Gian Francesco Malipiero – composer and musicologist

Musician revived interest in Monteverdi and composed music in the same spirit

Malipiero was born into an 
aristocratic Venetian family

A composer and editor whose work helped to rekindle interest in pre 19th century Italian music, Gian Francesco Malipiero, was born on this day in 1882 in Venice.

Malipiero’s own output, which included operas and orchestral works, has been assessed by experts as fusing modern techniques with the stylistic qualities of early Italian music.

The composer was born into an aristocratic Venetian family and was the grandson of the opera composer Francesco Malipiero. He studied music at the Vienna conservatory and then returned to Venice to carry on his studies.

He used to copy out the music of Claudio Monteverdi and Girolamo Frescobaldi at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, which inspired his love of music from that period.

He moved to Bologna to continue his studies and after graduating, returned to Venice and became an assistant to the blind composer Antonio Smareglia, which he later said taught him a great deal.

In 1913 he travelled to Paris where he was influenced by the music he heard there, from composers such as Ravel and Debussy. He attended the premiere of an opera by Stravinsky, La Sacre du Printemps, and described this experience as like awakening from a ‘long and dangerous lethargy.’ This was also when he first met the composer Alfredo Casello and the poet and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Malipiero found support from the
influential Gabriele D'Annunzio

For a while Malipiero was on good terms with Benito Mussolini, but he fell out of favour when the dictator did not like him writing the music for a Pirandello libretto. Although he dedicated his next opera to Mussolini, this did not help him regain the support of the Fascists.

Malipiero was appointed professor of composition at the Parma Conservatory in 1921 and subsequently became director at the Istituto Musicale Pollini in Padua.

In 1923 he joined with Casello and D’Annunzio in creating the Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche.

In the same year, he went to live permanently in the small hill town of Asolo in the Veneto, where he worked on editing a complete edition of Monteverdi’s work, making an invaluable contribution to the recovery and promotion of the composer’s music. He also collaborated with the Istituto Antonio Vivaldi in the publication of the complete instrumental works of the Venetian composer.

Malipiero was a prolific composer of operas, orchestral music, chamber music and music for the piano and the voice and said he found Asolo the ideal location for composing his own music. His work has been judged to reflect the spirit of 17th and 18th century Venetian music.

Malipiero died in Asolo in 1973 at the age of 91.

Malipiero used to study the music of Claudio
Monteverdi at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice

Travel tip:

The Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, where Malipiero used to study the music of Monteverdi, is also known as the Sansovino Library after the architect Jacopo Sansovino, who designed it. It is opposite the Basilica in St Marks Square and is named to commemorate the patron saint of Venice. It is one of the earliest surviving public libraries and repositories of manuscripts in Italy and holds one of the world’s most important collections of classical texts. The library was founded in 1468 when a Cardinal and scholar donated his entire collection of Greek and Latin manuscripts to the Republic of Venice. The library is open to the public from Monday to Saturday but is closed on Sundays and Italian Bank Holidays.

Book you stay in Venice with Booking.com

The Piazza Giuseppe Garibaldi is the main square
in the beautiful Veneto town of Asolo

Travel tip:

The beautiful hill town of Asolo in the Veneto, where Malipiero settled in later life, is known as ‘the pearl of the province of Treviso’ and ‘the city of a hundred horizons’ because of its beautiful views over the countryside and the mountains. The poet Robert Browning spent time in Asolo after he became a widower. He published Asolando, a volume of poetry written in the town, in 1889. The main road leading into the town is now named Via Browning in his honour. Asolo is also where the Queen of Cyprus, Caterina Cornaro, spent her last years. One of the main sights is the Castle of Caterina Cornaro, which now houses the Eleonora Duse Theatre.

Let Booking.com suggest places to stay in Asolo

More reading:

How Monteverdi put the opera genre on the musical map

Why Girolamo Frescobaldi is seen as one of the 'fathers' of Italian music

The complicated genius of Gabriele D'Annunzio

Also on this day:

1848: The Five Days of Milan

1925: The birth of musician Alessandro Alessandroni

1944: The last eruption of Mount Vesuvius

1945: The birth of pop singer Bobby Solo

Home

17 March

Angelo Beolco - playwright

Actor and dramatist with a genius for comedy

One of the most powerful Italian dramatists of the 16th century, Angelo Beolco, who was nicknamed Ruzzante (or sometimes Ruzante) after his favourite character, died on this day in 1542 in Padua in the Veneto region.  Beolco was famous for his rustic comedies, which were written mostly in the Paduan dialect of the Venetian language.  Many of his plays featured a peasant called Ruzzante and they painted a vivid picture of life in the Paduan countryside during the 16th century.  Beolco was born in Padua in 1496 and was the illegitimate son of a doctor. His mother was possibly a maid in the household where he was brought up by his father. He received a good education and after his father’s death became manager of the family estate. In 1529, he also became manager of a farm owned by a nobleman, Alvise Cornaro, who had retired to live in the Paduan countryside. Cornaro later became Beolco’s friend and protector.  Beolco met and associated with Paduan intellectuals of the time, such as the poet Pietro Bembo and the scholar and dramatist Sperone Speroni, which led to him developing an interest in the theatre.  Read more…

______________________________________

Giovanni Trapattoni - football coach

His seven Serie A titles is unequalled achievement

Giovanni Trapattoni, the former Juventus and Internazionale coach who is one of only four coaches to have won the principal league titles of four different European countries, was born on this day in 1939 in Cusano Milanino, a suburb on the northern perimeter of Milan.  The most successful club coach in the history of Serie A, he won seven titles, six with Juventus and one with Inter.  His nearest challengers in terms of most Italian domestic championships are Fabio Capello and Marcello Lippi, each of whom has five scudetti to his name.  In addition, Trapattoni has also won the German Bundesliga with Bayern Munich, the Portuguese Primeira Liga with Benfica and the Austrian Bundesliga with Red Bull Salzburg, with whom he secured his 10th league title overall in 2007.  Jose Mourinho is among the other three managers to have won titles in four countries.  He has been successful in Portugal, England, Italy and Spain.  Alongside former Bayern Munich coach Udo Lattek, Trapattoni is the only coach to have won all three major European club competitions and the only one to do it with the same club.  Read more…

______________________________________

Gabriele Ferzetti - actor

Starred in classic Italian films as well as Bond movie

The actor Gabriele Ferzetti, best known to international audiences for his role in the 1969 Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service but in Italy for the Michelangelo Antonioni classic L’avventura (1960), was born on this day in 1925 in Rome.  Ferzetti, who cut a naturally elegant and debonair appearance, was the go-to actor for handsome, romantic leads in the early part of his career and although he was ultimately eclipsed to some extent by Marcello Mastroianni, he seemed equally content with prominent supporting roles. Rarely idle, he made more than 160 films and appeared in countless TV dramas and was still working at 85 years old.  His intense performance as Antonioni’s wealthy yet unfulfilled playboy opposite Lea Massari and Monica Vitti in L’avventura was the role that identified him most as an actor of considerable talent. Ferzetti had played a similar character in another Antonioni classic Le amiche (1955).  Outside Italian cinema, he was memorable as the unscrupulous Morton, the railroad magnate who hobbled around on crutches in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).  Read more…

_____________________________________

Innocenzo Manzetti - inventor

Made prototype telephone 33 years ahead of Bell

The inventor Innocenzo Manzetti, credited by some scientific historians as having been the creator of a forerunner of the telephone many years ahead of his compatriot Antonio Meucci and the Scottish-American Alexander Graham Bell, was born on this day in 1826 in Aosta, in northwest Italy.  Manzetti's extraordinary catalogue of inventions included a steam-powered car, a hydraulic water pump, a pendulum watch that would keep going for a whole year and a robot that could play the flute.  But he was a man whose creative talents were not allied to business sense.  Like Meucci, a Florentine emigrant to New York who demonstrated a telephone-like device in 1860 - 16 years before Bell was granted the patent - Manzetti did not patent his device and therefore missed out on the fortune that came the way of Bell.  Research has found that Manzetti may have had the idea for a "vocal telegraph" as early as 1843, as a result of his success with his flute-playing automaton, which he constructed as a life-size model of a man sitting on a chair, inside which were concealed a system of levers, rods and compressed air tubes that enabled his lips and fingers to move on the flute.  Read more…

_________________________________________

Kingdom of Italy proclaimed

First king of Italy calls himself Victor Emmanuel II

The newly-unified Kingdom of Italy was officially proclaimed on this day in 1861 in Turin.  The first Italian parliament to meet in the city confirmed Victor Emmanuel as the first King of the new country.  It was the monarch's own choice to call himself Victor Emmanuel II, rather than Victor Emmanuel I. This immediately provoked criticism from some factions, who took it as implying that Italy had always been ruled by the House of Savoy.  Victor Emmanuel I, with whom Victor Emmanuel II had ancestral links, had been King of Sardinia - ruled by the Dukes of Savoy - from 1802 until his death in 1824.  Victor Emmanuel II had become King of Sardinia in 1849 after his father, Charles Albert, abdicated. His father had succeeded a distant cousin, Charles Felix, to become King of Sardinia in 1831.  The Kingdom of Sardinia is considered to be the legal predecessor to the Kingdom of Italy.  As King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II had appointed Count Camillo Benso of Cavour as Prime Minister of Sardinia-Piedmont, who had then masterminded a clever campaign to put him on the throne of a united Italy.  Victor Emmanuel II had become the symbol of the Risorgimento, the Italian unification movement in the 19th century.   Read more…

________________________________________

Book of the Day: Commerce, Peace, and the Arts in Renaissance Venice: Ruzante and the Empire at Centre Stage, by Linda L Carroll

With the Paduan playwright Angelo Beolco, aka Ruzante, as a focal point, this book sheds new light on his oeuvre and times - and on Venetian patrician interest in him - by embedding the Venetian aspects of his life within the monumental changes taking place in 15th and 16th-century Venice, politically, economically, socially, and artistically. In a study of patronage in the broadest sense of the term, Linda Carroll draws on vast quantities of new archival information; and by reading the previously unpublished primary sources against each other, she uncovers remarkable and heretofore unsuspected coincidences and connections. She documents the well-known links between the increasingly fruitless trade to the north and the need for new investments in land (re)gained by Venice on the mainland, links between problems of governance and political networks. Commerce, Peace, and the Arts in Renaissance Venice unveils the significance and potential purposes of those who invited Ruzante to perform in what are interpreted as "rudely" metaphorical truth-telling plays for Venetians at the highest social and political levels. 

Linda L Carroll is Professor of Italian at Tulane University, USA. She is the author of numerous books and articles explicating the exceptionally but opaquely candid plays of Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante), whose Prima oratione she has edited and translated. She is co-editor of Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy.

Buy from Amazon

Home

16 March

Aldo Moro - Italy's tragic former prime minister

Politician kidnapped and murdered by Red Brigades

Italy and the wider world were deeply shocked on this day in 1978 when the former Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped on the streets of Rome in a violent ambush that claimed the lives of his five bodyguards.  The attack took place on Via Mario Fani, a few minutes from Signor Moro's home in the Monte Mario area, at shortly after 9am during the morning rush hour.  Moro, a 61-year-old Christian Democrat politician who had formed a total of five Italian governments, between 1963 and 1968 and again from 1974-76, was being driven to the Palazzo Montecitorio in central Rome for a session of the Chamber of Deputies.  As the traffic forced Moro's car to pause outside a café, one of four small Fiat saloon cars used by the kidnappers reversed into a space in front of Moro's larger Fiat, in which the front seats were occupied by two carabinieri officers with Moro sitting behind them.  Another of the kidnappers' Fiats pulled in behind the Alfa Romeo immediately following Moro's, which contained three more bodyguards.  At that moment, four gunmen emerged from bushes close to the roadside and began firing automatic weapons.  Read more…

___________________________________________

Emilio Lunghi - athlete

Italy's first Olympic medallist 

Emilio Lunghi, a middle-distance runner who was the first to win an Olympic medal in the colours of Italy, was born on this day in 1886 in Genoa.  Competing in the 800 metres at the 1908 Olympic Games in London, Lunghi took the silver medal behind the American Mel Sheppard. In a fast-paced final, Lunghi's time was 1 minute 54.2 seconds, which was 1.8 seconds faster than the previous Olympic record but still 1.4 seconds behind Sheppard.  It was the same Olympics at which Lunghi's compatriot Dorando Pietri was controversially disqualified after coming home first in the marathon, when race officials took pity on him after he collapsed from exhaustion after entering the stadium and helped him across the line.  A versatile athlete who raced successfully at distances from 400m up to 3,000m, Lunghi was national champion nine times in six events and is considered the first great star of Italian track and field.  An all-round sportsman, Lunghi was a talented gymnast, swimmer and boxer, but after winning a 3,000m-race in his home city he was encouraged to develop his potential as a runner by joining Sport Pedestre Genova, at the time the most important athletics club in Liguria.  Read more…

________________________________________

Tiberius – Roman Emperor

The decline of a leader who ruled from a beautiful place of exile

After starting his reign in glory, the Emperor Tiberius slowly deteriorated and is reputed to have become steadily crueller and more debauched until he died on this day in 37 AD in Misenum, now Miseno, in Campania.  Tiberius had become the second Roman Emperor, succeeding his stepfather, Augustus, in 14 AD. As a young man, he had been a successful general, but at the age of 36 he chose to retire and go and live in Rhodes because he was determined to avoid getting involved in politics.  However, after the deaths of both grandsons of Augustus, his ailing stepfather had no choice but to make Tiberius his heir.  Tiberius inherited the throne at the age of 54 and was at first a hardworking ruler, trying to pass sensible and far-seeing laws. He stopped pointless, costly conflicts and the waste of the empire’s money and was said to have left the imperial coffers much fuller than when he inherited them.  But he was constantly at odds with the Senate, who claimed he gave vague orders to them and that they had to debate the orders among themselves so that they could decide what to do and therefore some of his legislation was never passed. Read more…

_________________________________________

Bernardo Bertolucci - film director

Caused outrage with Last Tango in Paris

The controversial filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci was born on this day in 1940 in Parma.  Bertolucci won an Oscar for best director as The Last Emperor picked up an impressive nine Academy Awards in 1988 but tends to be remembered more for the furore that surrounded his 1972 movie Last Tango in Paris. Starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, Last Tango in Paris caused outrage for its portrayal of sexual violence and emotional turmoil and was banned in Italy.  Although the storm died down over time, it blew up again in 2007 when Schneider, who was only 19 when the film was shot, claimed she felt violated after one particularly graphic scene because she had not been told everything that would happen.  Schneider died from cancer in 2011.  The controversy has overshadowed what has otherwise been an outstanding career, Bertolucci's movies placing him in the company of Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti and Franco Zeffirelli among the greatest Italian directors of all time.  As a young man, Bertolucci wanted to become a poet, inspired by his father, Attilio, who was a poet as well as an art historian.  Read more…

_________________________________________

Enrico Tamberlik – tenor

Imposing king of the high C sharp

Opera singer Enrico Tamberlik, who is remembered for the quality of his remarkable high notes, was born on this day in 1820 in Rome.  At the height of his career, Tamberlik, whose name is also sometimes spelt Tamberlick, sang regularly at the Royal Opera House in London and in St Petersburg, Paris and America.  The singer is believed to have been of Romanian descent but was born in Italy and did all his vocal training in Naples, Bologna and Milan.  At the age of 17 Tamberlik made his debut in a concert and then made his first appearance on the operatic stage as Gennaro in Lucrezia Borgia by Gaetano Donizetti at the Teatro Apollo in Rome.  In 1841 he appeared under the name Enrico Danieli at the Teatro Fondo in Naples as Tybalt in I Capuleti e I Montecchi by Vincenzo Bellini. A year later he made his debut at Teatro San Carlo in Naples under the name Enrico Tamberlik, which he used from then onwards.  Tamberlik made his London debut as Masaniello in Louis Auber’s La Muette de Portici at Covent Garden in 1850.  In St Petersburg in 1862 in the premiere performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s La forza del destino, he appeared as Don Alvaro, a role that had been written specially for him.  Read more…

________________________________________

Book of the Day:  The Moro Affair, by Leonardo Sciascia 

On 16 March 1978, Aldo Moro, former Italian Prime Minister, was ambushed in Rome. Within three minutes the gang killed all five members of his escort and bundled Moro into one of three getaway cars. An hour later the Red Brigades announced that Moro was in their hands; on 18 March they said he would be tried in a 'people's court of justice'. Seven weeks later Moro's body was discovered in the boot of a Renault parked in the crowded centre of Rome. In The Moro Affair, Leonardo Sciascia, whose work often shed light on the dark side of Italian life and society, untangles the real-life events of these crucial weeks and provides a unique insight into the dangerous world of Italian politics in the 1970s.

Leonardo Sciascia, who was born in Sicily in 1912 and died there in 1989, was a master of lucid and accessible prose  who worked with deceptively simple forms - books about crime, historical novels, political thrillers - in order to engage with the moral and historical problems of modern Italy, especially his native Sicily.

Buy from Amazon

Home

15 March

Salvator Rosa – artist

Exciting Baroque painter inspired others

Salvator Rosa, a fiery and flamboyant character who was a poet and actor as well as an artist, died on this day in 1673 in Rome.  One of the least conventional artists of 17th century Italy, he was adopted as a hero by painters of the Romantic movement in the 18th and 19th centuries.  He mainly painted landscapes, but also depicted scenes of witchcraft, revealing his interest in the less conventional ideas of his age. These scenes were also sometimes the background for his etchings and the satires he wrote.  Rosa was born in Arenella on the outskirts of Naples. His father, a land surveyor, wanted him to become a lawyer or priest and entered him in the convent of the Somaschi Fathers.  Rosa was interested in art and secretly learnt about painting with his uncle and his brother-in-law, Francesco Fracanzano, who was a pupil of Jose de Ribera. Rosa later became an apprentice to Aniello Falcone, working with him on his battle scenes.  His own paintings featured landscapes overgrown with vegetation and beach scenes with caves, peopled with shepherds, seamen, soldiers and bandits.  Read more…

_______________________________________

Cesare Beccaria - jurist and criminologist

Enlightened philosopher seen as father of criminal justice

The jurist and philosopher Cesare Beccaria, who is regarded as one of the greatest thinkers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, and whose writings had a profound influence on justice systems all over the world, was born on this day in 1738 in Milan.  As the author of a treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764), which was a ground-breaking work in the field of criminal law and the approach to punishing offenders, Beccaria is considered by many academics to be the father of criminal justice.  The treatise, which Beccaria compiled when he was only 26 years old, condemned the death penalty on the grounds that the state does not possess the right to take lives and declared torture to be a barbaric practice with no place in a civilised, measured society.  It outlined five principles for an effective system of criminal justice: that punishment should have had a preventive deterrent function as opposed to being retributive; that punishment should be proportionate to the crime committed; that the probability of punishment should be seen as a more effective deterrent than its severity.  Read more…

____________________________________

Gianluca Festa - footballer

Sardinian became a favourite in England

The footballer and coach Gianluca Festa, who played 177 matches in Italy’s Serie A but is best remembered as the first Italian defender to sign for a club in England’s Premier League, was born on this day in 1969 in Cagliari.  Festa joined Middlesbrough in January 1997 after manager Bryan Robson agreed to pay Inter-Milan £2.7million for the centre-back, who joined his Italian compatriot Fabrizio Ravanelli at the northeast England club.  Ravanelli had arrived in England the previous summer as one of a number of Italian stars to move from Serie A, a sign that the Premier League was beginning to challenge Serie A for the right to be called Europe’s top league.  Chelsea had signed Gianluca Vialli from Juventus and Roberto Di Matteo from Lazio, to be joined by Parma’s Gianfranco Zola later in the autumn, and Sheffield Wednesday had bought Festa’s former Inter teammate Benito Carbone.  Four of those five were forwards - Di Matteo operated in midfield - and Middlesbrough, who had been promoted in 1995 but were finding their second season difficult, broke new ground by tapping into Italy’s reputation for producing top-quality defenders.  Read more…

_______________________________________

The murder of Julius Caesar

He came, saw, conquered... and was assassinated

Statesman and soldier Gaius Julius Caesar was murdered on this day in 44 BC in Rome.  His death made the Ides of March, the day on the Roman calendar devised by Caesar that corresponds to 15 March, a turning point in Roman history, one of the events that marked the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire.  Caesar had made his mark as a soldier in Asia Minor and Spain and established himself as a politician, making useful allies.  But his invasion of Gaul took several years and was the most costly and destructive campaign ever undertaken by a Roman commander. Afterwards, Caesar crossed the Rubicon - a river that formed a northern border of Italy - with a legion of troops, entered Rome illegally, and established himself as a dictator dressed in royal robes.  On the Ides of March, Caesar was stabbed to death by a group of rebellious senators led by Marcus Junius Brutus.  His adopted heir, Octavian, later known as Augustus, rose to power afterwards and the Roman Empire began.  Far from sealing his reputation as a vainglorious tyrant, his assassins, Brutus, Cassius and the others, succeeded only in clinching Caesar’s historical immortality.  Read more…

_______________________________________

Giuseppe Mezzofanti - hyperpolyglot

Roman Catholic Cardinal could speak 38 languages

The death occurred in Rome on this day in 1849 of Cardinal Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti, a prodigiously talented academic renowned for his command of multiple foreign languages.  Defined as a hyperpolyglot - someone who is fluent in six languages or more - Mezzofanti is said to have full command of at least 38.  The majority were European, Mediterranean or Middle Eastern languages - mainstream and regional - but he was also said to be fluent in Chinese languages, Russian, plus Hindi and Gujarati.  His fame was such that he became something of an international celebrity, although he never actually left Italy, living the early part of his life in his home city of Bologna, before moving to Rome.  Visiting dignitaries from all over the world would ask to be introduced to him, ready to be awestruck as he slipped effortlessly into their native tongue.  There is an abundance of stories illustrating his extraordinary gift.  As a boy, working in the workshop in Bologna of his father, Francis, a carpenter, he is said to have overheard from a neighbouring building a priest giving lessons in Latin and Greek and later recalled every word, despite never having seen a Latin or Greek book.  Read more…

_____________________________________

Book of the Day: Salvator Rosa: Paint and Performance, by Helen Langdon

Painter, poet and actor Salvator Rosa was one of the most engaging and charismatic personalities of seventeenth-century Italy. Although a gifted landscape painter, he longed to be seen as the pre-eminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new account traces Rosa's strategies of self-promotion, and his creation of a new kind of audience for his art. The book describes the startling novelty of his subject-matter - witchcraft and divination, as well as prophecies, natural magic and dark violence - and his early exploration of a nascent aesthetic of the sublime.  Salvator Rosa shows how the artist, in a series of remarkable works, responded to new movements in thought and feeling, creating images that spoke to the deepest concerns of his age. Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery, London, described Salvator Rosa: Paint and Performance as a ‘superb biography . . . [which] presents the artist in all his brilliance and wit, his vaulting ambition, his potent originality as a painter and his infuriating complexity as a person.'

Helen Langdon is an art historian with a special interest in the Italian Baroque. She is author of Claude Lorrain (1989) and Caravaggio: A Life (1999) and is based in London.

Buy from Amazon

Home