8 November

NEW - Andrea Appiani - painter

The master of the fresco technique became court painter to Napoleon

Neoclassical artist Andrea Appiani, who was chosen to paint for the Emperor Napoleon during the time in which he ruled Italy, died on this day in 1817 in Milan.  He is remembered for his fine portraits of some of the famous people of the period, including Napoleon, the Empress Joséphine, and the poet, Ugo Foscolo. He is also well regarded for his religious and classical frescoes.  Born in Milan in 1754, Appiani was intended for a career in medicine, to follow in his father’s footsteps, but he went into the private academy of the painter Carlo Maria Guidici instead, where he received instruction in drawing and copying from sculpture and paintings.  He then joined the class of the fresco painter Antonio de Giorgi at the Ambrosiana picture gallery in Milan and he spent time in the studio of Martin Knoller where he learnt more about painting in oils.  Appiani also studied anatomy at the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan with the sculptor Gaetano Monti and traveled to Rome, Parma, Bologna, Florence and Naples to further his studies.  Read more…

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Sandro Mazzola - footballer

Tragedy instilled determination to succeed

The footballer Sandro Mazzola, widely regarded as one of Italy’s greatest players after a glittering career with Internazionale of Milan and the Italian national team, was born on this day in 1942 in Turin.  A forward or attacking midfield player with all the attributes of the world’s best players, Mazzola won four Serie A titles and two European Cups for Inter-Milan, largely under the coaching of Helenio Herrero. His goals tally in Serie A games alone was 116 in 417 appearances. He was capped 70 times by the national team, part of the side that won the 1968 European championships and reached the World Cup final in 1970.  Mazzola always saw his success as a tribute to his father, Valentino, a brilliant player who was captain of the Torino team that was almost entirely wiped out in the Superga air disaster of 1949, when a plane carrying the team back from a friendly in Portugal crashed in thick fog into the rear wall of the Basilica of Superga, which overlooks the city of Turin.  His parents had divorced in 1946 but Valentino won custody of his son and instilled in him a love of football, as well as teaching him the basic skills.  Read more…  

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Salvatore Cascio - actor

Child star of classic movie Cinema Paradiso

The actor Salvatore Cascio, who earned fame through his starring role in the Oscar-winning movie Cinema Paradiso, was born on this day in 1979 in Palazzo Adriano, a small town in a mountainous area of western Sicily.  In Guiseppe Tornatore’s nostalgic 1988 drama, Cascio was the eight-year-old child chosen to play the part of the the film’s central character as a small boy in a Sicilian village who loves to watch films at his local cinema and develops a friendship with the cinema’s grumpy but good-hearted projectionist, Alfredo.  His performance was so charming and captivating it won him the prize for best actor in a supporting role at the 1990 BAFTAs. He remains the only Italian to have won such an award. Roberto Benigni, star and director of the 1997 film Life is Beautiful, is the only Italian to have won a BAFTA as best actor.  By coincidence, the lead character in Cinema Paradiso is also called Salvatore and, like Cascio, is known as a boy as Totò, the Sicilian diminutive of Salvatore.  Landing the part was not down to just having the same name, however, although it helped when it came to filming.  Read more…

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Paolo Taviani - film director

Half of a successful partnership with brother Vittorio

The film director Paolo Taviani, the younger of the two Taviani brothers, whose work together won great acclaim and brought them considerable success in the 1970s and 80s in particular, was born on this day in 1931 in San Miniato, Tuscany.  With his brother Vittorio, who was two years his senior and died in April of this year, he wrote and directed more than 20 films.  Among their triumphs were Padre Padrone (1977), which won the Palme d’Or and the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) prize at the Cannes Film Festival, La notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars) 1982, which won the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes, and Caesar Must Die (2012), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.  The brothers famously would work in partnership, directing alternate scenes, one seldom criticising the other, if ever. The actor Marcello Mastroianni, who starred in their 1974 drama Allonsanfàn, is said to have addressed the brothers as “Paolovittorio.”  They were both born and raised in San Miniato by liberal, anti-Fascist parents who introduced them to art and culture.  Read more…

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Francis I of the Two Sicilies

Death of the king who failed to impress Lady Blessington 

Francis I died in Naples on this day in 1830 after having been King of the Two Sicilies for five years.  The Two Sicilies was the largest of all the Italian states before unification, originally formed as a union between the Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples.  It lasted until 1860 when it was annexed by the Kingdom of Sardinia, which became Italy in 1861.  The Two Sicilies originated when the Kingdom of Sicily was divided in 1283. The King at the time lost the island of Sicily but kept control of his part of southern Italy, which was also referred to as Sicily. The Two Sicilies had capitals in Palermo and Naples.  After Francis succeeded his father Ferdinand I in 1825 he took little part in government and lived with his mistresses in constant fear of assassination.  He is remembered for getting the Austrian occupation force removed from Naples, where it had been billeted at the expense of the treasury, and for founding the Royal Order of Francis I to reward civil merit.  We are fortunate to have been left with an impression of him by Lady Blessington, an English aristocrat, who lived in Naples between 1823 and 1826 and kept a fascinating diary of her time there.   In July 1823 she encountered Francis while he was still Prince of Salerno and heir presumptive to the throne.  Read more…

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Virna Lisi - actress

Screen siren turned back on glamour roles to prove talent

The actress Virna Lisi, born on this day in 1936, might have become the new Marilyn Monroe if she had allowed Hollywood to shape her career in the way the movie moguls had planned.  She was certainly blessed with all the physical attributes to fulfil their commercial ambitions - no less a screen goddess than Brigitte Bardot called her 'the most beautiful woman in the world' - but decided she was too good an actress to be typecast as mere window dressing or eye candy and ultimately rejected their advances.  In time she proved to herself that she made the right decision when her portrayal of the manipulative Catherine de' Medici, the Italian who was Queen of France between 1547 and 1559, in Patrice Chéreau’s 1994 film La Reine Margot won her three awards - Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, a César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) and the Italian film critics' award, the Nastro d'Argento (Silver Ribbon).  Born Virna Pieralisi in the town of Jesi, in the province of Ancona  in Marche, where her father had a marble importing business, she moved with her family to Rome in the early 1950s.  Read more…

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Francesco Molinari – golfer

Second win in Italian Open gave him unique status

Francesco Molinari, one of two golfing brothers who have advanced the cause of the sport in Italy more than anyone in the modern era, was born on this day in 1982 in Turin.  He and Edoardo, who is 21 months’ his senior, won the Mission Hills World Cup in China in 2009, the first time Italy had won the two-player team event.  And when he sank a 5ft (1.5m) putt to beat the Masters champion Danny Willett to win the Italian Open in Monza in September 2016, Francesco became the first Italian to win his country’s open championship twice since it became part of the European tour in 1972.  He had won it for the first time in 2006 at the Castello di Tolcinasco course just outside Milan, which gave him his first European tour victory at the age of 23 and made him the first Italian to win the tournament since Massimo Mannelli in 1980.  The success made such an impact in Italy, and in Turin in particular, that Francesco was asked to be one of the official torch carriers on behalf of the host nation at the 2006 Winter Olympics, which were staged in Turin. Francesco had yet to win a major at the time this was originally posted but went close in the 2017 PGA Championship at the Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, North Carolina, before winning the Open Championship at Carnoustie in Scotland in 2018.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Day Italian Football Died: Torino and the Tragedy of Superga, by Alexandra Manna and Mike Gibbs

AT just after 5pm on 4 May 1949, a Fiat aircraft carrying 31 people, among them the Torino football squad, crashed into a 2,200ft-high peak called Superga on the outskirts of Turin. In an instant the dominant force in Italian football was destroyed. It was a tragedy unparalleled in sporting history and still affecting the club today. Unlike Manchester United after Munich, the Torino club has never been able to recover from that awful moment. Fifty years after the tragedy of Superga, Alexandra Manna and Mike Gibbs revisited Turin to see an entire city pay homage to the memory of those who died. The experience made a profound impression upon them and they resolved to find out more. The Day Italian Football Died: Torino and the Tragedy of Superga is the result.

Alexandra Manna went to school in Italy. As Alexandra Manna-Gibbs she now runs a fashion printing business in Bristol called Fashionmoda, specialising in direct-to-garment printing. 

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Andrea Appiani - painter

The master of the fresco technique became court painter to Napoleon

Appiani fell into poverty at the end of 
his life despite his notable career

Neoclassical artist Andrea Appiani, who was chosen to paint for the Emperor Napoleon during the time in which he ruled Italy, died on this day in 1817 in Milan.

He is remembered for his fine portraits of some of the famous people of the period, including Napoleon, the Empress Joséphine, and the poet, Ugo Foscolo. He is also well regarded for his religious and classical frescoes.

Born in Milan in 1754, Appiani was intended for a career in medicine, to follow in his father’s footsteps, but he went into the private academy of the painter Carlo Maria Guidici instead, where he received instruction in drawing and copying from sculpture and paintings.

He then joined the class of the fresco painter Antonio de Giorgi at the Ambrosiana picture gallery in Milan and he spent time in the studio of Martin Knoller where he learnt more about painting in oils.

Appiani also studied anatomy at the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan with the sculptor Gaetano Monti and travelled to Rome, Parma, Bologna, Florence and Naples to further his studies.

He became interested in aesthetic issues, inspired by the classical poet Giuseppe Parini, who was the subject of two fine pencil portraits by him.

Appiani's magnificent portrait of
 Napoleon Bonaparte, painted in 1805

Appiani attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts from 1776 where he learnt the technique of fresco painting. His frescoes depicting the four evangelists in the church of Santa Maria presso San Celso, in Milan, completed in 1795, are considered by art experts to be among his masterpieces.

He is also remembered for his frescoes in the Royal Villa - Villa Reale - of Milan and his frescoes honouring Napoleon in some of the rooms of the Royal Palace of Milan.

Appiani was created a pensioned artist to the Kingdom of Italy by Napoleon, but lost his allowance after the fall of the kingdom in 1814, and he later fell into poverty. He suffered a stroke and died at the age of 63 in the city of his birth.

He is sometimes referred to as Andrea Appiani the Elder, to distinguish him from his great nephew, Andrea Appiani, who was an historical painter in Rome.

Appiani’s portrait of the poet Foscolo, a revolutionary who supported Napoleon’s attempts to expel the Austrians from Italy, hangs in the Pinacoteca di Brera, his 1805 portrait of Napoleon is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, while that of the Empress Joséphine hangs at the Château de Malmaison, her former home in Paris and and Napoleon's last residence in France.

The Pinocoteca di Brera is also home to the self-portrait of Appiani shown here.

The Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan is
one of Italy's most prestigious art schools

Travel tip:

The Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, sometimes shortened to Accademia di Brera, where Andrea Appiani studied, is now a state-run tertiary public academy of fine arts in Via Brera in Milan, in a building it shares with the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan's main public museum for art. The academy was founded in 1776 by Maria Theresa of Austria and shared its premises with other cultural and scientific institutions. The main building, the Palazzo Brera, was built in about 1615 to designs by Francesco Maria Richini.  The Brera district is so named because in around the ninth century, for military purposes, it was turned into a ‘brayda’ – a Lombardic word meaning ‘an area cleared of trees’.  Today, it is one of Milan’s most fashionable neighbourhoods, its narrow streets lined with trendy bars and restaurants. As the traditional home of many artists and writers, the area has a Bohemian feel that has brought comparisons with Montmartre in Paris. 

The Villa Reale, which faces the Giardini Pubblici
of Porta Venezia, contains notable Appiani frescoes

Travel tip:

Milan’s Villa Reale, which at times has been known as the Villa Belgiojoso Bonaparte and the Villa Comunale,was built between 1790 and 1796 as the residence of Count Ludovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso, an Austrian diplomat and soldier who served the Habsburg monarchy in the second half of the 18th century. The mediaeval castle of Belgioioso, a town around 40km (25 miles) south of Milan in the province of Pavia, had been the seat of the Belgiojoso family for centuries. His villa, built in Neoclassical style and designed by Leopoldo Pollack, an Austrian-born architect, is on Via Palestro, facing the Giardini Pubblici of Porta Venezia, the eastern gate of the city.  In 1920 the villa became the property of the city of Milan and a year later became the home of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna. Adjoining the main building is the Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, an exhibition space for contemporary art, which was built in 1955 on the site of the former stables of the palace, destroyed by wartime bombing.  The villa’s English-style gardens were also laid out by Leopoldo Pollack.

Also on this day:

1830: The death of Francis I of the Two Sicilies

1931: The birth of film director Paolo Taviani

1936: The birth of actress Virna Lisi

1942: The birth of footballer Sandro Mazzola

1979: The birth of child actor Salvatore Cascio

1982: The birth of golfer Francesco Molinari

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7 November

Luigi Riva - an Azzurri great

Italy's record goalscorer and hero of Cagliari

Luigi 'Gigi' Riva, who was born on this day in 1944, is widely regarded as one of the finest strikers in the history of Italian football.  Despite playing in an era when football in Italy was notoriously defensive, he scored more than 200 goals in a 16-year club career, 156 of them in Serie A for Cagliari, with whom he won the Scudetto (shield) as Italian League champions in 1970.  Nicknamed 'Rombo di tuono' - thunderclap - by the football writer Gianni Brera, Riva is also the all-time leading goalscorer for the Italian national team with 35 goals, his record having stood since 1974.  After his playing career, Riva spent 23 years as part of the management team for the Azzurri and was a key member of the backroom staff when Italy won the World Cup for a fourth time in 2006.  Born in Lombardy, not far from Lake Maggiore, Riva spent virtually his whole football career with Cagliari and made his home in Sardinia.  The 1969-70 title is the only championship in the club's history and Riva, who scored 21 goals in the title-winning season, is as revered on the island as Diego Maradona is in Naples.  Although he came from a loving home in the small town of Leggiuno, just a few kilometres inland from the shores of Lake Maggiore, Riva had a tough upbringing.  Read more…

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Gaspare Tagliacozzi - surgeon

Professor invented rhinoplasty procedure

Pioneering plastic surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi died on this day in 1599 in Bologna.  During his career, Tagliacozzi had developed what became known as ‘the Italian method’ for nasal reconstruction.  He improved on the procedure that had been carried out by the 15th century Sicilian surgeons, Gustavo Branca, and his son, Antonio.  Tagliacozzi wrote a book, De Curtorum Chirugia per Insitionem - On the Surgery of Mutilation by Grafting - which described in great detail the procedures carried out in the past to repair noses amputated during battle.  Surgeons who came after him credit him with single-handedly revolutionising the procedure and inventing what is today referred to as a rhinoplasty procedure.  Tagliacozzi was born in Bologna in 1545. He studied medicine, natural sciences and anatomy at the University of Bologna, gaining a degree in philosophy and medicine by the age of 24.  After he was appointed professor of surgery and professor of anatomy at the University he taught at the Archiginnasio, famous for its anatomical theatre, where he procured the bodies of executed prisoners to use in dissections.  Read more…

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Niccolò Machiavelli - statesman and diplomat

Dismissal gave public servant time to write about his ruthless ideas

Statesman and diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli, whose name has become synonymous with the words ‘cunning’ and ‘duplicity’, was dismissed from office in Florence on this day in 1512 by a written decree issued by the Medici rulers.  Machiavelli was forced to withdraw from public life and retired to his home in the Chianti region of Tuscany, where he wrote his most famous work, The Prince, which was to give the world the political idea of ‘the ends justify the means’.  Had the Medici not distrusted him, Machiavelli might have continued to serve in Florence as a diplomat and military leader.  He may never have passed on to mankind the ideas he had learnt from his work during the turbulent period in Italian history when popes and other European countries were battling against Italy’s city states for power.  In The Prince he was able to write with first-hand knowledge about the methods he had seen used by Cesare Borgia and his father Pope Alexander V1 to take over large parts of central Italy.  The ideas he put forward were to make the word ‘machiavellian’ a regularly used pejorative adjective and the phrase ‘Old Nick’ to become an English term for the devil.  Read more…

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Feast day of Ercolano – patron saint of Perugia

Bishop was martyred after trying to save city

Today sees the Umbrian city of Perugia celebrate one of the two annual feast days of its patron saint, Ercolano, who according to legend was martyred on this day in 549 at the hands of the Ostrogoths, who ruled much of Italy at that time and had placed the city under siege.  Herculanus, as he is also known, was the Bishop of Perugia and as such was charged with trying to bring comfort to his flock in the face of inevitable capture by the Ostrogoths, the tribe, thought to have originated in Scandinavia, which had swept into Italy at the beginning of the sixth century.  They had a large, well-equipped army – more powerful than the army Perugia possessed, although it had enough soldiers to deter an advance – and the Ostrogoth leader, Totila, was prepared to wait outside the walls of the city for as long as it would take to starve the population into surrender.  Perugia’s authorities did all they could to prolong the siege, rationing supplies and ensuring none were wasted, but days passed into months and years and there was no evidence that the amply fed army at the gates of the city was planning to move on.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Inside Story of the Legendary 1970 World Cup, by Andrew Downie

The 1970 World Cup is widely regarded as the greatest ever staged, with more goals per game than any World Cup since. But more than just the proliferation of goals was the quality of the overall football, as some of the finest teams ever to represent the likes of West Germany, Peru, Italy and England came together for a tilt at the world title. But at the heart of the tournament were Brazil; captained by Carlos Alberto and featuring legends like Pelé, Gérson, Jairzinho, Rivellino and Tostão, the 1970 Seleção are often cited as the greatest-ever World Cup team.  Using brand new interviews alongside painstaking archival research, Andrew Downie charts each stage of the tournament, from the preparations to the final, telling a host of remarkable stories in the players’ own words. The Greatest Show on Earth is an immediate, insightful and compelling narrative that paints a unique portrait of an extraordinary few weeks when football hit peaks it has seldom reached since. 

Andrew Downie is a Scottish journalist who has spent much of his life in Latin America. He has written two books and reported from more than a dozen countries. He is fluent in Portuguese and Spanish and currently divides his time between Spain and Brazil.

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6 November

Cesare Lombroso – criminologist

Professor who first encouraged study of criminal mind

Cesare Lombroso, a university professor often referred to as ‘the father of criminology’ was born on this day in 1835 in Verona.  Although many of his views are no longer held to be correct, he was the first to establish the validity of scientific study of the criminal mind, paving the way for a generation of psychiatrists and psychologists to create a greater understanding of criminal behaviour.  In broad terms, Lombroso's theory was that criminals could be distinguished from law-abiding people by multiple physical characteristics, which he contended were throwbacks to primitive, even subhuman ancestors, which brought with them throwbacks to primitive behaviour that went against the rules and expectations of modern civilised society.  Through years of postmortem examinations and comparative studies of criminals, the mentally disturbed and normal non-criminal individuals, Lombroso formed the belief that ‘born criminals’ could be identified by such features as the angle of their forehead, the size of their ears, a lack of symmetry in the face or even arms of excessive length.  Read more…

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Enzo Biagi - author and journalist

Much respected presenter taken off air by Berlusconi

Enzo Biagi, the distinguished print and television journalist and author of more than 80 books, died in Milan on this day in 2007, at the age of 87.  A staunch defender of the freedom of the press, Biagi himself was the victim of censorship from the highest level of the Italian government in 2002 when prime minister Silvio Berlusconi effectively sacked him from the public broadcaster RAI for what he called "criminal use" of the network.  In what became known as il Editto bulgaro - the Bulgarian Edict - because he made the pronouncement during a state visit to Sofia, Berlusconi named another journalist, Michele Santoro, and the satirical comedian, Daniele Luttazzi, as guilty of similar conduct and said it was his duty to "not to allow this to happen".  It meant that the last years of Biagi's life were marred somewhat by an absence from the screen that lasted five years.  He made an emotional comeback in April 2007, seven months before his death, when Romani Prodi had begun his second stint as PM and saw to it that he was reinstated.  Berlusconi's disapproval of Biagi was thought to have related to two interviews he conducted during the run-up to the 2001 elections.  Read more…

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Giovanni Buitoni - entrepreneur

Turned family business into multinational company

Giovanni Buitoni, the entrepreneur who turned Buitoni pasta and Perugina chocolates into the international brands they are today, was born on this day in 1891 in Perugia.  The Buitoni family had been making pasta since 1827, when Giovanni’s great grandmother, Giulia, opened a small shop in the Tuscan town of Sansepolcro, in order to support the family after her husband, Giovan Battista Buitoni, had become ill.  She had her own recipe for pasta that used only high quality durum wheat.  Giulia had pawned her wedding jewellery in order to set up the shop but the business did so well that in 1856 two of the couple’s nine children, Giuseppe and Giovanni, opened a factory in Città di Castello, just over the border in northern Umbria, to manufacture pasta using a hard durum wheat they sourced in Puglia.  Giovanni’s sons, Antonio and Francesco, continued the company’s expansion, founding manufacturing plants in other towns, including Perugia.  It was in Perugia in 1907 that Francesco, noting the increasing popularity of chocolate, joined several partners in launchingd the Perugina confectionary company. Giovanni junior’s destiny was probably always to have a role in the family business, although it came rather sooner than he expected.  Read more…

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Vino Novello

Raise a glass to autumn in Italy

Italy’s new wine from this year’s harvest - Vino Novello - goes on sale in the shops and will be served in bars and restaurants from around today.  The light, fruity, red wine, produced throughout Italy from different grape varieties, is enjoyable to drink and a bargain buy to take home with you.  Vino Novello is often similar in taste, body and colour to the French wine, Beaujolais Nouveau, which is exported to a number of other countries after its release in the third week of November.  Like Beaujolais Nouveau, Vino Novello has a low alcohol content and is meant to be drunk while it is still young. The wine should be consumed quickly after the bottle is opened and unopened bottles should be kept for only a few months. In some parts of Italy there is a tradition that the last days to drink it are i giorni della merla (the days of the blackbird), which are traditionally the coldest days at the end of January.  A major area for production is the Veneto, with the merlot grape being the one most used by winemakers to make Vino Novello. Many wine producing areas hold feste to celebrate and will serve local specialities to eat with the new wine.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Criminal Man, by Cesare Lombroso

Cesare Lombroso is widely considered the founder of criminology. His theory of the “born” criminal dominated European and American thinking about the causes of criminal behaviour during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. This volume offers English-language readers the first critical, scholarly translation of Lombroso’s L'uomo delinquente, one of the most famous criminological treatises ever written. The text laid the groundwork for subsequent biological theories of crime, including contemporary genetic explanations.  Originally published in 1876, Criminal Man went through five editions during Lombroso’s lifetime. In each edition Lombroso expanded on his ideas about innate criminality and refined his method for categorising criminal behaviour, although some of his views, conforming to the prevailing politics of sexual and racial hierarchy, would not be acceptable today. In this new translation, Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter bring together for the first time excerpts from all five editions in order to represent the development of Lombroso’s thought and his positivistic approach to understanding criminal behaviour.  

Cesare Lombroso, the physician and criminologist, wrote extensively about jurisprudence and the causes of crime. He produced more than 30 books during his lifetime.  Mary Gibson is Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Nicole Hahn Rafter is Senior Research Fellow at Northeastern University. 

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