22 January

NEW - Giuseppe Musolino - brigand

Vengeful killer who became an unlikely folk hero

Giuseppe Musolini, the Calabrian bandit whose fight for justice after a wrongful conviction turned him into a folk hero despite the multiple murders he committed in a quest for vengeance, died on this day in 1956 in a psychiatric hospital in Reggio Calabria.  He was 79 years old when he passed away, having been just 22 when he was sentenced to 21 years in prison for an attempted murder he swore he did not commit, with the evidence against him no better than circumstantial.  He escaped after just three months and embarked upon a killing spree in which he may have murdered as many as nine individuals and attempted the murder of several others, all of whom had played a part in what he saw as a corrupt trial.  The revenge killings took place during his two years and nine months on the run, during which Calabrians had taken to him as a symbolic figure, representing the people of an impoverished region against a state system rigged against them.  His story captured the imagination of not only Italians - southern Italians in particular - but of the wider world, with readers of newspapers in Europe and the United States eagerly awaiting the next update.  Read more…

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Papal Swiss Guard

Colourful uniforms camouflage highly trained security professionals

The Pope’s Swiss Guard was founded on this day in Vatican City in 1506.  A contingent of guards from Switzerland has continued to guard the Pope from that day to present times and it is one of the oldest military units still in existence.  The Swiss had been producing mercenary soldiers for hundreds of years with a reputation for loyalty and good discipline.  In the 15th century they were known for their good battle tactics and were employed by many European armies.  Pope Julius II ordered the first Swiss troops to guard the Vatican and they arrived in Rome on 22 January, 1506, the official date now given for the foundation of the Papal Swiss Guard.  The Pope later gave them the title ‘Defenders of the Church’s freedom’.  Recruits to the Pope’s Swiss Guard unit have to be Catholic men of Swiss nationality who have completed military training and can produce evidence of their good conduct.  Since the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, the Guards have received training in unarmed combat and in the use of modern weapons.  They are a colourful sight on ceremonial occasions at the Vatican in their blue, red, orange and yellow uniforms of Renaissance design.  Read more…

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Antonio Todde - supercentenarian

Sardinian shepherd holds record as oldest Italian in history

Antonio Todde, who was the oldest living man in the world before he died at the age of 112 years 346 days in 2002 and remains the oldest Italian man in history, was born on this day in 1889 in Tiana, a mountain village in Sardinia.  There are 19 other Italians who have attained a higher age, but all are women. Maria Giuseppa Robucci, from Apulia, died in 2019 at the age of 116 years 90 days. Emma Morano, from Piedmont, who died in 2017 aged 117 years 137 days, remains the oldest Italian of all time.  Todde was the world’s most senior male centenarian from the death of the American John Painter on March 1, 2001 until his own death 10 months later.  He was born to a poor shepherd family in Tiana, about 140km (87 miles) north of Cagliari in the Gennargentu mountains, about 55km (34 miles) southwest of the provincial capital, Nuoro.  The area historically has a high number of centenarians and there was longevity in Todde’s family. His father Francesco lived to be 90 years old, and his mother Francesca 98. His sister Maria Agostina - one of 11 siblings - was still alive at the age of 97 at the time of his death and herself lived to be 102.  Read more…

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Frankie Yale - gang boss

Mobster who employed a young Al Capone

The gang boss who gave Al Capone one of his first jobs was born on this day in 1893 in Longobucco in Calabria.  Francesco Ioele, who would later become known as Frankie Yale, moved to the United States in around 1900, his family settling into the lower Manhattan area of New York City.  Growing up, Ioele was befriended by another southern Italian immigrant, John Torrio, who introduced him to the Five Points Gang, which was one of the most dominant street gangs in New York in the early part of the 20th century.  In time, Ioele graduated from petty street crime and violent gang fights to racketeering, changing his name to Yale to make him sound more American and taking control of the ice delivery trade in Brooklyn.  With the profits Yale opened a waterfront bar on Coney Island, which was called the Harvard Inn. It was there that he took on a young Capone as a bouncer and in a fight there that Capone acquired the facial scars that would stay with him for life.  Capone worked for Yale for two years until Torrio, by then based in Chicago, recruited him to his organisation, and Capone moved to the city with which his criminal activities would become associated.  Read more…

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Carlo Orelli – soldier

The last trench infantryman

Carlo Orelli, the last surviving Italian soldier to have served at the start of Italy's involvement in the First World War, died on this day in 2005 at the age of 110.  Orelli had signed up for active duty at the age of 21 and joined the Austro-Hungarian front after Italy joined the war on the side of Britain, France and Russia in May 1915.  He took part in combat operations near Trieste, experiencing the brutality of trench warfare and seeing many of his friends die violent deaths, but after receiving injuries to his leg and ear he spent the rest of the war in hospital.  Orelli was born in Perugia in 1894, but his family moved to Rome, where he was to spend most of the rest of his life living in the Garbatella district.  He came from a military background and had a grandfather who had helped to defend Perugia against Austrian mercenaries in 1849. His father had served in the Italian Abyssinian campaign in the 1880s and his elder brother had fought in Libya during the war between Italy and Turkey in 1911.  The wounds Orelli suffered during a confrontation with Austrian soldiers ended his military career and he spent the rest of the war recovering from an infection in hospital.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: King of the Mountains: The Remarkable Story of Giuseppe Musolino, Italy's Most Famous Outlaw, by Dan Possumato

In 1897, a young Calabrian peasant named Giuseppe Musolino was sentenced to 21 years of hard labour for a crime he did not commit. However, defying all odds, he orchestrated a daring escape and embarked on a relentless pursuit of those responsible for his wrongful conviction, exacting a chilling and deadly retribution.  Evading capture for nearly three years, he cunningly outmaneuvered a vast manhunt consisting of hundreds of local and regional police, the Carabinieri, and even an Italian Army regiment. His exploits transformed him into a beloved Robin Hood figure among the inhabitants of the Mezzogiorno, the impoverished southern region of Italy. However, to the authorities, he was a cold-blooded murderer who had to be stopped.  Eventually apprehended, the Ministry of Justice relocated his trial 600 miles to the north, from Reggio di Calabria to Lucca, due to its belief that no jury in the south would convict him. The trial captured the attention of newspapers around the world. When Giuseppe Musolino passed away in 1956, half a century after his capture, TIME magazine aptly remarked, "Few adventurers, past or present, have become so legendary in so short a time." King of the Mountains presents a gripping account of an electrifying tale.

Dan Possumato is a retired US.Army senior administrative officer and a former Special Investigator for the State Department. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the US Army War College, he is a dual Italian-American citizen. His grandfather, Giovanni Musolino, was a first cousin of Giuseppe Musolino. 

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Giuseppe Musolino - brigand

Vengeful killer who became an unlikely folk hero

Giuseppe Musolino spent 
most of his life in jail

Giuseppe Musolini, the Calabrian bandit whose fight for justice after a wrongful conviction turned him into a folk hero despite the multiple murders he committed in a quest for vengeance, died on this day in 1956 in a psychiatric hospital in Reggio Calabria.

He was 79 years old when he passed away, having been just 22 when he was sentenced to 21 years in prison for an attempted murder he swore he did not commit, with the evidence against him no better than circumstantial.

He escaped after just three months and embarked upon a killing spree in which he may have murdered as many as nine individuals and attempted the murder of several others, most of whom had played a part in what he saw as a corrupt trial.

The revenge killings took place during his two years and nine months on the run, during which Calabrians took to him as a symbolic figure, representing the people of an impoverished region against a state system rigged against them.

His story captured the imagination of not only Italians - southern Italians in particular - but of the wider world, with readers of newspapers in Europe and the United States eagerly awaiting the next update.

It all began with a brawl in Santo Stefano, the village in the Aspromonte mountains, a short distance from the city of Reggio Calabria, where Musolino had been born in 1876.  Musolino, a carpenter and woodcutter by trade, was drinking in his father’s tavern when he and his friend, Antonio Filastò, became involved in an argument with Vincenzo and Stefano Zoccali, two brothers from one of the village’s more powerful families, reputed to be part of a picciotteria, a criminal gang of the type that would later evolve into the region’s fearsome mafia, known as the ‘Ndrangheta.

An artist's imagined scene of the
moment Musolino was captured 

The dispute was ostensibly over a delivery of hazelnuts, although it was also mooted that Musolino and Vincenzo Zoccali were rivals for the affections of a local girl. The fight spilled into the street, where others became involved and knives were drawn until one side produced guns and fired shots in the air to send the participants scattering for cover.  Musolino left the scene with stab wounds in his hand and arm, apparently inflicted by Zoccali.

The attempted murder charge came from what happened a day or two later when Zoccali’s family claimed a shot was fired at him at the stable where he kept horses. The assailant remained out of view behind a wall but witnesses testified to having heard Musolino shout and also to have found a hat belonging to him at the scene. They also said he had sworn a vendetta against the Zoccalis, which at the time was seen as a criminal offence.

A complaint was lodged with the police, although by the time they had decided to arrest Musolino he had long disappeared, having been tipped off that he was a wanted man. It took police six months to find him.

When his trial took place in Reggio Calabria, it was before a judge whose political associations gave him every encouragement to find against Musolino, while witnesses were thought to have either been bribed or intimidated by the Zoccali family to commit perjury. The judge, meanwhile, denied Musolino’s own lawyers the chance to call any witnesses who would testify for his innocence and sentenced him to 21 years in jail with hard labour, handing his friend, Antonio Filastò, a seven-year term.

Musolino was led away in a fury, shouting that if he had not sworn a vendetta against the Zoccalis, he would do so now. He also vowed revenge against all those who had given evidence against him, promising to kill them all as well as the prosecutor and the judge.

King of the Mountains is one of
several books about Musolino

He and Filastò were locked up at the prison fortress of Gerace Marina, located in present-day Locri on the Ionian coast, but within three months had escaped, taking advantage of the deteriorating condition of the fortress, which allowed them to hack away at the cement in the stone walls and create a hole to climb through, sliding down the outside with the aid of a ladder made from sheets and bed slats.  Musolino claimed that San Giuseppe, patron saint of carpenters and protector of the poor, had visited him in a dream to point out which part of the stone walls they should target.

Musolino hid in the Aspromonte mountains, one by one working through his list of targets, committing five murders in his first eight months out of captivity and continuing to pursue his goal of revenge for almost three years.  He found local people only too willing to help him, giving him food and hiding places despite a bounty of 5,000 lire being offered to anyone who caught him and turned him over to the police.

Many felt his trial had simply been a representation of the attitudes towards the south held by many northern Italians, who had led the fight to unify the country on behalf of the wealthy Kingdom of Sardinia but had subsequently disparaged southern Italians as backward and ignorant. There was a particular sense of betrayal in Santo Stefano, home of the Romeo family, who were patriots and major supporters of unification in Calabria, helping Garibaldi conquer the region and even joining him on his march north to Naples.

During his time on the run, Musolino, who claimed to be descended from French nobility on the side of his mother, wrote to Italy’s new king, Victor Emmanuel III, appealing for help for the people of Calabria. Eventually, he decided to leave Calabria and head north, hoping at some point to be able to meet Victor Emmanuel in person and ask to be pardoned.

Musolino hoped to ask Victor
Emmanuel III for a pardon

Despite the local police having been joined by the carabinieri corps and the army in searching for Musolino in the Aspromonte mountains, he left the area unnoticed. When he was captured, by accident, he was more than 800km - almost 500 miles - away in Acqualenga, just south of Urbino in Marche.

Walking along a country lane in October 1901, he caught sight of three carabinieri officers, whom he assumed were looking for him, and ran away. They saw him and pursued him, catching up with him when he tripped over a wire supporting a grapevine and fell.

Musolino was transferred by train to a prison in Catanzaro in Calabria on October 24, 1901 to await a second trial, which took place many hundred of miles away from his homeland in Lucca, Tuscany. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and taken to Portolongone prison near Livorno on the Tuscan coast, where he remained until 1946.

In that year, he was declared to be mentally ill and transferred to the psychiatric hospital in Reggio Calabria, where he died on January 22, 1956.

Giuseppe Musolino’s story had a huge impact worldwide, with mass circulation newspapers such as Corriere della Sera and Il Mattino at home giving it extensive coverage, along with international journals including The Times in London, Le Figaro in Paris and the New York Times.  Their reporting, which included tales of stealing from the rich to give money to the poor, convinced some readers that he was a romantic figure akin to the heroic outlaw of English folklore, Robin Hood.

A film, Il Brigante Musolino (1950), directed by Mario Camerini and starring Amedeo Nazzari, told the story to cinema audiences. The celebrated poet Giovanni Pascoli wrote an ode to him and the English writer Norman Douglas devoted a whole chapter of his book, Old Calabria, to his tale, which also inspired recording artists in many genres to write wrote songs about him.  Other books include King of the Mountains: The Remarkable Story of Giuseppe Musolino, Italy's Most Famous Outlaw, by Dan Possumato.

Santo Stefano in Aspromonte attracts winter
visitors to its nearby ski slopes

Travel tip:

Santo Stefano in Aspromonte, birthplace of Giuseppe Musolino, is a village perched on a rocky spur in a mountainous area of the province of Reggio Calabria. The area, which falls within the area of the beautiful Aspromonte National Park, has attractions for summer and winter stays, the mountain areas dotted with pathways and stairways for trekking and the ski slopes of Gambarie nearby. The village itself boasts an historic centre of nooks and crannies, steep staircases, pretty palaces and fountains, as well as the remains of the ancient Abbey of San Giovanni a Castaneto. The area is renowned for its production of oil, cereals and fruit, while wild mushrooms and chestnuts trees abound in the nearby woodlands. 

The remains of an ancient Greek theatre in the
vicinity of the Calabrian resport of Locri

Travel tip:

The coastal city of Locri, on Calabria’s Ionian Sea coast, was originally a Greek colony founded at the end of the eighth century BC by Greek refugees who settled on the coast. It became a major centre in the political and artistic life of Magna Graecia, the name the Romans gave to the Greek-speaking areas of southern Italy. The modern Locri has attractions that include a museum and archaeological park that is home to ancient Greek ruins and artifacts, the scenic Lungomare di Locri and the Monument to the Five Martyrs of Gerace, dedicated to five Locride citizens who were executed in the Risorgimento for having fought for freedom. Locri has more than 12,000 inhabitants, is an important administrative and cultural centre on the Ionian Coast and is only 90 minutes away from the International Airport of Lamezia Terme.

Also on this day:

1506: The founding of the Papal Swiss Guard

1889: The birth of supercentenarian Antonio Todde

1893: The birth of mobster Frankie Yale

2005: The death of veteran soldier Carlo Orelli

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21 January

Gennaro Contaldo – Chef

TV cook is passionate about Amalfi’s speciality dishes

Celebrity chef Gennaro Contaldo was born on this day in 1949 in Minori in Campania.  Contaldo has made many appearances on British television alongside chefs such as the late Antonio Carluccio, Jamie Oliver and James Martin and he has also brought out several cook books.  It is well documented that he is the man responsible for inspiring Jamie Oliver’s interest in Italian food.  Contaldo grew up in the small seaside town of Minori near Amalfi and is a passionate advocate of the style of cooking in the area, cucina amalfitana.  From an early age he was interested in dishes cooked with local produce, going out to collect wild herbs for his mother, and he began helping out in local restaurants at the age of eight.  Contaldo moved to Britain in the late 1960s and travelled around the country working in village restaurants and studying the food growing wild in each area, such as herbs and mushrooms. He eventually went to London and worked in several restaurants, including Antonio Carluccio’s establishment in Neal Street.  Read more…

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Antonio Janigro - conductor and cellist

Musician who found ‘accidental’ fame in Yugoslavia

The conductor and cellist Antonio Janigro, who spent more than two decades as an orchestra leader in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, was born on this day in 1918 in Milan.  An accomplished cello soloist in Italy, his adventure in Yugoslavia happened by accident, in a way.  He was on holiday there in 1939 when the Second World War began, leaving him stranded with no prospect of returning home.  Happily, Zagreb Conservatory offered Janigro a job as professor of cello and chamber music. This turned out to be a providential turn of fate and he was to remain in Yugoslavia for much of his life.  He founded the school of modern cello playing in Yugoslavia, formed the exemplary chamber orchestra I Solisti di Zagreb with Dragutin Hrdjok in 1954 and for 10 years led the Radio Zagreb symphony orchestra. Raised in a house on the Via Guido d’Arezzo in Milan, Janigro was born in a musical family, although his father’s dream of becoming a concert pianist had to be abandoned, sadly, when he lost his arm after being shot in the First World War.  Janigro himself studied piano from the age of six, and then began playing the cello in 1926, when he was eight years old.  Read more…

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Pietro Rava - World Cup winner

Defender was the last survivor from Azzurri of 1938

Pietro Rava, who was the last survivor of Italy's 1938 World Cup-winning football team when he died in December 2006, was born on this day in 1916 at Cassine in Piedmont.  A powerful defender who could play at full back or in a central position, Rava won 30 caps for the national team between 1935 and 1946, finishing on the losing side only once and being made captain in 1940.  He was also a member of the Italy team that won the gold medal in the football competition at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.  At club level, he spent most of his career with Juventus, forming a formidable defensive partnership with Alfredo Foni, alongside whom he also lined up in the national side.  Rava won a Championship medal in 1949-50, his final season at Juventus, although by then he had fallen out of favour with Jesse Carver, the Turin club's English coach, and made only six appearances, moving to Novara the following year.  At the time of his birth, Rava's family were living in Cassine, a small town near Alessandria, about 100km (62 miles) south-east of Turin, because of his father's job with a railway company.  Read more…

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Camillo Golgi – neuroscientist

Nobel prize winner whose name lives on in medical science

Camillo Golgi, who is recognised as the greatest neuroscientist and biologist of his time, died on this day in 1926 in Pavia.  He was well known for his research into the central nervous system and discovering a staining technique for studying tissue, sometimes called Golgi’s method, or Golgi’s staining.  In 1906, Golgi and a Spanish biologist, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system.  Golgi was born in 1843 in Corteno, a village in the province of Brescia in Lombardy. The village was later renamed Corteno Golgi in his honour.  In 1860 Golgi went to the University of Pavia to study medicine. After graduating in 1865 he worked in a hospital for the Italian army and as part of a team investigating a cholera epidemic in the area around Pavia.  He resumed his academic studies under the supervision of Cesare Lombroso, an expert in medical psychology, and wrote a thesis about mental disorders. As he became more and more interested in experimental medicine he started attending the Institute of General Pathology headed by Giulio Bizzozero, who was to influence Golgi’s research publications.  Read more…

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Giuseppe Savoldi - footballer

The world’s first £1 million player

Giuseppe Savoldi, whose transfer from Bologna to Napoli in 1975 made him the first footballer in the world to be bought for £1 million, was born on this day in 1947 in Gorlago, a municipality a short distance from the city of Bergamo in Lombardy.  A prolific striker, Savoldi’s big-money deal came four years ahead of the much heralded £1 million transfer of another striker, Trevor Francis, from Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest, which made him the first player in Britain to move for a seven-figure sum.  Napoli, who saw Savoldi as the last component in what they hoped would be a title-winning team, paid 1.4 billion lire in cash, plus two players, Sergio Clerici and Romario Rampanti, to secure his signature. The two players were valued at 600 million lire in total, which valued Savoldi at 2 billion lire, the equivalent at the time of about £1.2 million.  But where Francis, who later spent five seasons playing in Serie A, won two European Cups with Nottingham Forest, scoring the winning goal in the final in 1979, Savoldi’s move did not yield anything like the same kind of success.  Napoli had finished third and then second in Serie A in the seasons before Savoldi’s arrival but were unable to maintain their momentum. Read more…

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Book of the Day: Gennaro's Passione: The Classic Italian Cookery Book, by Gennaro Contaldo

A glorious update of a modern classic – full of colourful recipes that evoke Italian life at its most enticing, Gennaro's Passione is the story of Gennaro Contaldo’s upbringing in Italian food and will teach you to cook like a true Italian.  Born just metres away from the sea on Italy’s stunning Amalfi coast, Gennaro learnt from his father how to seek out wild food – free-diving for oysters, foraging for wild mushrooms and missing school to go fishing. This adventurous spirit lived on throughout Gennaro’s career in food and was what went on to inspire Jamie Oliver to call Gennaro his ‘London dad’. It was summed up here in this first, glorious collection of his favourite Italian recipes, originally published in 2003.  Lovingly restored and updated for the modern kitchen, this new edition of Gennaro’s Passione features photographs from Gennaro’s childhood alongside stunning food and travel photography. Over 100 recipes, full of delightful personal recollections, share the secrets of Gennaro’s love affair with Italian food, and will inspire cooks of all abilities to taste the true flavours of the Italian coastline. Buon appetito!

Gennaro Contaldo is one of the UK’s best-loved chefs. He is renowned for being a mentor to Jamie Oliver and teaching him, with his friend, the late Antonio Carluccio, everything Jamie knows about Italian cooking. In 1999, Gennaro opened Passione in London, which was awarded Best Italian restaurant in 2005. This is his seventh book, following others that include Pasta Perfecto and Fast Cook Italian. He lives in east London with his wife and twin daughters.

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20 January

Federico Fellini – film director

The cinematic legacy of Rimini’s most famous son

Federico Fellini, one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, was born on this day in Rimini in 1920.  He had a career lasting almost 50 years and his films were nominated for 12 Academy Awards. He won four Oscars, each for Best Foreign Language Film, with La strada, Nights of Cabiria, 8½ and Amarcord.  Fellini initially went to Rome to study Law at university but ended up working as a journalist instead.  His assignments for a magazine gave him the opportunity to meet people involved in show business and he eventually got work as a script writer for films and radio.  Fellini worked as both a screenwriter and assistant director on Roberto Rossellini films as well as producing and directing for other filmmakers. He began work on his first solo film, The White Sheik, in 1951. It received mixed reviews but in 1953 his film, I vitelloni, pleased both the public and the critics.  He won his first Academy Award with Nights of Cabiria, starring his wife, Giulietta Masini, in 1953.  Fellini’s film La dolce vita, starring Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni and set in Rome, broke all box office records in 1960 and won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival. It is one of the most critically acclaimed films of all time.  Read more…

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Marco Simoncelli - motorcycle world champion

Young rider whose career ended in tragedy

The motorcycle racer Marco Simoncelli, who is part of an illustrious roll call of Italian world champions headed by Giacomo Agostini and Valentino Rossi, was born on this day in 1987 in Cattolica on the Adriatic coast.  Simoncelli, who was European 125cc champion in 2002 in only his second year of senior competition, became 250cc world champion in 2008 when he won six races riding for Gilera.  He had dreams of emulating Rossi, winner of the 250cc world title in 1999, in going on to be a force in the premier MotoGP category, in which the latter has been world champion seven times, just one fewer than Agostini's record eight titles.  But after stepping up to MotoGP in 2010, Simoncelli suffered a fatal crash at the Malaysian Grand Prix in October the following year, killed at the age of just 24.  On only the second lap of the Sepang circuit, he lost control of his Honda at a corner and appeared to be heading for the gravel run-off area but suddenly veered back across the congested track.  With the bike almost on its side, Simoncelli was struck by two other competitors.  One of them, with chilling irony, was Rossi, who was entirely blameless but unable to prevent his front wheel from striking his compatriot's head.  Read more…

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Ennio Porrino - composer

Premature death robbed Italian music of great talent

The composer Ennio Porrino, best known for his symphonic poem, Sardegna, and his opera, I Shardana, was born on this day in 1910 in Cagliari.  Porrino was critically acclaimed, his operas earning comparisons with the great Giacomo Puccini, although to some his reputation has been tarnished by his association with Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime. He was only 49 when he died in Rome.  His 1941 opera, Gli Orazi, has been interpreted as a ‘hymn to fascism’ by some critics, while his piece, The March of the Volunteer, was used by Mussolini’s short-lived Italian Social Republic as its anthem.  Little is known of Porrino’s early years. It is thought that his family moved to Rome when he was a small child and most accounts of his life begin with his studies at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, which he attended from the age of 17 and where he graduated in 1932.  He also studied with the composer Ottorino Respighi, who was keen to see his potential realised.  Respighi would be a significant influence on Porrino’s own work.  Porrino was not slow to make an impact in Roman musical circles. In 1931 he won an opera competition organised by the Giornale d'Italia newspaper.  Read more…

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Franca Sozzani – magazine editor

Risk taker who turned Vogue Italia into a major voice

Franca Sozzani, the journalist who was editor-in-chief of the Italian edition of Vogue magazine for 28 years, was born on this day in 1950 in Mantua.  Under her stewardship, Vogue Italia was transformed from what she saw as little more than a characterless clothing catalogue for the Milan fashion giants to one of the edgiest publications the style shelves of the newsstands had ever seen.  Sozzani used high-end fashion and the catwalk stars to make bold and sometimes outrageous statements on the world issues she cared about, creating shockwaves through the industry but often selling so many copies that editions sometimes sold out even on second or third reprints.  It meant that advertisers who backed off in horror in the early days of her tenure clamoured to buy space again, particularly when the magazine began to attract a following even outside Italy.  She gave photographers and stylists a level of creative freedom they enjoyed nowhere else, encouraging them to express themselves through their photoshoots, particularly if they could deliver a message at the same time.  She encouraged her writers, too, not to shy away from issues she thought were important, and not to regard fashion as an insular world.  Read more…

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Rafael Bombelli – mathematician

First person to explain algebra in simple language

Rafael Bombelli, the mathematician regarded as the inventor of complex numbers, was baptised and was also probably born on this day in 1526 near Bologna.  He wrote a book about algebra in simple language that could be understood by everyone, giving a comprehensive account of what was known about the subject at the time. The first three volumes, published in 1572, were the first European texts to explain how to perform computations with negative numbers.  Rafael Bombelli was the eldest son of Antonio Mazzoli, a wool merchant, who had changed his name to Bombelli to disassociate himself from the reputation of his family. His grandfather had taken part in a failed attempt to seize Bologna on behalf of the Bentivoglio family but had been caught and executed. Antonio Mazzoli was able to return to Bologna only after changing his name to Bombelli.  It is thought that Rafael Bombelli did not attend university but was taught by an engineer-architect named Pier Francesco Clementi.  He followed Clementi into the profession and acquired a patron, Alessandro Rufini. His patron was given the right to reclaim marsh land in the Val di Chiana by the Pope and Bombelli worked on this project until 1555.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Films of Federico Fellini, by Peter Bondanella

The Films of Federico Fellini examines the career of one of Italy's most renowned filmmakers through close analysis of five masterpieces that span his career: La strada, La dolce vita, 8½, Amarcord and Interview. Providing an overview of Fellini's early career as a cartoonist and scriptwriter for neorealist directors such as Roberto Rossellini, this study traces the development of Fellini's unique and personal cinematic vision as it transcends Italian neorealism. Rejecting an overtly ideological approach to Fellini's cinema, Bondanella emphasises the director's interest in fantasy, the irrational and individualism.

Until his retirement in 2007, the late Peter Bondanella was Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, Film Studies, and Italian at Indiana University. A member of the European Academy of Sciences and the Arts and past president of the American Association for Italian Studies, Bondanella wrote numerous books and articles on Italian literature and cinema and translated or edited a number of Italian literary classics.

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