23 April

NEW - Renata Viganò - writer and partisan

Resistance-inspired novel hailed as masterpiece

The writer and partisan Renata Viganò, whose 1949 novel L’Agnese va a morire - Agnes Goes to Die - was considered a masterpiece among literary works inspired by the heroics of the Italian Resistance movement in World War Two, died on this day in 1976 in her home city of Bologna.  L’Agnese va a morire, Viganò’s second novel, won the Viareggio Prize, a prestigious literary award, and was translated into 14 languages and subsequently turned into a film. Viganò, who had volumes of poetry published as a teenager and became a prolific contributor to the news and editorial pages of a number of newspapers, wrote L’Agnese va a morire from the viewpoint of a newspaper reporter, which placed it in the neorealist genre that became popular with film-makers in the postwar years. Born in Bologna in 1900, Viganò’s father, Eugenio, was a socialist from Reggio Emilia but ran his own business. Her mother, Amelia, hailed from a wealthy family and they were initially comfortably off.  A talented writer from a young age, she had volumes of poetry published at the ages of 13 and 16. Read more…

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Gaspara Stampa – poet

Beautiful sonnets were inspired by unrequited love

Gaspara Stampa, the greatest female poet of the Italian Renaissance, died on this day in 1554 in Venice at the age of 31.  She is regarded by many as the greatest Italian female poet of any age, despite having had such a brief life.  Gaspara was born in Padua and lived in the city until she was eight years old. Her father, Bartolomeo, had been a jewel and gold merchant, but after he died, Gaspara’s mother, Cecilia, took her three children to live in Venice. They were accommodated in the house of Geronimo Morosini, who was descended from a noble Venetian family, in the parish of Santi Gervasio and Protasio, now known as San Trovaso.  Along with her sister, Cassandra, and brother, Baldassare, Gaspara was educated in literature, music, history and painting. She excelled at singing and playing the lute and her home became a cultural hub as it was visited by many Venetian writers, painters and musicians, among them Francesco Sansovino, a poet and writer who was the son of the great Florentine architect, Jacopo Sansovino.  Gaspara dedicated most of her poems to Count Collatino di Collalto of Treviso, with whom she had an affair.  Read more…

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Stefano Bontade - Mafia supremo

Well-connected Cosa Nostra boss had links to ex-premier Andreotti

Stefano Bontade, one of the most powerful and well connected figures in the Sicilian Mafia in the 1960s and 1970s, was born on this day in 1939 in Palermo, where he was murdered exactly 42 years later in a birthday execution that sparked a two-year war between the island’s rival clans.  Known as Il Falco – the Falcon – he was said to have close links with a number of important politicians in Sicily and with the former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti.  He was strongly suspected of being a key figure in the 1962 murder of Enrico Mattei, the president of Italy’s state-owned oil and gas conglomerate ENI, and in the bogus kidnapping of Michele Sindona, the disgraced banker who used the Vatican Bank to launder the proceeds of Cosa Nostra heroin trafficking.  Born into a Mafia family, Bontade controlled the Villagrazia area in the south-west of Palermo and became head of the Santa Maria di Gesù crime family at the age of 25 when his father, Francesco Paolo Bontade, a major Cosa Nostra boss known as Don Paolino, stepped down in failing health.  He was banished to the mainland, specifically Qualiano in Campania, following his arrest in 1972.  Read more…

Ruggero Leoncavallo – opera composer

Writer and musician created one of the most popular operas of all time

Ruggero Leoncavallo, the composer of the opera, Pagliacci, was born on this day in 1857 in Naples.  Pagliacci - which means 'clowns' - is one of the most popular operas ever written and is still regularly performed all over the world.  Leoncavallo also wrote the song, Mattinata, often performed by Enrico Caruso and still recorded by today’s tenors.  Leoncavallo was the son of a judge and moved with his father from Naples to live in the town of Montalto Uffugo in Calabria when he was a child.  He later returned to Naples to be educated and then studied literature at the University of Bologna under the poet Giosuè Carducci.  Leoncavallo initially worked as a piano teacher in Egypt but then moved to Paris where he found work as an accompanist for artists singing in cafes.  He then moved to Milan where he taught the piano and started to compose operas.  After the success of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, Leoncavallo produced his own verismo work, Pagliacci. Verismo was a post-romantic operatic tradition, often featuring true stories about the lives of poor people.  Leoncavallo claimed he had derived the plot for Pagliacci from a real-life murder trial.  Read more…

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Milva - singer and actress

Popular star of five decades

The singer and actress known as Milva died on this day in 2021 in Milan at the age of 81.  Born Maria Ilva Biolcati in Goro, a fishing village on the Po delta, her popularity was such that she sold more than 80 million records. Her output was extraordinary, running to 126 singles and a staggering 173 albums in a career spanning more than half a century. No Italian artist has recorded so many albums.   For a time she bestrode the pop world, earning the nickname La Pantera di Goro  - The Panther of Goro - as recognition by the Italian media of her status as one of the three best-loved female performers of her generation, alongside Mina - dubbed the Tiger of Cremona - and Iva Zanicchi, who found herself labelled the Eagle of Ligonchio.  Yet Milva was equally at home with the musical theatre of Bertolt Brecht and the operatic works of Luciano Berio and earned plaudits early in career when she sang Édith Piaf's repertoire at the prestigious Olympia theatre in Paris.  She was said to have an uncanny ability to sing almost any kind of music in any language after listening to it just once.  Her versatility enabled her to adapt to new trends in music and prolong her career.  Read more…

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Gianandrea Noseda - conductor

Milanese musician has achieved worldwide acclaim

Gianandrea Noseda, who is recognised as one of the leading orchestra conductors of his generation, was born on this day in 1964 in Milan.  He holds the title of Cavaliere Ufficiale al Merito della Repubblica Italiana for his contribution to the artistic life of Italy.  Noseda studied piano and composition in Milan and began studying conducting at the age of 27.  He made his debut as a conductor in 1994 with the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi. He won the Cadaques International Conducting Competition for young conductors in Spain the same year.  In 1997 he became principal guest conductor at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg and during his time there became fluent in Russian.  In 2002 he became principal conductor of the BBC Philharmonic and in this role led live performances in Manchester of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. In 2006 his title was changed to chief conductor.  The London Symphony Orchestra announced the appointment of Noseda as its new principal guest conductor in 2016.  Noseda has been Music Director of the Teatro Regio Torino since 2007, taking their orchestra to the Edinburgh Festival in 2017.  Read more… 

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Book of the Day: The Italian Resistance: Fascists, Guerrillas and the Allies, by Tom Behan

One of the enduring myths about World War Two is that only the Allies liberated occupied Europe. Many countries had anti-fascist Resistance movements, and Italy's was one of the biggest and most politically radical yet it remains relatively unknown outside of its own homeland. Within Italy many plaques and streets commemorate the actions of the partisans - a movement from below that grew as Mussolini's dictatorship unravelled. Led by radical left forces, the Resistance trod a thin line between fighting their enemies at home and maintaining an uneasy working relationship with the Allies. Essential for courses on World War Two and European history, Tom Behan’s The Italian Resistance uses unpublished archival material and interviews with surviving partisans to tell an inspiring story of liberation.

Tom Behan was Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Kent. As well as The Italian Resistance, he was the author of See Naples and Die. Behan was an active member of the British Socialist Workers Party for over 30 years.

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Renata Viganò - writer and partisan

Resistance-inspired novel hailed as masterpiece

Renata Viganò's later writing career was
coloured by her time in the Resistance

The writer and partisan Renata Viganò, whose 1949 novel L’Agnese va a morire - Agnes Goes to Die - was considered a masterpiece among literary works inspired by the heroics of the Italian Resistance movement in World War Two, died on this day in 1976 in her home city of Bologna.

L’Agnese va a morire, Viganò’s second novel, won the Viareggio Prize, a prestigious literary award, and was translated into 14 languages and subsequently turned into a film.

Viganò, who had volumes of poetry published as a teenager and became a prolific contributor to the news and editorial pages of a number of newspapers, wrote L’Agnese va a morire from the viewpoint of a newspaper reporter, which placed it in the neorealist genre that became popular with film-makers in the postwar years.

Born in Bologna in 1900, Viganò’s father, Eugenio, was a socialist from Reggio Emilia but ran his own business. Her mother, Amelia, hailed from a wealthy family and they were initially comfortably off. 

A talented writer from a young age, she had volumes of poetry published at the ages of 13 and 16 and went to a classical liceo - high school - with dreams of becoming a doctor.

However, the economic consequences of Italy’s involvement in the First World War caused Eugenio’s business to collapse. With the family suddenly poor, Renata had to give up high school in order to contribute to the household’s income, finding work in local hospitals, first as a janitor but eventually as a nurse.

Viganò with her husband, Antonio Meluschi,
with whom she shared her wartime experience

She continued to write. Her first novel was published in 1933 and her involvement in literary circles in Bologna led her to meet another writer, Antonio Meluschi. They married in 1937 and their home - at via Mascarella 63 -  became a meeting point for writers and intellectuals, including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luciano Serra, Enzo Biagi, Giorgio Bassani and Achille Ardigò.

As World War Two began, her politics became increasingly influenced by the left and with Italy’s formal surrender to the Allies in 1943 she and her husband decided to take a more active role in fighting fascism by joining the Resistance movement.

Under the name of Contessa, she was a courier and nurse in a partisan brigade commanded by Meluschi, first in Romagna and then in the wetlands and lagoons of the Valli di Comacchio, where she directed what could be described as a partisans' health service. 

Unlike many of their fellow fighters, Viganò and her husband survived the war and it was soon afterwards that she began working on L’Agnese va a morire.

Heavily autobiographical, set in the Valli di Comacchio during the eight months of German occupation of Italy that preceded the country’s liberation, the protagonist is Agnese, a middle-aged washerwoman, who responds to the death of her husband, Palita, at the hands of the Germans, by beginning to collaborate with the partisans as a liaison officer.

The novel came to the attention of Natalia Ginzburg, herself destined to become an award-winning writer, who was then an editor at Einaudi, and was identified by the renowned literary critic Maria Corti as one of the finest works on the Resistance. 

Viganò in later life; she invariably had
a cat for company as she worked

In 1976, L'Agnese va a morire was made into a film, released internationally under the title of And Agnese Goes to Die, directed by Giuliano Montaldo, with a screenplay by Nicola Badalucco and Giuliano Montaldo and music by Ennio Morricone. It starred Ingrid Thulin in the role of Agnese and Massimo Girotti in that of Palita, with a cast that also included Michele Placido and Aurore Clement. Sadly, Viganò died shortly before the film was released

Among Viganò's subsequent works were other books on the battle for Italy’s freedom, including Donne della Resistenza (1955) and Matrimonio in brigata (1976).

She also established herself in the years after the war as one of Italy’s most incisive voices during the country’s reconstruction, her contributions from the pages of l'Unità, the official Communist Party newspaper, reaching a wide audience of not only women. 

Two months before her death at the age of 75, she was recognised by the city of Bologna for her contribution to journalism.

Bologna dedicated a garden to her with a small monument in the Savena district, while the municipalities of San Lazzaro, Pontecchio and Ferrara named streets after her.

The marshes of the Valli di Comacchio are
attractive to walkers and birdwatchers

Travel tip:

The marshes of the Valli di Comacchio, while reduced in size by land reclamation in recent years, are still one of the largest lagoon systems in Italy. They cover an area of more than 11,000 hectares between Comacchio and the river Reno and are connected to the sea via canals. They form an environment of rare beauty within the Po Delta Park, the stretches of water in some places divided by embankments and ancient sandbars. The area is one of rich birdlife, both resident and migratory, and visitors are attracted by walks along the banks, excursions by boat and birdwatching.

The Porta Mascarella, where Via Mascarella ends,
is one of 10 remaining gates in Bologna's outer wall

Travel tip:

Via Mascarella, where Renata Viganò lived with her husband in Bologna before they moved out of the city to fight with the Resistance movement in World War Two, is an historic thoroughfare that dates back at least until the early 13th century. Stretching from Via delle Belle Arti to Piazza di Porta Mascarella, it is the only road leading to one of the city’s outer gates that is completely outside the Cerchia del Mille, the second of the three circles of ancient walls built to enclose the city at various points in history. The oldest walls of which visible remains remain today are those of the Cerchia di Selenite, built following the barbarian invasions, at the time of the decline of the Western Roman Empire in the third century and discovered only in the 1920s. These walls enclosed an area of only about 20 hectares. The Cerchia dei Mille was erected probably in the 11th century with the expansion of the city and the growth of new villages outside the original walls. Construction of the third ring began 200 years later. Much of this circle was demolished at the start of the 20th century to make way for a ring road, although thankfully 10 of the 12 gates were preserved.

Also on this day:

1554: The death of poet Gaspara Stampa

1857: The birth of opera composer Ruggero Leoncavallo

1939: The birth of Mafia boss Stefano Bontade

1964: The birth of conductor Gianandrea Noseda

2021: The death of singer and actress Milva

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22 April

Fiorenza Cossotto - mezzo-soprano

Career overshadowed by story of ‘row’ with Maria Callas

Fiorenza Cossotto, a singer considered one of the greatest mezzo-sopranos of the 20th century, was born on this day in 1935 in Crescentino in Piedmont.  Cossotto was hailed for her interpretations of the major mezzo and contralto roles from mid-19th-century Italian operas, particularly those of Giuseppe Verdi such as Aida, Il trovatore and Don Carlos, but also Gaetano Donizetti, Amilcare Ponchielli, Vincenzo Bellini and the other important composers of the day.  Yet she is often remembered for a supposed spat with Maria Callas that led the Greek-American soprano to walk off the stage during her final performance at the Opéra in Paris of her signature role in Bellini’s Norma in 1965.  The incident in question took place immediately after Callas, as Norma, and Cossotto, as Adalgisa, had joined in their duet ‘Mira, o Norma’.  Callas, by that stage a little below her prime, was notoriously temperamental and within moments onlookers were imagining a row, theorising that Cossotto had tried to sabotage Callas’s performance by holding her own high notes longer and singing over Callas.  Read more…

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Alida Valli - actress

Scandal dogged star admired by Mussolini

The actress Alida Valli, who was once described by Benito Mussolini as the most beautiful woman in the world after Greta Garbo, died on this day in 2006 at the age of 84.  One of the biggest stars in Italian cinema in the late 1930s and 40s, when she starred in numerous romantic dramas and comedies, she was best known outside Italy for playing Anna Schmidt, the actress girlfriend of Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s Oscar-winning 1949 classic The Third Man.  She was cast in the role by the producer David O Selznick, who shared the Fascist leader’s appreciation for her looks, and who billed her simply as Valli, hoping it would create for her a Garboesque enigmatic allure.  Later, however, she complained that having one name made her “feel silly”.  Valli was born in Pola, Istria, then part of Italy (now Pula, Croatia), in 1921. She was christened Baroness Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein-Frauenberg, on account of a noble line to her paternal grandfather, Baron Luigi Altenburger, an Austrian-Italian from Trento and a descendant of the Counts d’Arco.  Her father was a journalist and professor. The family moved to Como when she was young.  Read more…

Vittorio Jano - motor racing engineer

Genius behind the success of Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Ferrari

Born on this day in 1891, Vittorio Jano was among the greatest engine designers in motor racing history.  Jano's engines powered cars for Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Ferrari during a career that spanned four decades, winning numerous Grand Prix races.  The legendary Argentinian Juan Manuel Fangio won the fourth of his five Formula One world championships in Jano's Lancia-Ferrari D50, in 1956.  Almost 30 years earlier, Jano's Alfa Romeo P2 won the very first Grand Prix world championship in 1925, while its successor, the P3, scored a staggering 46 race wins between 1932 and 1935.  He worked for Ferrari from the mid-50s onwards, where his greatest legacy was the V-8 Dino engine, which was the staple of Ferrari cars on the track and the road between 1966 and 2004.  Jano's parents were from Hungary, but settled in Italy, where his father worked as a mechanical engineer in Turin.  He was born in the small town of San Giorgio Canavese in Piedmont, about 35km (22 miles) north of Turin, and was originally called Viktor János.  Following his father into engineering, he joined Fiat at the age of just 20.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, by Philip Gossett

Divas and Scholars is a dazzling and beguiling account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with Philip Gossett’s personal experiences of triumphant—and even failed—performances and suffused with his towering and tonic passion for music. Writing as a fan, a musician, and a scholar, Gossett, one of  the world's leading authorities on the performance of Italian opera, brings colourfully to life the problems, and occasionally the scandals, that attend the production of some of our favourite operas.  Gossett begins by tracing the social history of 19th-century Italian theatres in order to explain the nature of the musical scores from which performers have long worked. He then illuminates the often hidden but crucial negotiations between opera scholars and opera conductors and performers: What does it mean to talk about performing from a critical edition? How does one determine what music to perform when multiple versions of an opera exist? What are the implications of omitting passages from an opera in a performance? In addition to vexing questions such as these, Gossett also tackles issues of ornamentation and transposition in vocal style, the matters of translation and adaptation, and even aspects of stage direction and set design. Gossett enlivens his history with reports from his own experiences with major opera companies at venues ranging from the Metropolitan and Santa Fe operas to the Rossini Opera Festival at Pesaro. 

Philip Gossett was an American musicologist and historian, and Robert W Reneker Distinguished Service Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society as best book on music of 2006.

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21 April

Alessandro Moreschi - the last castrato

Only singer of his type to make solo recordings

Alessandro Moreschi, the singer generally recognised as the last castrato, and the only castrato of whom solo recordings were made, died on this day in 1922 in his apartment in Rome.  Suffering from pneumonia, Moreschi passed away in his apartment in Via Plinio, just a few minutes walk from the Vatican, where he sang for 30 years as a member of the Sistine Chapel choir.  Castrati were male classical singers with voices that were the equivalent of the female soprano, mezzo-soprano or contralto, but which carried much greater power. As the name suggests, these vocal qualities in men were produced through castration, which had to take place before puberty to prevent normal development.  The procedure both impaired the development of the larynx so that the pre-pubescent vocal range was retained and altered the way in which the subject’s bones developed, which resulted often in unusually long limbs and, more significantly, very long ribs, which gave the castrato’s lungs unrivalled capacity.  It was a barbaric practice and many boys did not survive it, but the rewards for those who did were potentially huge.   Read more…

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The birth of Rome

City said to have been founded on April 21, 753 BC

Three days of celebrations in Rome mark the annual Natale di Roma Festival, which commemorates the founding of the city in 753BC.  The traditional celebrations take place largely in the large open public space of Circus Maximus, which hosts many historical re-enactments.  In past years a costumed parade has toured the city, featuring more than 2,000 gladiators, senators, vestal virgins and priestesses.  City museums traditionally offer free entry and many of the city’s restaurants have special Natale di Roma menus.  After dark, many public places are lit up, torches illuminate the Aventine Hill, and firework displays take place by the Tiber river.  According to legend, Romulus and his twin brother, Remus, founded Rome on the site where they were suckled by a she-wolf as orphaned infants.  They were said to be the sons of Rhea Silvia, the daughter of King Numitor of Alba Longa, a city located in the nearby Alban Hills southeast of what would become Rome.  Before they were born, Numitor was deposed by his younger brother Amulius, who murdered his existing son and forced Rhea to become a vestal virgin so that she would not give birth to rival claimants to his title.  Read more…

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Pietro Della Valle – composer and travel writer

Roman wrote unique accounts of 17th century Persia and India 

Composer, musicologist, and writer Pietro Della Valle, who travelled to the Holy Land, Persia and India during the Renaissance and wrote about his experiences in letters to a friend, died on this day in 1652 in Rome.  Della Valle was born in Rome into a wealthy and noble family and grew up to study Latin, Greek, classical mythology and the Bible. Another member of his family was Cardinal Andrea della Valle, after whom the Basilica Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome was named.  Having been disappointed in love, Pietro Della Valle vowed to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He sailed from Venice to Istanbul, where he lived for more than a year learning Turkish and Arabic.  He then travelled to Jerusalem, by way of Alexandria, Cairo, and Mount Sinai, where he visited the holy sites. He wrote regular letters about his travels to Mario Schipano, a professor of medicine in Naples, who later published them in three volumes.  Della Valle moved on to Damascus, went to Baghdad, where he married a Christian woman, Sitti Maani Gioenida, before moving on to Persia, now known as Iran. While in the Middle East, Della Valle created one of the first modern records of the location of ancient Babylon.  Read more…

Cosimo I de' Medici

The grand designs of a powerful archduke

The second duke of Florence and first grand duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I, died on this day in 1574 at the Villa di Castello near Florence.  Cosimo had proved to be both shrewd and unscrupulous, bringing Florence under his despotic control and increasing its territories.  He was the first to have the idea of uniting all public services in a single building. He commissioned the Uffizi - offices - a beautiful building that is now an art gallery in the centre of Florence.  Cosimo was the great-great-grandson of Lorenzo the Elder, whose brother was Cosimo the Elder but played no part in politics until he heard of the assassination of his distant cousin, Alessandro.  He immediately travelled to Florence and was elected head of the republic in 1537 with the approval of the city’s senate, assembly and council.  He also had the support of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The Emperor’s generals defeated an army raised against Cosimo, who then had the principal rebels beheaded in public in Florence.  Cosimo began to style himself as a duke and sidelined the other Government bodies in the city.  As the Emperor’s protégée, he remained safe from the hostility of Pope Paul II and King Francis I of France.  Read more…

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Silvana Mangano - actress

Star who married the producer Dino De Laurentiis

The actress Silvana Mangano, who was decried as a mere sex symbol and later hailed as a fine character actress during a quite restricted career, was born on this day in 1930 in Rome.  She found fame through Giuseppe De Santis’s neorealist film Bitter Rice, in which she played a female worker in the rice fields in the Po Valley who becomes involved with a petty criminal Walter, played by Vittorio Gassman.  Mangano’s character was a sensual, lustful young woman and the actress, a former beauty queen, carried it off so well that she was hailed by one critic as “Ingrid Bergmann with a Latin disposition” and likened also to the American glamour queen Rita Hayworth.  She went on to work with many of Italy's leading directors, including Alberto Lattuada, Vittorio De Sica, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luchino Visconti, but she made only 30 films, in part because she preferred to spend time with her family but also because Dino De Laurentiis, the producer of Bitter Rice who soon became her husband, controlled her career.  It is said that she was offered the important part of Maddalena in Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita but that De Laurentiis prevented her from taking it.  Read more…

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Gino Strada - surgeon and charity founder

‘Maestro of humanity’ built hospitals for war victims

The surgeon and founder of the medical and humanitarian charity Emergency, Gino Strada, was born on this day in 1948 in Sesto San Giovanni, a town that is now effectively a suburb of Milan.  Emergency has provided free healthcare to more than 11 million people in 19 different countries, including locations severely affected by conflict such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen.  It also operates in Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Sudan, Cambodia, Serbia, Nicaragua and Sri Lanka.  The hospitals set up by the organisation - some designed with the help of Strada’s friend, the world-renowned architect Renzo Piano - are built to the highest standards, with the aim of providing world-class treatments and after-care. Strada, who was said himself to have performed more than 30,000 operations on direct or indirect victims of conflict, insisted that the hospitals in which his European volunteers worked had to be places where “you would be happy to have one of your family members treated”.  When Strada died in 2021, among the many tributes paid to him was one by the then president of the European parliament, David Sassoli, who described him as the ‘maestro of humanity’. Read more…

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Book of the Day: The World of the Castrati: The History of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon, by Patrick Barbier

Patrick Barbier's entertaining and authoritative book was the first full study of the subject in the context of the Baroque period. Covering the lives of more than 60 singers from the end of the 16th century to the 19th, he blends history and anecdote as he examines their social origins and backgrounds, their training and debuts, their brilliant careers, their relationship with society and the Catholic Church, and their decline and death. The castrati became a legend that still fascinates us today. Thousands flocked to hear and see these singing hybrids - part man, part woman, part child - who portrayed virile heroes on the operatic stage, their soprano or contralto voices weirdly at variance with their clothes and bearing. The sole surviving scratchy recording tells us little of the extraordinary effect of those voices on their audiences - thrilling, unlike any sound produced by the normal human voice.  Illustrated with photographs and engravings, The World of the Castrati ranges from the glories of patronage and adulation to the darker side of a fashion that exploited the sons of poor families, denied them their manhood and left them, when they were old, to decline into poverty and loneliness. It is a story that will intrigue opera-lovers and general readers alike, superbly told by a writer who has researched his subject with the thoroughness of a true enthusiast

Patrick Barbier is a music historian and writer and a professor at the Catholic University of the West in Angers, western France.

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