12 November

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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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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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: Giro d'Italia: The Story of the World's Most Beautiful Bike Race, by Colin O’Brien

Born of tumult in 1909, the Giro d'Italia helped unite a nation.  Since then it has reflected it too; the race's capricious and unpredictable nature matching the passions and extremes of Italy itself.  A desperately hard race through a beautiful country, the Giro has bred characters and stories that dramatise the shifting culture and society of its home: Alfonsina Strada, who cropped her hair and raced against the men in 1924. Ottavio Bottecchia, expected to challenge for the winner's Maglia Rosa in 1928, until killed on a training ride, probably by Mussolini's Black Shirts. Fausto Coppi, the metropolitan playboy with amphetamines in his veins, guided by a mystic blind masseur; and his arch rival Gino Bartali; humble, pious and countrified (and brave: recently it emerged he smuggled papers for persecuted Jewish Italians). The Giro's most tragic hero - Marco Pantani, born to climb but fated to lose.  Halted only by World Wars, the Giro has been contested since 1909. The 2017 edition was its one hundredth. Giro d'Italia: The Story of the World's Most Beautiful Bike Race celebrates it in all its kaleidoscopic glory.

Colin O'Brien is an Irish sports writer based in Rome. His passion for cycling and the European professional racing scene was ignited when Marco Pantani and the world's best riders came to Dublin with the 1998 Tour de France. He contributes to leading publications worldwide, including Rouleur, Peloton, Cyclist, and ProCycling.

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11 November

NEW - Filippo Buonarroti – revolutionary conspirator

Writer paved the way for the 1848 revolutions in Europe

Filippo Buonarroti, whose political writing inspired many other famous socialists, including Karl Marx, was born on this day in 1761 in Pisa.  Sometimes referred to as Philippe Buonarroti because he spent many years living in France, working to further the cause of the revolution there, the writer was born into a noble family. His father was a direct descendant of the brother of the artist Michelangelo Buonarroti.  Filippo Buonarroti studied Law at the University of Pisa, where he founded what was seen at the time as a subversive newspaper, the Gazetta Universale. It is thought that he joined a Masonic Lodge at about the same time.  Although he was kept under surveillance by the authorities in Italy, Buonarroti expressed support for the French Revolution when it broke out in 1789.  Buonarroti travelled to Corsica to spread the revolutionary message through a newspaper, Giornale Patriottico di Corsica, which was the first newspaper written in the Italian language that supported the French Revolution openly. There, he became a friend of the Buonaparte family, from which Napoleon originated.  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.  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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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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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: Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution, by Martyn Lyons

The Napoleonic period cannot be interpreted as a single historical 'block'. Bonaparte had many different persona: the Jacobin, the Republican, the reformer of the Consulate, the consolidator of the Empire and the 'liberal' of the Hundred Days. The emphasis here is on Napoleon as the heir and executor of the French Revolution, rather than on his role as the liquidator of revolutionary ideals. Napoleon is seen as part of the Revolution, preserving its social gains, and consecrating the triumph of the bourgeoisie. Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution steers away from the personal and heroic interpretation of the period. Instead of seeing the era in terms of a single man, the study explores developments in French society and the economy, giving due weight to research on the demographic and social history of the period 1800-1815.

Martyn Lyons is emeritus professor of history and European studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Born in London and brought up in Lancashire and North Wales, he has lived in Australia since 1977.

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Filippo Buonarroti – revolutionary conspirator

Writer paved the way for the 1848 revolutions in Europe

Filippo Buonarotti, whose writings inspired
social revolutionaries across Europe

Filippo Buonarroti, whose political writing inspired many other famous socialists, including Karl Marx, was born on this day in 1761 in Pisa.

Sometimes referred to as Philippe Buonarroti because he spent many years living in France, working to further the cause of the revolution there, the writer was born into a noble family. His father was a direct descendant of the brother of the artist Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Filippo Buonarroti studied Law at the University of Pisa, where he founded what was seen at the time as a subversive newspaper, the Gazetta Universale. It is thought that he joined a Masonic Lodge at about the same time.

Although he was kept under surveillance by the authorities in Italy, Buonarroti expressed support for the French Revolution when it broke out in 1789.

Buonarroti travelled to Corsica to spread the revolutionary message through a newspaper, Giornale Patriottico di Corsica, which was the first newspaper written in the Italian language that supported the French Revolution openly. There, he became a friend of the Buonaparte family, from which Napoleon originated.

After being expelled from Corsica in 1791, Buonarroti returned to Tuscany, where he was arrested and imprisoned.

But in 1793, he was able to travel to Paris, where Maximilien Robespierre, a central figure during the French Revolution, put him in charge of organising the expatriate Italian revolutionaries, from a base in Nice.

Maximilien Robespierre, with 
whom Buonarotti worked in Paris

Buonarroti denounced the Corsican patriot Filippo Pasquale de’ Paoli to the French authorities and was rewarded for his revolutionary activities with a special decree of French citizenship in 1793. He was also nominated as National Commissioner of Oneglia, a port in Liguria, in 1795.

But after Robespierre was imprisoned and later executed, Buonarroti was recalled to Paris and imprisoned. It was in prison that he met the journalist and revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf, and he became one of his most fervent co-conspirators. 

Buonarroti was rounded up with other Babeuf supporters in 1796. But although Babeuf himself was guillotined, Buonarroti was imprisoned on the French island of Oleron. He was allowed to go free after Napoleon Bonaparte took charge of the Government in France in 1799.

He then spent time in Geneva and Brussels, but returned to Paris after the second revolution broke out there in 1830. He died in Paris in 1837 and is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery. 

Filippo Buonarroti’s book, History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals, published in 1828, was seen as an essential textbook for revolutionaries. It put forward a strategy to revolutionise society in stages, from monarchy to liberalism, then moving towards radicalism, and finally to communism.

It has been claimed that the French political philosopher and activist Louis Auguste Blanqui learnt many of his tactics from Buonarroti.  Many revolutionaries in Europe also regarded his work as a cornerstone for their activities. In total, Buonarroti wrote six works about his revolutionary principles.

The Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin once praised Buonarroti as ‘the greatest conspirator of his age.’

The inner courtyard of the 15th century Palazzo
 della Sapienza, the heart of the University of Pisa

Travel tip:

Pisa, the town of Filippo Buonarotti’s birth, is famous the world over for its Leaning Tower, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Italy. Already tilting when it was completed in 1372 as the bell tower of the cathedral, it can be found in Piazza del Duomo, which is also known as Piazza dei Miracoli, in the centre of Pisa. The University of Pisa, where Buonarroti was a student, was founded in 1343, making it the tenth oldest in Italy. The university houses Europe’s oldest academic botanical garden. The main university buildings are in and around Lungarno Antonio Pacinotti, overlooking the River Arno, and they are a short walk away from the Leaning Tower. There is a school named after him in Pisa and streets commemorating him in Pisa, Livorno and Imperia.

The port area is one of the most 
historic parts of Oneglia

Travel tip:

Buonarroti was appointed by the French as National Commissioner of Oneglia, an Italian  town on the coast in the region of Liguria. Oneglia was joined to Porto Maurizio in 1923 by Mussolini to form the comune of Imperia. This area has become well known for cultivating flowers and olives and there is a Museum of the Olive in the part of the city that used to be Oneglia. One of Italy’s most famous olive oil producers and connoisseurs, Filippo Berio, was born in Oneglia in 1829.  The Porto Maurizio area of Imperia is characterised by steep, narrow streets and loggias with an elevated position offering views across the Ligurian Sea, while Oneglia is on the whole a modern town, one exception being the streets behind the Calata Cuneo in the port area.

Also on this day:

1696: The birth of composer and violinist Andrea Zani

1854: The birth of socialist activist Alessandro Mussolini

1869: The birth of future King Victor Emmanuel III

1932: The birth of sports presenter Germano Mosconi

1961: The birth of actor Luca Zingaretti

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10 November

Lord Byron in Venice

Romantic English poet finds renewed inspiration

Aristocratic English poet Lord Byron and his friend, John Cam Hobhouse, arrived in Venice for the first time on this day in 1816.  They put up at the Hotel Grande Bretagne on the Grand Canal and embarked on a few days of tourism.  But it was not long before Byron decided to move into an apartment just off the Frezzeria, a street near St Mark's Square, and settled down to enjoy life in the city that was to be his home for the next three years.  Byron has become one of Venice’s legends, perhaps the most famous, or infamous, of all its residents.  Tourists who came afterwards expected to see Venice through his eyes. Even the art critic, John Ruskin, has admitted that on his first visit he had come in search of Byron’s Venice.  Byron once wrote that Venice had always been ‘the greenest island of my imagination’ and he never seems to have been disappointed by it.  He also wrote in a letter to one of his friends that Venice was ‘one of those places that before he saw them he thought he already knew’. He said he appreciated the silence of the Venetian canals and the ‘gloomy gaiety’ of quietly passing gondolas.  Read more…

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Ennio Morricone - film music maestro

Composer who scored some of cinema's greatest soundtracks

Ennio Morricone, who composed some of the most memorable soundtracks in the history of the cinema, was born on this day in 1928 in Rome.  Morricone has written more than 500 film and television scores, winning countless awards.  Best known for his associations with the Italian directors Sergio Leone, Giuseppe Tornatore and Giuliano Montaldo, he also worked among others with Pier Paolo Pasolini, Brian de Palma, Roland Joffé, Franco Zeffirelli and Quentin Tarantino, whose 2015 Western The Hateful Eight finally won Morricone an Oscar that many considered long overdue.  Among his finest soundtracks are those he wrote for Leone's 'Dollars' trilogy in the 1960s, for the Leone gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America two decades later, for Joffé's The Mission and De Palma's The Untouchables.  He composed the score for Tornatore's hauntingly poignant Cinema Paradiso and for Maddalena, a somewhat obscure 1971 film by the Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz that included the acclaimed Come Maddalena and Chi Mai, which later reached number two in the British singles chart after being used for the 1981 TV series The Life and Times of David Lloyd George.  Read more…

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Gaetano Bresci - assassin

Anarchist who gunned down a king

Gaetano Bresci, the man who assassinated the Italian king Umberto I, was born on this day in 1869 in Coiano, a small village near Prato in Tuscany.  He murdered Umberto in Monza, north of Milan, on July 29, 1900, while the monarch was handing out prizes at an athletics event.  Bresci mingled with the crowd but then sprang forward and shot Umberto three or four times with a .32 revolver.  Often unpopular with his subjects despite being nicknamed Il Buono (the good), Umberto had survived two previous attempts on his life, in 1878 and 1897.  Bresci was immediately overpowered and after standing trial in Milan he was given a life sentence of hard labour on Santo Stefano island, a prison notorious for its anarchist and socialist inmates.  He had been closely involved with anarchist groups and had served a brief jail term earlier for anarchist activity but had a motive for killing Umberto.  A silk weaver by profession, he was living in the United States, where he had emigrated in the 1890s and had settled in New Jersey with his Irish-born wife.  Working as a weaver in a mill in Paterson, New Jersey, Bresci and others set about propagating anarchist ideas among the large local Italian immigrant population.  Read more…

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Charles Ferdinand - Prince of the Two Sicilies

The heir presumptive whose marriage earned him exile

Charles Ferdinand, the Bourbon Prince of the Two Sicilies and Prince of Capua and heir presumptive to the crown of King Ferdinand II, was born on this day in 1811 in Palermo.  Prince Charles, the second son of King Francis I of the Two Sicilies and Maria Isabella of Spain, gave up his claim to the throne when he married a commoner, after his brother, King Ferdinand II, issued a decree upholding their father’s insistence that blood-royal members of the kingdom did not marry beneath their status.  In 1835, at which time Ferdinand II had not fathered any children and Charles therefore held the status of heir presumptive, Charles met and fell in love with a beautiful Irish woman, Penelope Smyth, who was visiting Naples.  Penelope Smyth was the daughter of Grice Smyth of Ballynatray, County Waterford, and sister of Sir John Rowland Smyth. Ferdinand II forbade their union, in accordance with his father’s wishes, but the lovers would not be parted.  On January 12, 1836 the couple eloped. Two months later, Ferdinand II issued the decree that forbade their marriage but three weeks after that Charles and Penelope reached Gretna Green, the town just over the border between England and Scotland.  Read more…

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Vanessa Ferrari - gymnast

First Italian woman to win a World Championship gold

The gymnast Vanessa Ferrari, who in 2006 became the first Italian female competitor to win a gold medal at the World Championships of artistic gymnastics, was born on this day in 1990, in the town of Orzinuovi in Lombardy.  Ferrari won the all-around gold - consisting of uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise - at the World Championships in Aarhus in Denmark when she was only 15 years old. It remains the only artistic gymnastics world title to be won by an Italian woman.  Earlier in 2006, Ferrari had picked up her first gold medal of the European Championships at Volos in Greece as Italy won the all-around team event.  Naturally small in stature, Ferrari was inspired to take up gymnastics by watching the sport on television as a child, when the sport was dominated by Russian and Romanian athletes.  With the help of her Bulgarian-born mother, Galya, who made many sacrifices to help her daughter fulfil her ambitions, Ferrari joined the Brixia gym in the city of Brescia. Brixia was co-founded by Enrico Casella, a former rugby player who was technical director of the Italian women’s gymnastics team at the 2004 Olympics in Athens.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: In Venice and in the Veneto with Lord Byron, by Gregory Dowling

Lord Byron lived in Venice for three years, from 1816 to 1819. He has become one of the legends of the city, with his palace on the Grand Canal, his great swimming feats and his notorious love-life. More importantly, these three years were a turning point in his creative career. Venice, which was in sad decline during Byron’s stay, is the subject of a number of serious poems, such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the Ode to Venice, and its history provided the theme for two major dramas. But Byron also composed one of the wittiest and most amusing works ever written on Venetian life, with his social satire, Beppo. For it was in Venice that he discovered the potentialities of the Italian form of ottava rima, which gave him a way forward for his own poetry. His greatest poem, Don Juan, was begun in Venice and can be said to be fully Venetian in inspiration and atmosphere, even if it does not mention the city.  In Venice and in the Veneto with Lord Byron takes us to the various fascinating places in Venice and on the islands of the lagoon that Byron himself visited and wrote about. There are also itineraries to the mainland, visiting Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Este, Arquà Petrarca and his villa at La Mira, where he spent the summer months. The aim is to help the reader to enter imaginatively a crucial period of drama and creativity in Byron’s life.

Gregory Dowling is an English-born author, translator, literary critic and Professor of Anglo-American Literature at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice. 

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