became a leading member of a group of Tuscan painters known as the Macchiaioli, who have been described as the Italian equivalent of the French Impressionists but whose images were more sharply defined.  The group, largely comprising painters from a working class background, saw themselves more as a social movement who expressed themselves through art.  Born into a modest household in the Via della Coroncina in the centre of Livorno, the Tuscan port city, Fattori’s family hoped he would seek a qualification in commerce that would equip him to prosper in the city’s trade-based economy.  But his skill in sketching persuaded them instead to apprentice him in 1845 to Giuseppe Baldini, a local painter of religious themes.  The following year he moved to Florence to study under Giuseppe Bezzuoli and enrol at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence.  It was while he was in Florence, in 1848, that he became politically active, joining the Partito d’Azione.  Read more…

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Francesco I d’Este – Duke of Modena

Military leader left legacy of fine architecture

Francesco I, Duke of Modena, who was to be immortalised in a bust by the sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, was born on this day in 1610 in Modena in Emilia-Romagna.  He is remembered as a skilful military commander, who enriched Modena with the building of the Ducal Palace.  Francesco was the eldest son of Alfonso III d’Este and Isabella of Savoy and became Duke of Modena in 1629 after the death of his mother had prompted his grieving father to abdicate in order to take religious vows and become a Capuchin Friar in Merano.  During the next two years about 70 per cent of the inhabitants of Modena were killed by the plague.  The Duke’s father, now known as Fra’ Giambattista da Modena, tried to help the dying and went about preaching during the outbreak of plague, before retiring to a convent built by Francesco for him in Castelnuovo in Garfagnana.  After the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, Francesco sided with Spain and invaded the Duchy of Parma, but when he went to Spain to claim his reward he was able to acquire only Correggio, for a payment of 230,000 florins.  Francesco then sided with Venice, Florence and Parma against Pope Urban VIII and tried unsuccessfully to conquer Ferrara.  Read more…

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Isabella Leonarda – composer

Devout nun wrote an abundance of Baroque music

Isabella Leonarda, a nun who was one of the most productive women composers of her time, was born on this day in 1620 in Novara.  Leonarda’s published work spans a period of 60 years and she has been credited with more than 200 compositions.  She did not start composing regularly until she was in her fifties, but noted in the dedication to one of her works that she wrote music only during time allocated for rest, so as not to neglect her administrative duties within the convent.  Leonarda was the daughter of Count Gianantonio Leonardi and his wife Apollonia. The Leonardi were important people in Novara, many of them church and civic officials.  Leonarda entered the Collegio di Sant’Orsola, a convent in Novara, when she was 16 and rose to a high position within the convent.  Her published compositions began to appear in 1640 but it was the work she produced later in her life that she is remembered for today and she became one of the most prolific convent composers of the Baroque era. It is believed she taught the other nuns to perform music, which would have given her the opportunity to have her own compositions performed.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Betrothed (I promessi sposi), by Alessandro Manzoni

Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, prevented from marrying by the petty tyrant Don Rodrigo, who desires Lucia for himself. Forced to flee, they are then cruelly separated, and must face many dangers including plague, famine and imprisonment, and confront a variety of strange characters - the mysterious Nun of Monza, the fiery Father Cristoforo and the sinister 'Unnamed' - in their struggle to be reunited. A vigorous portrayal of enduring passion, The Betrothed's exploration of love, power and faith presents a whirling panorama of 17th century Italian life and is one of the greatest European historical novels. (Introduced and translated by Bruce Penman). 

Alessandro Manzoni was born in 1785 near Lake Como, Italy. Sent to boarding school at the age of five, he felt estranged from his family, particularly when his mother left his father. As a young man Manzoni subscribed to the ideas of the French Revolution, joining his mother in Paris, where he married Henriette Blondel in 1808. He died in 1873.

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Nino Castelnuovo - actor

Starred in sumptuous French musical and TV adaptation of literary classic

Nino Castelnuovo worked with some of Italy's
 most famous 'golden age' directors

The actor Nino Castelnuovo, best known for playing opposite a young Catherine Deneuve in a Palme d’Or-winning French musical and as the star of a celebrated TV adaptation of Alessandro Manzoni’s classic novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), died on this day in 2021 at the age of 84.

Castelnuovo’s talent came to the fore during a golden age of Italian cinema, working with leading directors such as Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, Pietro Germi, Luigi Comencini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and starring opposite such luminaries as Alberto Sordi, Monica Vitti and Claudia Cardinale.

Yet it was the visually beautiful, deeply sentimental French musical, Le parapluies de Cherbourg - The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - that catapulted him to fame in 1964, five years after his screen debut.

Directed by Jacques Demy, the musical, in which the dialogue is entirely sung (although by voice dubbers rather than the actors appearing on screen), Castelnuovo played the handsome Guy, a mechanic, who is in love with Deneuve’s character, Geneviève, who works in her mother’s umbrella shop.

Their romance is interrupted when Guy is called up to serve in the Algerian War. Geneviève gives birth to their child while Guy is away but they lose touch. When they meet again, six years later, they are both married to other people, their lives having taken very different courses. An affecting tale, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for five Academy Awards.

Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo arrive at a
promotional event for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Born in the lakeside town of Lecco, in Lombardy, Castelnuovo was christened as Francesco. His mother, Emilia Paola, a maid, was married to Camillo Castelnuovo, who worked in a button factory. 

Nino worked at different times as a mechanic and a painter. An enthusiastic cinema-goer, he idolised Fred Astaire, which prompted him to take lessons in gymnastics and dancing.  After moving to Milan at the age of 19, he studied drama at the Piccolo Teatro, presided over by the director Giorgio Strehler.

His first screen appearance came via a bit part in a film titled The Virtuous Bigamist in 1956, but his first credited role was in the 1959 thriller Un maledetto imbroglio, directed by Germi, based on Carlo Emilio Gadda’s crime novel, which was titled in English as That Awful Mess on Via Merulana. The film was shown in America as The Facts of Murder.

The following year he starred with Alain Delon in Visconti’s acclaimed drama Rocco and His Brothers and alongside the actor-director Pasolini in The Hunchback of Rome. 

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg won him gushing reviews, yet where Deneuve’s career took off internationally after the film’s release, Castelnuovo fared less well.  He was never short of parts, going on to make more than 50 films, yet Italian cinema audiences in particular were slow to warm to him.

Castelnuovo with Claudia Cardinale in a scene from
his first credited movie, Un maledetto imbroglio

In the event, it was the small screen that provided him with his second, career-defining part, as Renzo, the principal male character in a television adaptation of Manzoni’s epic I promessi sposi, first published in three volumes in 1827.

The revised, definitive version published in 1842 has become the most widely-read novel in the Italian language, studied by virtually every Italian secondary school student and regarded by Italian scholars as a literary masterpiece on a par with Dante’s Divine Comedy.

By coincidence, Manzoni places Renzo and Lucia, the couple at the centre of the novel’s storyline, in a village just outside Lecco, where their story begins.  The novel is notable for its description of 17th century Milan during a major outbreak of plague. Rai’s adaptation won much praise from critics and Castelnuovo enjoyed a surge of popularity that won him an audience with Pope Paul VI, among other things.

Thereafter, Castelnuovo became a familiar face in TV dramas both in Italy and in other European countries, although he continued to make films and was keen to work in theatre, too. He performed in several stage productions of the works of Carlo Goldoni, the 18th century Venetian playwright, and returned to the cinema in 1996 when director Anthony Minghella cast him as an archaeologist in the Oscar-winning The English Patient.

Despite suffering problems with his eyesight due to glaucoma, Castelnuovo continued working, mainly on television, into his late 70s.  He suffered two personal tragedies, losing both his brothers. In 1976, Pierantonio died after being beaten up by a group of revellers at a festival, while Clemente was killed in a car accident in 1994.

Nino himself died in hospital in Rome after a long period of ill health. He was survived by his wife, the actress Maria Cristina Di Nicola, and a son, Lorenzo, from a previous relationship.

Piazza XX Settembre in the Lombardy town of
Lecco, looking towards the Basilica di San Nicolò

Travel tip:

Lecco, where Nino Castelnuovo was born, lies at the end of the south eastern branch of Lago di Como, which is known as Lago di Lecco. The town is surrounded by mountains including Monte Resegone, which has cable-car access to the Piani d’Erna lookout point, and Monte Barro, a regional park area that contains the remains of a fifth-century settlement and the Costa Perla birdwatching station. In the centre of Lecco, the Basilica di San Nicolò, with its neo-Gothic bell tower, is a notable attraction, while the town makes much of it being the childhood home of Alessandro Manzoni, who chose it as the home of his betrothed lovers, Renzo and Lucia, in I promessi sposi. The historic fishermen’s quarter of Pescarenico, which features in the book, has a number of restaurants that make it well worth a visit.

Bellagio is one of many pretty towns dotted
around the shores of Lago di Como

Travel tip:

Lago di Como - Lake Como - the third largest lake in Italy after Garda and Maggiore, has been a popular retreat for aristocrats and the wealthy since Roman times, and remains a popular tourist destination. Its many lakeside villas include the Villa Carlotta, overlooking the lake at Tremezzo, built in the late 18th century as a holiday home for the Clerici family, successful silk merchants, the Villa Olmo in Como, built for the marquis Innocenzo Odescalchi, and  Villa d'Este, in Cernobbio, now a luxury hotel and, between 1816 and 1817, home to Caroline of Brunswick, estranged wife of the Prince of Wales and later Queen Consort of King George IV of the United Kingdom.  Numerous pretty towns along the shores of the lake, which covers an area of 146 sq km (56 sq miles), include Bellagio, Menaggio and Varenna. 

Also on this day:

1610: The birth of Francesco I d’Este, Duke of Modena

1620: The birth of composer Isabella Leonarda

1825: The birth of painter Giovanni Fattori

1925: The birth of novelist and screenwriter Andrea Camilleri

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5 September

Francesca Porcellato - Paralympian

Life of sporting excellence born of horrific accident

Francesca Porcellato, one of Italy’s most enduring Paralympians, was born on this day in 1970 in Castelfranco Veneto.  She has competed in eight summer Paralympics as an athlete and cyclist and three winter Paralympics in cross-country skiing, winning a total of 14 medals, including three golds.  At the 2010 Winter Paralympics in Vancouver, Canada, she was flag-bearer for the Italian team.  She is also a prolific wheelchair marathon competitor, sharing with America’s Tatyana McFadden the distinction of having won the London Marathon wheelchair event four times.  As recently as 2017, at the age of 47, Francesca won gold in the H3 event at the Paracycling road world championships in Pietermaritzburg in South Africa. The H3 category – for paraplegic, tetraplegic or amputees unable to ride a standard bicycle – involves competitors riding in a lying position, using their arms to turn the wheels.  Francesca was the defending champion in the H3 after winning gold at the 2015 championships in Nottwil in Switzerland, where she also took gold in the time trial.  Read more…

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Tommaso Campanella – poet and philosopher

Friar had utopian dream to banish poverty

Writer Tommaso Campanella was born on this day in 1568 in Stilo in Reggio Calabria and was baptised Giovanni Domenico Campanella.  As a friar who was also a philosopher, Campanella tried to reconcile humanism with Roman Catholicism. He is best remembered for his work, La città del sole (The City of the Sun), written in 1602 which was about a utopian commonwealth where every man’s work contributed to the good of the community and there was no poverty.  The son of a poor cobbler, Campanella was an infant prodigy who joined the Dominican order before he was 15, taking the name Fra Tommaso.   He was influenced by the work of philosopher Bernardino Telesio, who opposed Aristotle’s ideas, and he became interested in astrology, which constantly featured in his writing.  After Campanella published his own work, Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses, which stressed the need for human experience as a basis for philosophy, he was arrested, tried and imprisoned briefly for heresy.  Campanella then became interested in pragmatism and the idea of political reform, moved deeply by the poverty of the people living in his native Stilo.  Read more…

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Mario Scelba – Prime Minister 

Tough interior minister worked for social and economic reform

Mario Scelba, a Christian Democrat who would become Italy’s 33rd Prime Minister, was born on this day in 1901 in Caltagirone in Sicily.  He earned the nickname ‘the Iron Sicilian’ while serving as Interior Minister because of his repression of both left-wing protests and Neo-Fascist rallies.  Scelba had been born into a poor family that worked on land owned by the priest Don Luigi Sturzo, who was to become one of the founders of the Italian People’s Party (PPI).  As his godfather, Sturzo paid for Scelba to study law in Rome. When the Fascists suppressed the PPI and forced Sturzo into exile, Scelba remained in Rome as his agent.  He wrote for the underground newspaper, Il Popolo, during the Second World War. He was once arrested by the Germans but freed after three days as he was considered to be ‘a worthless catch’.  After Rome’s liberation by the Allied Forces, Scelba joined the new Christian Democrats, reborn out of the PPI. The Christian Democrats started organising post-Fascist Italy in competition with the centre and left parties, but also at times in coalition with them.  Read more…

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Giacomo Zabarella – philosopher

Scholar devoted his life to explaining Aristotle’s ideas

The leading representative of Renaissance Aristotelianism, Giacomo Zabarella, was born on this day in 1533 in Padua in the Veneto.  His ability to translate ancient Greek enabled him to understand the original texts written by Aristotle and he spent most of his life presenting what he considered to be the true meaning of the philosopher’s ideas.  He had been born into a noble Paduan family who arranged for him to receive a humanist education.  After entering the University of Padua he was taught by Francesco Robortello in the humanities, Bernardino Tomitano in logic, Marcantonio Genua in physics and metaphysics and Pietro Catena in mathematics. All were followers of Aristotle.  Zabarella obtained a Doctorate in Philosophy from the university in 1553 and was offered the Chair of Logic in 1564. He was promoted to the first extraordinary chair of natural philosophy in 1577.  Zabarella became well known for his writings on logic and methodology and spent his entire teaching career at the University of Padua.  As an orthodox Aristotelian, he sought to defend the scientific status of theoretical natural philosophy.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: La rossa volante (The Flying Redhead), by Francesca Porcellato (in Italian)

At 18 months old, Francesca was playing in the driveway of her home when a tanker carrying diesel hit her, crushing her and making her lose the use of her legs. She had to move to Rome to an institute specializing in physiotherapy. In her autobiography, La rossa volante, she tells how the transition from braces to a wheelchair was her return to her life. She no longer felt herself dark inside, oppressed by unmanageable superstructures that made it impossible for her to think, move or even have fun. She sat in the wheelchair, she regained freedom of action and thought and possession of the future. At six years old she dreamed of becoming an athlete. In this book she tells how her dream turned into reality.  Today, at 52 years old, Francesca Porcellato, nicknamed The Flying Redhead, is the Italian Paralympic champion who has won the most in multiple disciplines, from athletics to cross-country skiing to handbike cycling, winning fourteen medals in eleven editions of the Games between summer and winter. In her time, she has also helped attitudes to disability begin to change. “I was born in a time when disability was voluntarily obscured,” she said. “Today, a few decades later, dressed in blue, I sign autographs.”

Co-author Matteo Bursi is a Milan-born journalist and broadcaster who presents sport on the Telemantova channel and writes for La Gazzetta dello Sport. In 2018 he published the book Lo sport è una cosa seria - Sport is a Serious Thing.

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