13 November

Dacia Maraini – writer

Long career of a feminist novelist and playwright

Novelist and short story writer Dacia Maraini was born on this day in 1936 in Fiesole in Tuscany.  An Italian female writer who is widely recognised abroad, Dacia Maraini is also a respected critic, poet, journalist and playwright. She established la Maddalena, the first Italian theatrical group composed exclusively of women.  The themes of limitation and oppression in Maraini’s writing have their roots in her childhood years, which she spent in a concentration camp in Japan. She then went to live in Sicily, which she has also described as an oppressive setting.  Her writing expresses the concerns of the Italian feminist movement, focusing on issues such as abortion, sexual violence, prostitution and the mother/daughter relationship. Many of her works are autobiographical and are written in the form of diaries and letters.  Maraini lived with the writer Alberto Moravia from 1962 until 1983 and was a close friend of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Maria Callas.  She was the daughter of Sicilian princess Topazia Aliata di Salaparuta, who was an artist, and Fosco Maraini, a Florentine ethnologist.  When she was still a young child, Maraini’s family moved to Japan to escape Fascism in 1938. They were interned in a Japanese concentration camp. Read more…

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Alberto Lattuada – film director

Versatility and eye for talent made him leading figure

A leading figure in Italian cinema, Alberto Lattuada was born on this day in 1914 in Vaprio d’Adda in Lombardy.  Lattuada was the son of the composer Felice Lattuada, who made him complete his studies as an architect before allowing him to enter the film business.  As a student, Lattuada was a member of the editorial staff of the antifascist publication Camminare and also of Corrente di Vita, an independent newspaper. Corrente di Vita was closed by the Fascist regime just before Italy entered the Second World War. Lattuada, who is said to have detested fascism, helped to organise a screening of a banned anti-war film at about this time, which got him into trouble with the police.  In 1940 Lattuada started his cinema career as a screenwriter and assistant director on Mario Soldati’s Piccolo mondo antico (Old-Fashioned World).  He directed his own first movie, Giacomo l’idealista (Giacomo the Idealist) in 1942.  In 1950 he co-directed Luci del varietà with Federico Fellini. This was the first film directed by Fellini.  Read more…

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Gioachino Rossini - composer

Italian composer who found the fast route to wealth and popularity

One of Italy’s most prolific composers, Gioachino Rossini, died on this day in France in 1868.  He wrote 39 operas as well as sacred music, songs and instrumental music. He is perhaps best remembered for, The Barber of Seville (Il barbiere di Siviglia), and Cinderella (La Cenerentola).  Rossini was born into a musical family living in Pesaro on the Adriatic coast in 1792. During his early years his mother earned her living singing at theatres in the area and he quickly developed musical talent of his own.  He made his first and only appearance on stage as a singer in 1805 but then settled down to learn the cello.  His first opera, The Marriage Contract (La cambiale di matrimonio), was staged in Venice when he was just 18.  In 1813 his operas, Tancredi and L’italiana in Algeri, were big successes in Venice and he found himself famous at the age of 20.  The Barber of Seville was first produced in Rome in 1816 and was so successful that even Beethoven wrote to congratulate Rossini on it.  The composer became wealthy and in big demand and travelled to Austria, France and England.  Read more…

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Agostina Livia Pietrantoni - saint

Tragic sister’s simple virtue stopped the traffic in the capital

Nun Agostina Livia Pietrantoni died on this day in 1894 in Rome after being attacked by a patient at the hospital where she was working.  Her story touched Romans so deeply that her funeral brought the city to a standstill as thousands of residents lined the streets and knelt before her casket when it passed them.  The November 16 edition of the daily newspaper Il Messaggero reported that a more impressive spectacle had never before been seen in Rome.  ‘From one o’clock in the afternoon, the streets close to Santo Spirito, and all the roads it was believed that the funeral procession would pass, were crowded with people to the point of making the flow of traffic difficult.’  Sister Agostina was beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1972 and canonised by Pope John Paul II in 1999. Her feast day is celebrated each year on November 12.  Sant’Agostina was born Livia Pietrantoni in 1864 in Pozzaglia Sabina to the north east of Rome. She was the second of 11 children born to a poor farmer and his wife.  She started work at the age of seven doing manual labour, carrying heavy sacks of stones and sand for road construction.  Read more…

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Giovanna of Italy - Tsaritsa of Bulgaria

Daughter of King of Italy who married Tsar Boris III

The girl who would grow up to be Ioanna, Tsarista of Bulgaria, was born Princess Giovanna Elisabetta Antonia Romana Maria of Savoy on this day in 1907 in Rome.  Giovanna’s father was King Victor Emmanuel III, who was Italy’s monarch through two world wars from 1900 until he abdicated in 1946 just as Italy was about to become a republic.  Her mother was Queen Elena of Montenegro.  At the age of 22, Princess Giovanna became Tsarista Ioanna - the last Tsarista - after marrying the Tsar of Bulgaria, Boris III, in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi.  It was the hope of the Italian royal family that the marriage would strengthen their relationship with the Balkan states.  The marriage lasted until Boris’s death in 1943 at the age of just 49. The Tsar had fallen ill during a trip to Germany to discuss Bulgaria’s role in the Second World War as a member of the Axis bloc and there were suspicions that he was poisoned on the orders of Hitler.  Bulgaria had agreed to join the Axis under the threat of invasion by the Germans, who wanted to use their territory to launch an attack on Greece, but the Tsar was said to be appalled at Hitler's massacres of Jews. On two occasions he refused orders to deport Bulgarian Jews.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Train to Budapest, by Dacia Maraini

1956: Amara, a young Italian journalist, is sent to report on the growing political divide between East and West in post-war central Europe. She also has a more personal mission: to find out what happened to Emanuele, her soul mate from before the war when both were children in Florence. Maraini's novel, Train to Budapest, explains that Emanuele and his family were Jews transported by the Nazis from wartime Vienna, but not before he had sent Amara a long series of letters she still carries with her. Her quest now takes her on long train journeys. She visits the holocaust museum at Auschwitz, and Budapest, where she is caught up in the tumultuous events of the October rising against the Soviet Union. Amara is helped by chance travel companions, notably Hans, part Austrian and half-Jewish, who works as a surrogate father at weddings for brides orphaned in the war, and Hovath, an elderly Hungarian captured by the Russians after forced service with the German army outside Stalingrad in 1942. Along the way she meets many other survivors, each with their own story to tell, and ponders the troubled existence of her own parents in the oppressive world of Mussolini's Italy. But did Emanuele survive the war or, like so many other Viennese Jews, did he die in Auschwitz or a ghetto in Poland?

Novelist, poet and playwright, Dacia Maraini has been awarded Italy's top two literary prizes, the Premio Strega and the Premio Campiello. Her fiction, which has been published in 22 countries, includes Woman at War, Isolina, Voices and the worldwide best-seller The Silent Duchess. She lives in Rome.

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12 November

Silvio Berlusconi resigns as PM

Financial crisis brings down 'untouchable' premier 

Silvio Berlusconi resigned as prime minister of Italy on this day in 2011. A controversial, polarising figure, he had dominated Italian politics for 17 years.  With Italy in the grip of the economic crisis that had brought severe consequences to other parts of the Eurozone, Berlusconi lost his parliamentary majority a few days earlier and promised to resign when austerity measures demanded by Brussels were passed by both houses of the Italian parliament.  The Senate had approved the measures the day before. When the lower house voted 380-26 in favour, Berlusconi was true to his word, meeting president Giorgio Napoletano within two hours to tender his resignation.  His last journey from the Palazzo Chigi to the Palazzo Quirinale, the respective official residences of the prime minister and the president, was not a dignified one.  When he arrived at the Quirinale, he was booed by a large and somewhat hostile crowd that had gathered, entering the building to shouts of 'buffoon' and 'mafioso'.  A gathering of musicians and singers serenaded him with a version of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah.  After the meeting concluded, he left by a side entrance to avoid further barracking.  Read more…

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Giro di Lombardia - historic cycle race

2021 edition was 115th since inception

The Giro di Lombardia cycle race - now known simply as Il Lombardia - was contested for the first time on this day in 1905.  The last of the cycling calendar’s five ‘Monuments’ - the races considered to be the oldest, hardest and most prestigious of the one-day events in the men's road cycling programme - the Giro di Lombardia is has also been called the Autumn Classic or la classica delle foglie morte - the classic of the dead (falling) leaves.  It is a particular favourite with cyclists who excel on hill climbs, its changing route normally featuring five or six notable ascents, of which the Madonna del Ghisallo, the site of a church that has become a sacred place in the cycling world, is a permanent fixture.  The race was the idea of journalist Tullio Morgagni, well known as the founder of the Giro d’Italia, although the Giro di Lombardia predated the former by three years.  The editor of the Milan newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport came up with the idea to give Piero Albini, a Milanese rider, an opportunity to avenge his defeat by rival Giovanni Cuniolo in an event called the Italian King’s Cup.  For the first two years of its life, the race was simply called Milano-Milano, reflecting the fact that it started and ended in the regional capital. Read more…

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Piero Terracina - death camp survivor

Roman lived to be 91 after being freed from Auschwitz

Piero Terracina, the man thought to be the longest survivor among the Jews rounded up for deportation in Rome after Nazi occupation during World War Two, was born on this day in 1928 in the Italian capital. Terracina was taken to the notorious Auschwitz death camp in Poland, where almost one million Jewish prisoners were killed, but was spared death and eventually liberated in 1945.  After a long and difficult recovery he returned to Rome and lived to be 91. For the last almost 30 years of his life, so long as his health allowed, he devoted himself to maintaining awareness of the Holocaust in the hope that such horrors would never be repeated.  Terracina enjoyed a relatively uneventful early childhood. Although many of Rome’s Jews still lived in the area of Rione Sant’Angelo to which they had been originally confined by papal decree in the 16th century, the Jewish community in the early part of the 20th century enjoyed the same status as any other Italians in the city.  Piero was the youngest of four children born to Giovanni Terracina and Lidia Ascoli. His father was a fabric merchant.  Read more…

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Giulio Lega – First World War hero

Flying ace survived war to look after health of Italy’s politicians

Credited with five aerial victories during the First World War, the pilot Giulio Lega was born on this day in 1892 in Florence.  After the war he completed his medical studies and embarked on a long career as physician to Italy’s Chamber of Deputies.  Lega had been a medical student when he was accepted by the Italian army for officer training in 1915.  Because he was unusually tall, he became an ‘extended infantryman’ in the Grenadiers. He made his mark with them at the Fourth Battle of the Isonzo, for which he was awarded the War Merit Cross for valour. The following year he won a Bronze Medal for Military Valour in close-quarters combat, which was awarded to him on the battlefield.  Lega volunteered to train as a pilot in 1916 and was sent to Malpensa near Milan. After gaining his licence he was sent on reconnaissance duty during which he earned a Silver Medal for Military Valour. After completing fighter pilot training he joined 76a Squadriglia and went on to fly 46 combat sorties with them.  His first two victories in the air, near Col d’Asiago and over Montello, were shared with two other Italian pilots. During the last Austro-Hungarian offensive he downed a Hansa-Brandenburg C1 over Passagno single-handedly.  Read more…

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Umberto Giordano - opera composer

Death of the musician remembered for Andrea Chenier

Composer Umberto Giordano died on this day in 1948 in Milan at the age of 81.  He is perhaps best remembered for his opera, Andrea Chenier, a dramatic work about liberty and love during the French Revolution, which was based on the real life story of the romantic French poet, André Chenier.  The premiere of the opera was held at Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1896. At the time, its success propelled Giordano into the front rank of up-and-coming Italian composers alongside Pietro Mascagni, to whom he is often compared, and Giacomo Puccini.  Another of Giordano’s works widely acclaimed by both the public and the critics is the opera Fedora.  This had its premiere in 1898 at the Teatro Lirico in Milan. A rising young tenor, Enrico Caruso, played the role of Fedora’s lover, Loris. The opera was a big success and is still performed today.  Some of Giordano’s later works are less well-known but they have achieved the respect of the critics and music experts and are occasionally revived by opera companies.  Giordano was born in Foggia in Puglia in August 1867. He studied under Paolo Serrao at the Conservatoire of Naples.  Read more…

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Treaty of Rapallo 1920

Agreement solves dispute over former Austrian territory

The Treaty of Rapallo between Italy and the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was signed on this day in 1920 in Rapallo near Genoa in Liguria.  It was drawn up to solve the dispute over territories formerly controlled by Austria in the upper Adriatic and Dalmatia, which were known as the Austrian Littoral.  There had been tension between Italy and the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes since the end of the First World War when the Austro-Hungarian empire was dissolved.  Italy had claimed the territories assigned to it by the secret London Pact of 1915 between Italy and the Triple Entente.  The Pact, signed on 26 April 2015, stipulated that in the event of victory in the First World War, Italy was to gain territory formerly controlled by Austria in northern Dalmatia.  These territories had a mixed population but Slovenes and Croats accounted for more than half.  The London Pact was nullified by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the war after pressure from American President Woodrow Wilson. Therefore the objective of the Treaty of Rapallo two years later was to find a compromise.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony, by Paul Ginsborg

Silvio Berlusconi, a self-made man with a taste for luxurious living, owner of a huge television empire and the politician who likened a German MEP to a Nazi concentration camp guard – small wonder that much of democratic Europe and America has responded with considerable dismay and disdain to his governance of Italy.  Paul Ginsborg, contemporary Italy's foremost historian, explains here why we should take Berlusconi seriously. Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony combines historical narrative - Berlusconi's childhood in the dynamic and paternalist Milanese bourgeoisie, his strict religious schooling, a working life which has encompassed crooning, large construction projects and the creation of a commercial television empire - with careful analysis of Berlusconi's political development. While highlighting the particular italianità of Berlusconi's trajectory, Ginsborg also finds international tendencies, such as the distorted relationship between the media system and politics. Throughout, Ginsborg suggests that Berlusconi has gotten as far as he has thanks to the wide-open space left by the strategic weaknesses of modern left-wing politics.

Paul Ginsborg, author of the highly acclaimed books A History of Contemporary Italy and Italy and Its Discontents, teaches history at Florence University.

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11 November

NEW - Alessandro Mussolini - socialist activist

Father whose politics were Fascist leader’s early inspiration

Alessandro Mussolini, the father of Italian Fascist founder and leader Benito Mussolini, was born on this day in 1854, in Montemaggiore di Predappio, a hamlet in Emilia-Romagna, then still part of the Papal States in pre-unification Italy.  A blacksmith by profession, he was a revolutionary socialist activist who had a profound influence on his son’s early political leanings.  Although his embrace of nationalism was not as full as that of his son, Mussolini senior nonetheless greatly admired Italian nationalist figures such as Carlo Pisacane, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Giuseppe Garibaldi, whom he perceived as having socialist or humanist tendencies.  Regularly in trouble with the police for acts of criminal damage and sometimes violence against opponents, Alessandro was eventually held under house arrest and granted his release only when he announced he wished to marry his girlfriend, a local schoolteacher who was a devout Catholic.  Alessandro was born in a house in Montemaggiore di Predappio that once hosted Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi as they made their way towards Venice from San Marino.  Read more…

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Luca Zingaretti - actor

Found fame as TV detective Inspector Montalbano

The actor Luca Zingaretti, best known for his portrayal of Inspector Montalbano in the TV series based on Andrea Camilleri's crime novels, was born on this day in 1961 in Rome.  The Montalbano mysteries, now into a 10th series, began broadcasting on Italy's RAI network in 1999 and has become a hit in several countries outside Italy, including France, Spain, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.  Zingaretti has played the famously maverick Sicilian detective in all 28 feature-length episodes to date, each one based on a novel or short story collection by the Sicilian-born author Camilleri, now in his 92nd year but still writing.  Although he had established himself as a stage actor and had appeared in a number of films, it was the part of Montalbano that established Zingaretti's fame.  Yet he had hoped to become a star on another kind of stage as a professional footballer.  Growing up in the Magliana neighbourhood in the southwest of Rome, he spent as much time as he could out in the streets kicking a ball and played for a number of junior teams.  Read more…

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Andrea Zani – violinist and composer

Musician who ushered in the new classical era

Andrea Teodora Zani, one of the earliest Italian composers to move away from the Baroque style, was born on this day in 1696 in Casalmaggiore in the province of Cremona in Lombardy.  Casalmaggiore, nicknamed ‘the little Venice on the Po’, was a breeding ground for musical talent at this time and Zani was an exact contemporary of Giuseppe Guarneri, the most famous member of the Guarneri family of violin makers in Cremona. He was just a bit younger than the violinist composers, Francesco Maria Veracini, Giuseppe Tartini and Pietro Locatelli.  Zani’s father, an amateur violinist, gave him his first violin lessons and he later received instruction from Giacomo Civeri, a local musician, and Carlo Ricci, who was at the time court musician to the Gonzaga family at their palace in Guastalla.  After Zani played in front of Antonio Caldara, who was Capellmeister for the court of Archduke Ferdinand Charles in nearby Mantua, he was invited to go to Vienna to be a violinist in the service of the Habsburgs.  A lot of Zani’s work has survived in both published and manuscript form, some of it having been recovered from European libraries. His early works show the influence of Antonio Vivaldi. Read more…

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Victor Emmanuel III

Birth of the King who ruled Italy through two world wars

Italy’s longest reigning monarch, Victor Emmanuel III (Vittorio Emanuele III di Savoia), was born on this day in Naples in 1869.  The only child of King Umberto I and Queen Margherita of Savoy, he was given the title of Prince of Naples. He became King of Italy in 1900 after his father was assassinated in Monza.  During the reign of Victor Emmanuel III, Italy was involved in two world wars and experienced the rise and fall of Fascism.  At the height of his popularity he was nicknamed by the Italians Re soldato (soldier King) and Re vittorioso (victorious King) because of Italy’s success in battle during the First World War. He was also sometimes called sciaboletta (little sabre) as he was only five feet (1.53m) tall.  Italy had remained neutral at the start of the First World War but signed treaties to go into the war on the side of France, Britain and Russia in 1915. Victor Emmanuel III enjoyed popular support as a result of visiting areas in the north affected by the fighting while his wife, Queen Elena, helped the nurses care for the wounded.  But the instability after the First World War led to Mussolini’s rise to power. Read more…

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Germano Mosconi – sports writer and presenter

Short-tempered journalist who became the news

Germano Mosconi, who became a well-known television personality, was born on this day in 1932 in San Bonifacio in the Veneto.  Mosconi became notorious for his short temper and swearing on air and was regarded as a bit of a character on local television. But he became known all over Italy and throughout the world after a video of him someone posted anonymously on the internet went viral.  In the 1980s Mosconi delivered sports reports on Telenuovo in Verona and in 1982 he received the Cesare d’Oro international award for journalistic merit.  But he later became known for his excessive swearing and blaspheming. The anonymous video showed his irate reactions to various problems he encountered while broadcasting, such as people unexpectedly entering the studio, background noises and illegible writing on the news sheets he received.  His use of swear words, blasphemy and insults in both Italian and Venetian dialect and his other humorous antics made the video compulsive viewing all over the world.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini's Italy, by Christopher Duggan

Fascist Voices is a fresh and disturbing look at a country in thrall to a charismatic dictator. Tracing fascism from its conception to its legacy, Christopher Duggan unpicks why the regime enjoyed so much support among the majority of the Italian people. He examines the extraordinary hold the Duce had on Italy and how he came to embody fascism.  By making use of rarely examined sources, such as letters and diaries, newspaper reports, secret police files, popular songs and radio broadcasts, Duggan explores how ordinary people experienced fascism on a daily basis; how its ideology influenced politcs, religion and everyday life to the extent that Mussolini's legacy still lingers in Italy today.

Christopher Duggan is Professor of Italian History at Reading University. He has written several books on modern Italian history, including History of Sicily, with M I Finley and D Mack Smith, Fascism and the Mafia, A concise history of Italy, Francesco Crispi: From Nation to Nationalism and The Force of Destiny: a History of Italy Since 1796.

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Alessandro Mussolini - socialist activist

Father whose politics were Fascist leader’s early inspiration

Mussolini's father, Alessandro, by trade a
blacksmith, was an active socialist militant

Alessandro Mussolini, the father of Italian Fascist founder and leader Benito Mussolini, was born on this day in 1854, in Montemaggiore di Predappio, a hamlet in Emilia-Romagna, then still part of the Papal States in pre-unification Italy.

A blacksmith by profession, he was a revolutionary socialist activist who had a profound influence on his son’s early political leanings.  Although his embrace of nationalism was not as full as that of his son, Mussolini senior nonetheless greatly admired Italian nationalist figures such as Carlo Pisacane, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Giuseppe Garibaldi, whom he perceived as having socialist or humanist tendencies.

Regularly in trouble with the police for acts of criminal damage and sometimes violence against opponents, Alessandro was eventually held under house arrest and granted his release only when he announced he wished to marry his girlfriend, a local schoolteacher who was a devout Catholic.

Alessandro was born in a house in Montemaggiore di Predappio that once hosted Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi as they made their way towards Venice from San Marino.  Anita, carrying their fifth child, became ill soon after leaving Montemaggiore and died outside Ravenna.

Although Alessandro had distant noble roots on his father’s side, his own politics were firmly on the left. He declared himself to be a socialist revolutionary at the age of 19 and the following year took part in riots in nearby Predappio.

Giuseppe Garibaldi was one of
Alessandro Mussolini's heroes

He acquired a reputation for violence and intimidation against political adversaries and for destroying property, regularly testing the patience of the local authorities. Detained in 1878 after defying police warnings to stop threatening opponents and causing wilful damage to property, he was placed under house arrest.

At the heart of his political philosophy was the belief that the means of production should belong to the State and not be privately owned and that society should be governed by committees of workers. He combined his socialist principles with nationalism, driven by his pride at being Italian. His idealistic vision combined Garibaldi-style militarism with Mazzinian nationalist sentiment and humanitarian socialism.

His notoriety as an activist had an impact on his life in many ways. His in-laws, for example, would not grant their approval to his marriage to Rosa Maltoni after he was released from house arrest in 1882, their view of Alessandro not helped by his undisguised contempt for the Catholic church to which his bride, by contrast, was devoted.

He suffered regular periods out of work, too, because prospective employers, aware of his reputation, feared he would be a disruptive influence who might encourage his fellow workers to stage strikes.  These periods of idleness led him to drink heavily and he would eventually become an alcoholic.

Nonetheless, his marriage to Rosa produced three children, of whom Benito - named Benito Amilcare Andrea in honour of the Mexican politician Benito Juárez and two Italian revolutionaries, Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa - was their first born, in 1893. Subsequently, Benito acquired a brother, Arnaldo, and a sister, Edvige.

Rachele Guidi, who was to
become Benito's wife

Meanwhile, Alessandro’s political activity continued. He participated in a successful campaign to have Costa elected to the Chamber as Italy’s first socialist deputy, and was himself elected to serve on the council in Predappio, where he organised the first local cooperative among labourers.

His involvement in local government ended, however, when he was wrongly arrested on suspicion of inciting riots in Predappio at the time of the local elections in 1902. Despite pleading his innocence, he was kept in custody for six months before a court in Forlì finally acquitted him.

The spell in prison damaged his health, and after Rosa died in 1905 he drifted into relative obscurity. He opened a small tavern on the outskirts of Forlì and became reacquainted with Anna Lombardi, whom he had courted many years earlier, before meeting Rosa. Anna was by now a widow with five daughters. One of them, Rachele Guidi, became enamoured with Benito, by then a young man in his 20s, and would later become his long-suffering wife. 

Benito, who had helped his father in the smithy as a boy, listening to Alessandro speak about Karl Marx as well as Pisacane, Mazzini and Garibaldi, at first worked with him too in the inn when his own commitments allowed it. In time, though, Benito was at home less and less and as the work took its toll on Alessandro, who turned increasingly back to the bottle.

He died in 1910, just eight days after his 56th birthday. Almost half a century later, in 1957, members of the Mussolini family arranged for his remains to be moved from their resting place in Forlì to the family mausoleum that Benito had built in 1928 in Predappio, the town of his own birth.

There, Alessandro was reunited with Rosa and Benito himself, who was also buried there in 1957, some 12 years after he was killed by partisans on the shore of Lake Como, when it was agreed the family could hold a funeral. Rachele was interred next to her husband at Predappio following her death in 1979.

The parish church at Montemaggiore was
rebuilt on Benito Mussolini's orders

Travel tip:

Alessandro’s birthplace, Montemaggiore di Predappio, a hamlet which had 100 residents at the last count, is situated about 10km (six miles) from the town of Predappio in Emilia-Romagna, accessed by a road of many hairpin bends that climbs into the Apennines to the west of Predappio.  It was once the home of a castle built in the 12th century, the last remains of which disappeared in the 1960s. Nowadays, the only building of note is its parish church, dedicated to Santo Cristofero, that Benito Mussolini had rebuilt in 1939. A well-preserved castle can be seen at Predappio Alta, one of the villages on the road to Montemaggiore. The Rocca di Predappio dates back to the early 10th century and was enlarged in the 15th century, when the addition of formidable walls made it almost impregnable. Thanks to its use largely as a garrison rather than a defensive bulwark, its structure remains almost intact.

The Mussolini crypt attracts
thousands of visitors

Travel tip:

Predappio, where Benito Mussolini was born in 1883, is a small town situated around 18km (11 miles) south of Forlì.  After a landslide hit the town in the winter of 1923-24, many people were left homeless, prompting the Italian government to build a bigger, more prestigious township to celebrate the birthplace of Mussolini, following the architectural styles favoured by the emerging Fascist regime. Along with the nearby town of Forlì, Predappio was given the title of La Città del Duce. The Mussolini family mausoleum in a cemetery just outside the town has become one of several attractions in the town for the neofascists who visit in their thousands each year. Visitors may be disturbed by the number of businesses in Predappio openly selling memorabilia celebrating the Fascist regime, although plans by a local mayor to open a Museum of Fascism in the town did not reach fruition. 

Also on this day:

1696: The birth of violinist and composer Andrea Zani

1869: The birth of King Victor Emmanuel III

1932: The birth of Germano Mosconi, controversial sports presenter

1961: The birth of actor Luca Zingaretti

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