13 February

NEW - The Challenge of Barletta

The day an Italian red wine proved too good for the French to resist

A group of 13 Italian cavaliers won a duel, which has since gone down in history, against 13 French mounted soldiers, on this day in 1503 near Trani in the region of Puglia.  The celebrated contest has become known as the Challenge of Barletta (Disfida di Barletta), taking its name from a town in the area that later commemorated the victory with a monument.  It is considered one of the earliest displays of Italian national pride, if not the first of its kind, even though it was fought while a war was going on between French and Spanish troops, who were battling to win control of the south of Italy. The Challenge was provoked by a group of French soldiers who had been taken as prisoners of war by the Spanish. They had been invited to a banquet in Barletta at a local osteria, along with some of the Italian knights who were fighting on behalf of the Spanish.  A wine cellar in Barletta has now been named La Cantina della Sfida and it houses a museum commemorating the duel. However, it is not certain whether this was the original setting for the banquet where the French cavaliers issued the challenge. Read more...

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Pierluigi Collina - football referee

Italian arbiter seen as the best in game's history

Pierluigi Collina, arguably the best and certainly the most recognisable football referee in the history of the game, was born on this day in 1960 in Bologna.  Collina, who was in charge of the 1999 Champions League final and the 2002 World Cup final, was named FIFA's referee of the year for six consecutive seasons.  He was renowned for his athleticism, his knowledge of the laws of the game and for applying them with even-handedness and respect for the players, while using his distinctive appearance to reinforce his authority on the field.  Standing 1.88m (6ft 2ins) tall and with piercing blue eyes, Collina is also completely hairless as a result of suffering a severe form of alopecia in his early 20s, giving him an intimidating presence on the field.  Growing up in Bologna, the son of a civil servant and a schoolteacher, Collina shared the dream of many Italian boys in that he wanted to become a professional footballer.  In reality, he was not quite good enough, although he was a decent central defender who played amateur football to a good standard.   When he was 17 and at college, he was persuaded to take a referee's course and displayed a natural aptitude.  Read more…

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Benvenuto Cellini – sculptor and goldsmith

Creator of the famous Perseus bronze had a dark history

The colourful life of the Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini ended on this day in 1571 with his death in Florence at the age of 70.  A contemporary of Michelangelo, the Mannerist Cellini was most famous for his bronze sculpture of Perseus with the Head of Medusa, which still stands where it was erected in 1554 in the Loggia dei Lanzi of the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, and for the table sculpture in gold he created as a salieri - salt cellar - for Francis I of France.  The Cellini Salt Cellar, as it is generally known, measuring 26cm (10ins) by 33.5cm (13.2ins), is now kept at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, with an insurance value of $60 million.  His works apart, Cellini was also known for an eventful personal life, in which his violent behaviour frequently landed him in trouble. He killed at least two people while working in Rome as a young man and claimed also to have shot dead Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, during the 1527 Siege of Rome by mutinous soldiers of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.  Cellini was also imprisoned for alleged embezzlement of the gems from the tiara of Pope Clement VII.  Read more…

Isabella d’Este – Marchioness of Mantua

‘The First Lady of the world’

Isabella d’Este, who was a leading cultural and political figure during the Renaissance, died on this day in 1539 in Mantua.  She had been a patron of the arts, a leader of fashion, a politically astute ruler and a diplomat. Such was her influence that she was once described as ‘the First Lady of the world’.  Her life is documented by her correspondence, which is still archived in Mantua. She received about 28,000 letters and wrote about 12,000. More than 2000 of her letters have survived.  Isabella grew up in a cultured family in the city of Ferrara. Her father was Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, and her mother was Eleanor of Naples.  She received a classical education and had opportunities to meet famous scholars and artists. She was reputed to have frequently discussed the classics and affairs of state with ambassadors who came to the court.  When Isabella was just six years old she was betrothed to Francesco, the heir to the Marquess of Mantua.  At the age of 15 she married him by proxy. He had succeeded his father and become Francesco II and she became his Marchioness.   In 1493 Isabella gave birth to a daughter, Eleonora, the first of her eight children.  Read more…

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Antonia Pozzi - poet

Tragic writer whose work was published only after her death

The poet Antonia Pozzi, who came to be regarded as one of the greatest Italian poets of the 20th century, was born on this day in 1912 in Milan. Born into a wealthy family, she enjoyed a privileged lifestyle but seemingly a difficult relationship with her parents. She kept diaries and began to write poems as a teenager, although none came to light until she died in tragic circumstances at the age of just 26. Afterwards, her notebooks were found to contain more than 300 poems, which revealed her to be one of the most original voices in 20th century Italian literature.  Most have subsequently been published, to great critical acclaim.  The daughter of Roberto Pozzi, a prominent Milan lawyer, and his aristocratic wife, Countess Lina Cavagna Sangiuliani, Antonia’s literary talent may have been inherited from her great-grandfather on her mother’s side, the 19th century poet and writer, Tommaso Grossi.  As a teenager, she had multiple interests, studying German, English and French and travelling both within Italy and further afield, to France, Austria, Germany, England, Greece and North Africa, always indulging her love of photography.  Read more…

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Fire at Teatro di San Carlo

Royal theatre reopens quickly after blaze 

Fire broke out during a dress rehearsal for a ballet at Teatro di San Carlo in Naples on this day in 1816.  The flames spread quickly, destroying a large part of the building in less than an hour.  The external walls were the only things left standing, but on the orders of Ferdinand IV, King of Naples, the prestigious theatre was rebuilt at once.  It was reconstructed following designs drawn up by architect Antonio Niccolini for a horseshoe-shaped auditorium with 1,444 seats. A stunning fresco was painted in the centre of the ceiling above the auditorium depicting a classical subject, Apollo presenting to Minerva the greatest poets of the world.  The rebuilding work took just ten months to complete and the theatre reopened to the public in January 1817.  Teatro di San Carlo had opened for the first time in 1737, way ahead of Teatro alla Scala in Milan and La Fenice in Venice.  Built in Via San Carlo close to Piazza del Plebiscito, the main square in Naples, Teatro di San Carlo had quickly become one of the most important opera houses in Europe, known for its excellent productions.  The original theatre was designed by Giovanni Antonio Medrano for the Bourbon King of Naples, Charles I, and took only eight months to build.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Rules of the Game, by Pierluigi Collina

On 30 June, 2002 Pierluigi Collina, universally acknowledged to be the world's finest referee, officiated over Brazil and Germany in the World Cup Final. A matter of weeks later, he was back on the field refereeing a Italian Cup first round encounter between Sampdoria and Siena. This unique vantage point makes Collina perfectly placed to comment on the game, on the stars, the media and the matches he has overseen, including England's world cup victory over Argentina and Manchester United's dramatic treble winning European Cup Final. The Rules of the Game takes us as never before into the world of the referee, the preparation needed for each game, the managing of players and the other officials and the camaraderie behind the scenes. Collina describes how it feels to make a difficult decision, the pressures from the crowd and from the players while taking us through the most significant matches he has refereed. But more than anything this is Pierluigi Collina's chance to speak out about the game he loves. His passionate, expert and, sometimes controversial views are compulsory reading for anyone with a passing interest in the beautiful game. 

Pierluigi Collina was born in Bologna in 1960. By trade a financial consultant, he has become one of the greatest referees of all time, having officiated at the World Cup Final, Champions League Final and Olympic Final. He lives in Viareggio with his wife and two children.

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The Challenge of Barletta

The day an Italian red wine proved too good for the French to resist

A poster advertising the annual
commemoration of the Challenge

A group of 13 Italian cavaliers won a duel, which has since gone down in history, against 13 French mounted soldiers, on this day in 1503 near Trani in the region of Puglia.

The celebrated contest has become known as the Challenge of Barletta (Disfida di Barletta), taking its name from a town in the area that later commemorated the victory with a monument. 

It is considered one of the earliest displays of Italian national pride, if not the first of its kind, even though it was fought while a war was going on between French and Spanish troops, who were battling to win control of the south of Italy.

The Challenge was provoked by a group of French soldiers who had been taken as prisoners of war by the Spanish. They had been invited to a banquet in Barletta at a local osteria, along with some of the Italian knights who were fighting on behalf of the Spanish.

A wine cellar in Barletta has now been named La Cantina della Sfida and it houses a museum commemorating the duel. However, it is not certain whether this was the original setting for the banquet where the French cavaliers issued the challenge.

A French knight, Charles de Torgues - also known as Guy de la Motte - had drunk too much of the local red wine, Rosso Barletta, and made disparaging remarks about the courage of Italian soldiers in general, provoking an argument among the guests.

To solve the dispute, the French challenged the Italians to a mounted tournament between 13 French and 13 Italian cavaliers. The rules were imposed by the French, who mistakenly thought the Italians would refuse the challenge because they would be superstitious about the number 13.

A monument in Barletta keeps the
memory alive after 500 years

However, the Italians, captained by Ettore Fieramosca, accepted the challenge. The fighting, using swords and axes, wielded by cavaliers on horseback, ended when all the French cavaliers had been either captured or wounded. The Italians therefore won the tournament and the French had to surrender their weapons and horses to them. They also had to pay the Italians a ransom for their knights, because of the rules they had set for the challenge themselves, in advance.

It is said that there were long celebrations in Barletta following the victory by the Italian knights and now every year on February 13 the event is commemorated in the city.

Barletta has become known as Citta della Disfida - City of the Challenge. The writer Massimo d’Azeglio, who went on to become prime minister of Piedmont following in the footsteps of Cavour, wrote a novel about the event in 1833, Ettore Fieramosca, or La disfida di Barletta. 

A humorous version of the tournament was featured in the 1976 film Il Soldato del Ventura. 

And Mussolini once referred to the event to try to stimulate national feeling in the 20th century. He ignored the fact that in 1503 Italy did not exist as a unified country. He also overlooked the detail that at the time of their duel with the French, the Italian cavaliers were using their expertise to fight on behalf of the Spanish, who then went on to rule the south of Italy for two centuries. 

Some of the exhibits on display in the
museum in the Cantina della Disfida

Travel tip:

Barletta is a city and comune in Puglia on the Adriatic coast. It is the capoluogo, along with Andria and Trani, of the province of Barletta-Andria-Trani. The area of Barletta also includes part of the battlefield of Cannae, an important archaeological site because of the major battle fought there in 216 BC between the Carthaginians and the Romans, which was won for the Carthaginians by their General, Hannibal. Barletta is also home to the Colossus of Barletta, a bronze statue of a Roman emperor standing about four metres, or 13 feet, tall. The Colossus, which is known to local people as Eraclo, is the biggest surviving statue from the late Roman empire.

Trani's white stone cathedral
is one of the city's attractions

Travel tip:

The celebrated duel between the French and the Italians took place in countryside near Trani, on the plains between Corato and Andria. Trani is a beautiful seaport on the Adriatic  coast to the north west of Bari. Trani still has its 13th century fort, which has now been restored and has been opened to the public as a museum and performance venue. Trani’s white stone cathedral, which was consecrated in the 12th century, is dedicated to Saint Nicholas the Pilgrim, a Greek traveller, who died in Trani in 1094 while making a pilgrimage to Rome. Trani also produces its own prestigious wine, Moscato di Trani DOC, a golden dessert wine made from grapes grown in the area. 

Also on this day:

1539: The death of Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua

1571: The death of sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini

1816: Fire damages the Teatro San Carlo in Naples

1912: The birth of poet Antonia Pozzi

1960: The birth of football referee Pierluigi Collina

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12 February

Franco Zeffirelli – film director

Shakespeare adaptations made director a household name

The film, opera and television director Franco Zeffirelli was born on this day in Florence in 1923.  He was best known for his adaptations of Shakespeare plays for the big screen, notably The Taming of the Shrew (1967), with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Romeo and Juliet (1968) and Hamlet (1990) with Mel Gibson.   Boldly, he cast two teenagers in the title roles of Romeo and Juliet and filmed the tragedy against the backdrop of 15th century buildings in Serravalle in the Veneto region. His film became the standard adaptation of the play and has been shown to thousands of students over the years.  His later films included Jane Eyre (1996) and Tea with Mussolini (1999), while he directed several adaptations of operas for the cinema, including I Pagliacci (1981), Cavalleria rusticana (1982), Otello (1986), and La bohème (2008).  Because he was the product of an affair between two people already married, Zeffirelli's name was an invention, and a misspelled one. His mother intended him to be registered as Zeffiretti - the Italian for 'little breezes' - in a reference to a line in Mozart's opera, Idomeneo. However, it was misspelled in the register.  Read more…

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Michelangelo Cerquozzi – painter

Battle scenes brought fame and riches to Baroque artist

Michelangelo Cerquozzi, the Baroque painter, was born on this day in 1602 in Rome.  He was to become famous for his paintings of battles, earning himself the nickname of Michelangelo delle Battaglie - Michelangelo of the Battles.  Cerquozzi was born into a well-off family as his father was a successful leather merchant. He started his artistic training at the age of 12 in the studio of Giuseppe Cesari, a history painter, with whom the young Caravaggio trained when he first arrived in Rome.  Not much is known about Cerquozzi’s early work, although he is thought to have been influenced by the Flemish and Dutch artists active in Rome at the time. As well as battles, Cerquozzi painted small, religious and mythological works and some still life scenes.  Cerquozzi joined the Accademia di San Luca in 1634 and, although he did not follow their strict rules, he started gradually gaining recognition for his work.  He secured commissions from prominent Roman patrons, including representatives of the Barberini and Colonna families.  His only public commission in Rome was for a lunette depicting the Miracle of Saint Francis of Paolo in the cloister of the Church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, which has sadly been lost.  Read more…

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Lazzaro Spallanzani – priest and scientist

18th century biologist who pioneered artificial insemination 

Lazzaro Spallanzani, the first scientist to interpret the process of digestion and the first to carry out a successful artificial insemination, died on this day in 1799 in Pavia.  Spallanzani made important contributions to the experimental study of bodily functions and animal reproduction. His investigations into the development of microscopic life in nutrient culture solutions paved the way for the later research of Louis Pasteur.  Born in Scandiano in the province of Reggio Emilia, the son of a wealthy lawyer, Spallanzani attended a Jesuit college and was ordained as a priest but then went to Bologna to study law.  Influenced by the eminent Laura Bassi, a professor of physics at the University, Spallanzani became interested in science.  In 1754 Spallanzani was appointed professor of logic, metaphysics and Greek at a college in Reggio and he later became a professor of physics at the University of Modena.  Spallanzani experimented in transplantation, successfully transplanting the head of one snail on to the body of another.  After a series of experiments on digestion, he obtained evidence that digestive juices contain special chemicals that are suited to particular foods.  Read more…

Vittorio Emanuele - Prince of Naples

Heir to the last King of Italy spent his life in exile

Prince Vittorio Emanuele of Savoy, the only son of Umberto II, the last King of Italy, was born on this day in 1937 in Naples.  He had to leave Italy when he was nine years old following the constitutional referendum held in Italy after World War II. The referendum affirmed the abolition of the monarchy and the creation of the Italian republic in 1946.  Umberto II had been King of Italy for just over a month and was afterwards nicknamed the May King. He had been de facto head of state since 1944, after his father, King Victor Emmanuel III, had transferred most of his powers to him.  Umberto lived for 37 years in exile in Cascais on the Portuguese Riviera. He never set foot in his native Italy again as he, and all his male heirs, were banned from Italian soil.  His only son, Vittorio Emanuele, spent most of his life exiled from Italy and living in Switzerland. He married a Swiss heiress and world ranked water skier, Marina Doria, in 1971.  They had one son, Prince Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, Prince of Venice, who was born in 1972.  Vittorio Emanuele also used the title Duke of Savoy and claimed to be head of the House of Savoy, although this claim was disputed by supporters of his third cousin, Prince Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, and his son, Almone.  Read more…

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Claudia Mori - actress and singer

Film star who married pop icon Adriano Celentano

The actress, singer and later television producer Claudia Mori, married for more than half a century to Italy’s all-time biggest-selling recording artist, Adriano Celentano, was born on this day in 1944 in Rome.  She and Celentano met in 1963 on the set of Uno strano tipo (A Strange Type), a comedy film in which they were both starring. The two were married the following year at the Church of San Francesco in Grosseto in Tuscany, having kept their intentions secret to avoid publicity.  Mori was only 20 when she and Celentano - six years her senior - were married but she had already made several films.  Born Claudia Moroni, she made her film debut in Raffaello Matarazzo’s romantic comedy Cerasella at the age of just 15 in 1959, featuring as the title character opposite Mario Girotti, the actor who would later change his name to Terence Hill and become famous as the parish priest Don Matteo in the long-running television series of the same name.  The following year she had a supporting part as a laundry worker colleague of Alain Delon in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers).  Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, edited by Russell Jackson

Film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays are increasingly popular and now figure prominently in the study of his work and its reception. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film is a collection of critical and historical essays on the films adapted from, and inspired by, Shakespeare's plays. An international team of leading scholars discuss Shakespearean films from a variety of perspectives: as works of art in their own right; as products of the international movie industry; in terms of cinematic and theatrical genres; and as the work of particular directors from Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles to Franco Zeffirelli and Kenneth Branagh. They also consider specific issues such as the portrayal of Shakespeare's women and the supernatural. The emphasis is on feature films for cinema, rather than television, with strong coverage of Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet. A guide to further reading and a useful filmography are also provided.

Russell Jackson is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Birmingham, in the United Kingdom. In addition to The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, his books include Shakespeare Films in the Making: Vision, Production and Reception and  He has worked closely in rehearsal with actors and directors as text consultant on many theatre and film productions.

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11 February

Carlo Carrà - Futurist artist

Painter hailed for capturing violence at anarchist's funeral

The painter Carlo Carrà, a leading figure in the Futurist movement that gained popularity in Italy in the early part of the 20th century, was born on this day in 1881 in Quargnento, a village about 11km (7 miles) from Alessandria in Piedmont.  Futurism was an avant-garde artistic, social and political movement that was launched by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909 and attracted many painters and sculptors, designers and architects, writers, film makers and composers who wished to embrace modernity and free Italy from what they perceived as a stifling obsession with the past.  The Futurists admired the speed and technological advancement of cars and aeroplanes and the new industrial cities, all of which they saw as demonstrating the triumph of humanity over nature through invention. They were also fervent nationalists and encouraged the youth of Italy to rise up in violent revolution against the establishment.  The movement was associated with anarchism. Indeed, Carrà counted himself as an anarchist in his youth and his best known work emerged from that period, when he attended the funeral of a fellow anarchist, Angelo Galli, who was killed by police during a general strike in Milan in 1906.  Read more…

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Lateran Treaty

How the Vatican became an independent state inside Italy 

An agreement between the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See, recognising the Vatican as an independent state within Italy, was signed on this day in 1929.  The Lateran Treaty settled what had been known as ‘The Roman Question’, a dispute regarding the power of the Popes as rulers of civil territory within a united Italy.  The treaty is named after the Lateran Palace where the agreement was signed by prime minister Benito Mussolini on behalf of King Victor Emmanuel III and Cardinal Pietro Gasparri on behalf of Pope Pius XI.  The Italian parliament ratified the treaty on June 7, 1929. Although Italy was then under a Fascist government, the succeeding democratic governments have all upheld the treaty.  The Vatican was officially recognised as an independent state, with the Pope as an independent sovereign ruling within Vatican City. The state covers approximately 40 hectares (100 acres) of land.  The papacy recognised the state of Italy with Rome as its capital, giving it a special character as ‘the centre of the catholic world and a place of pilgrimage’.  The Prime Minister at the time, Benito Mussolini, agreed to give the church financial support in return for public support from the Pope.  Read more...

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Giuseppe De Santis - film director

Former Resistance fighter famous for neorealist classic Bitter Rice

The writer and film director Giuseppe De Santis, who is best remembered for the 1949 neorealist film Bitter Rice - screened as Riso Amaro for Italian audiences - was born on this day in 1917 in Fondi, a small city in Lazio about 130km (81 miles) south of Rome.  De Santis is sometimes described as an idealist of the neorealism genre, which flourished in the years immediately after World War Two, yet it can also be argued that he moved away from the documentary style that characterised some of neorealism’s early output towards films with more traditional storylines.  Bitter Rice, for example, while highlighting the harsh working conditions in the rice fields around Vercelli in the Po Valley and the exploitation of labourers by wealthy landowners, is also a tale of plotting, jealousy and treachery among thieves.  Nonetheless, De Santis, a staunch opponent of Mussolini and Fascism who fought against the Germans with the Italian Resistance, inevitably underpinned his work with a strong social message. The son of a surveyor, De Santis wrote stories from an early age, drawing on the day-to-day lives of the people around him in Fondi and the surrounding countryside.  Read more…

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Louis Visconti - architect

Roman who made his mark on Paris

The architect Louis Visconti, who designed a number of public buildings and squares as well as numerous private residences in Paris, was born on this day in 1791 in Rome.   Notably, Visconti was the architect chosen to design the tomb to house the remains of Napoleon Bonaparte after King Louis Philippe I obtained permission from Britain in 1840 to return them from Saint Helena, the remote island in the South Atlantic where the former emperor had died in exile in 1921.  Born Louis Tullius Joachim Visconti, he came from a family of archaeologists. His grandfather, Giambattista Antonio Visconti was the founder of the Vatican Museums and his father, Ennio Quirino Visconti, was an archaeologist and art historian.  Ennio had been a consul of the short-lived Roman Republic, proclaimed in February 1798 after Louis Alexandre Berthier, a general of Napoleon, had invaded Rome, but was forced to leave with the restoration of papal control.   He and his family moved to Paris and were naturalised as French citizens, with Ennio becoming a curator of antiquities and paintings at the Musée du Louvre.   In 1808, Louis enrolled at Paris's École des Beaux-Arts.   Read more… 

Carlo Sartori – footballer

Italian was first foreigner to play for Manchester United

Carlo Domenico Sartori, the first footballer from outside Great Britain or Ireland to play for Manchester United, was born on this day in 1948 in the mountain village of Caderzone Terme in Trentino.  The red-haired attacking midfielder made his United debut on October 9, 1968, appearing as substitute in a 2-2 draw against Tottenham Hotspur at the London club’s White Hart Lane ground.  On the field were seven members of the United team that had won the European Cup for the first time the previous May, including George Best and Bobby Charlton, as well as his boyhood idol, Denis Law, who had missed the final against Benfica through injury.  Sartori, who made his European Cup debut against the Belgian side Anderlecht the following month, went on to make 56 appearances in four seasons as a senior United player before returning to Italy to join Bologna.  Although they dominate the Premier League today, players from abroad were a rarity in British football in Sartori’s era and United did not have another in their ranks until they signed the Yugoslav defender Nikola Jovanovic from Red Star Belgrade in 1980.  Read more…

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Gianluca Ginoble – singer

Versatile baritone helps make Il Volo’s magical sound

Gianluca Ginoble, a member of the hugely successful and award winning Italian pop and opera trio Il Volo, was born on this day in 1995 in Roseto degli Abruzzi, in the Abruzzo region.  He is the youngest of the trio and the only baritone. The other two singers, Piero Barone and Ignazio Boschetto, are both tenors.  Gianluca’s family lives in Montepagano, a small hilltop town overlooking Roseto degli Abruzzi. He is the oldest son of Ercole Ginoble and Eleonora Di Vittorio and has a younger brother, Ernesto.  Gianluca started to sing when he was just three years old with his grandfather, Ernesto, in the Bar Centrale, which Ernesto owns, in the main square of the town.  While still young, Gianluca took part in music festivals and competitions in his area, winning some and being distinguished in them all because of his beautiful deep voice.  In 2009, he won the talent show Ti Lascio Una Canzone on Rai Uno, singing Il mare calmo della sera, which had been Andrea Bocelli's winning song at the Sanremo Music Festival of 1994.  He was then just 14 years old.  Piero Barone and Ignazio Boschetto also took part in the show and in one episode the trio performed together for the first time, singing the Neapolitan classic, O sole mio.   Read more…

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Book of the Day: Futurism and Europe: The Aesthetics of a New World, by Fabio Benzi and Renske Cohen Tervaert

Futurism & Europe: The Aesthetics of a New World examines for the first time the many interconnections between Futurism and other European avant-gardes as varied as the Bauhaus in Germany, De Stijl in the Netherlands, Omega Workshops in Britain, Constructivism in Russia and Esprit Nouveau in France. Featuring more than 20 essays by an international team of experts, this expansive book covers a range of topics and mediums including painting, sculpture, architecture, interior and stage designs, graphic work, fashion, theatre and cinema, as well as a diverse variety of functional objects from furniture and carpets to ceramics and toys.  Spanning various avant-gardes from 1912 to 1939, artists featured include Italian futurists such as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Fortunato Depero, alongside other European artists including Sonia Delaunay, Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, Walter Gropius, Alexander Rodchenko, Fritz Lang, László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Hans Arp, Duncan Grant, Natalia Goncharova and Vladimir Tatlin. Broad in scope, this pioneering book examines the intersections between Futurism and other European avant-garde movements in their shared quest for a new aesthetic, triggering a lively exchange of new ideas, friction and rivalry.  

Fabio Benzi is full professor in the history of contemporary art at Università “Gabriele d’Annunzio” di Chieti-Pescara, Italy. Renske Cohen Tervaert is curator at the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands, which hosted an exhibition of European avant-garde art in 2023.

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