6 October

NEW - Giuseppe Cesare Abba – writer and soldier

Patriotic revolutionary took notes during historic expedition with Garibaldi

Giuseppe Cesare Abba, an Italian writer who volunteered to fight alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi during his campaign to unify Italy, was born on this day in 1836 in Cairo Montenotte in Liguria, which was then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia.  Abba took part in most of the battles that led to the dissolution of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and he made notes during the 1860 campaign.  His major work, Noterelle d’Uno dei Mille was published in 1880, thanks to a recommendation by Giosuè Carducci, the Italian writer and poet who won a Nobel prize in Literature.  While attending a college in Liguria, Abba became enthusiastic about the work of patriotic romantic poets and writers such as Ugo Foscolo, Giovanni Prati, and Aleardo Aleardi. He went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Genoa, but left in 1859 to voluntarily enrol in a cavalry regiment in Pinerolo. Read more…

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The October Martyrs of Lanciano

Heroic group of partisans earned Gold Medal for Valour

The town of Lanciano in Abruzzo today and every October 6 remembers the 23 citizens killed by German troops on this day in 1943 after one of the most celebrated revolts of World War Two against the occupying Nazi forces.  The group became known as the Martiri ottobrini di Lanciano - the October Martyrs of Lanciano. Their deeds were recognised by the postwar Italian government with the award - to all the citizens of the town - of the Gold Medal for Military Valour, and there are a number of monuments in the town that commemorate the event and the participants.  As well as 11 partisan resistance fighters, another 12 Lancianese who fought alongside them were killed by the Germans. The leader of the partigiani group, a 28-year-old former soldier named Trentino La Barba, was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal for Valour in his own right. Read more…

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Maria Bertilla Boscardin – wartime nurse

Brave nun was prepared to die caring for others

Maria Bertilla Boscardin, a nun who was canonised for her devoted nursing of sick children and air raid victims in the First World War, was born on this day in 1888 in Brendola, a small town in the Veneto.  She was beatified by Pope Pius XII in 1952, just 30 years after she died, and made a saint by Pope John XXIII nine years later.  It was one of the quicker canonisations of modern history. Sometimes many decades or even hundreds of years pass before a person’s life is recognised with sainthood.  Boscardin’s came so swiftly that relatives and some of the patients she cared for were present at her canonisation ceremony. Indeed, her father, Angelo, was asked to provide testimony during the beatification process.  Born into a peasant family, who knew her as Annette, her life in Brendola, which is about 15km (9 miles) southwest of Vicenza, was tough.  Read more…

Ottavio Bianchi - football coach

The northerner who steered Napoli to first scudetto

Ottavio Bianchi, the coach who guided Napoli to their first Serie A title in the Italian football championship, was born on this day in 1943 in the northern Italian city of Brescia.  Napoli, who had been runners-up four times in Italy's elite league, broke their duck by winning the scudetto in the 1986-87 season, when Bianchi built his side around the forward line consisting initially of the World Cup-winning Argentina star Diego Maradona, the Italy strikers Bruno Giordano and Andrea Carnevale.  After the arrival of the Brazilian forward Careca to partner Maradona and Giordano, the trio became collectively known as MaGiCa.  Bianchi’s team began the 1986-87 season with a 13-match unbeaten run. It came to an end with an away defeat against Fiorentina but Napoli lost only two more matches all season, winning the title by three points from Juventus. Read more…

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Bruno Sammartino - wrestling champion

How a sickly kid from Abruzzo became king of the ring

Bruno Sammartino, who found fame as a professional wrestler in the United States, was born on this day in 1935 in Pizzoferrato, a village in the province of Chieti in the Abruzzo region.  He died in 2018 at the age of 82, having spent the last years of his life in Ross Township in Pennsylvania, about six miles north of the city of Pittsburgh.  Sammartino held the title of world heavyweight champion under the banner of the World Wide Wrestling Federation - now known as World Wrestling Entertainment - for more than 11 years in two reigns. The first of those, spanning seven years, eight months and one day, is the longest any individual has held the title continuously since it was first contested in 1963.  At his peak in the ring, Sammartino weighed in at 265lbs (120kg), yet it was something of a miracle that he survived his childhood.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Garibaldi and the Thousand, May 1860 (Garibaldi Trilogy Book 2), by George Macaulay Trevelyan 

Giuseppe Garibaldi, hero of the Italian Risorgimento, is one of history’s greatest, most charismatic leaders.  This is the second volume in British historian GM Trevelyan’s epic trilogy covering his life and career, originally published in 1909. Following his flight from Rome after the fall of the Roman Republic in 1849, in Garibaldi and the Thousand, May 1860 we find Garibaldi wandering in exile, mourning the death of his beloved wife Anita. Soon he is recalled by Italian King Victor Emmanuel and Count Cavour of Sicily, both in favour of Italian unification. They persuade him to lead the campaign against the Austrian Empire. In Sicily he forms the “thousand” - an army of doctors, dentists, lawyers and bankers who fought a Neapolitan garrison of 20,000. The book ends with the triumphant capture of Palermo, which marked the first step in the liberation of Sicily and the establishing of Italian unity.  The Garibaldi Trilogy is considered GM Trevelyan’s finest work and was the first study of the Italian Risorgimento in the English language. 

GM Trevelyan was an English historian whose work, written for the general reader as much as for the history student. The third son of Sir George Otto Trevelyan, he was educated at Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He became Regius Professor of modern history at Cambridge in 1927 and master of Trinity College in 1940, retiring in 1951. 

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Giuseppe Cesare Abba – writer and soldier

Patriotic revolutionary took notes during historic expedition with Garibaldi

Abba as a young man in the
uniform of Garibaldi's army

Giuseppe Cesare Abba, an Italian writer who volunteered to fight alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi during his campaign to unify Italy, was born on this day in 1836 in Cairo Montenotte in Liguria, which was then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia.

Abba took part in most of the battles that led to the dissolution of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and he made notes during the 1860 campaign. 

His major work, Noterelle d’Uno dei Mille was published in 1880, thanks to a recommendation by Giosuè Carducci, the Italian writer and poet who won a Nobel prize in Literature.

While attending a college in Liguria, Abba became enthusiastic about the work of patriotic romantic poets and writers such as Ugo Foscolo, Giovanni Prati, and Aleardo Aleardi. He went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Genoa, but left in 1859 to voluntarily enrol in a cavalry regiment in Pinerolo, a comune - municipality - of Turin. 

The following year he moved to Parma where he joined up with Garibaldi and his volunteers.

The literary career he was to follow later was inspired by his memories of his revolutionary experiences during the campaign to unite Italy.

He left Liguria for Sicily, where he had a baptism of fire fighting in the Battle of Calatafimi.  He also played his part in the taking of Palermo and earned himself an honourable mention in the Battle of Volturno.

Afterwards, he retired to live as a civilian in Pisa and then later moved back to his native town in Liguria, where he was elected as mayor.

Abba’s first attempt at writing was a romantic poem in five canti under the title, Arrigo. Then, as a keen follower of the novelist Alessandro Manzoni, he embarked on an historical novel, Le rive della Bormida nel 1794 - The Banks of the Bormida in 1794 - which used ideas from the notes he had taken during the 1860 Spedizione dei Mille - the Expedition of the Thousand.

Abba pictured around the time his
Notorelle were published

In 1880, he used the same notes to produce Noterelle di Uno dei Mille, edite dopo vent’anni - Notes by One of the Thousand, 20 Years Later. It was only in 1891 that this work was given its final title, Da Quarto al Volturno: noterelle d’uno dei mille - From Quarto to Volturno: Notes by One of the Thousand.

Yet Abba’s magnum opus may never have been published had it not been for the support of Giosuè Carducci. One of Abba’s former revolutionary compatriots had urged him to send his manuscript to Carducci who was considering writing a book about the life of Garibaldi and had been encouraging survivors of the campaign to send him their historical testimonies.

After Carducci had read Abba’s work, he passed it on to the publishers, Zanichelli, because he regarded it so highly. He also told Abba that he might not now go ahead with his own biography of the Italian hero, Garibaldi.

Abba became famous after the publication of his Noterelle. He went on to write a Life of Nino Bixio, the soldier who helped to organise Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand, and took part in the capture of Rome in 1870, which completed the unification process for Italy.

He also wrote a History of the Thousand and other works based on his experiences with Garibaldi, and some poetry and short stories. But none of his other books became as popular as his Noterelle.

In later life, he was appointed first teacher at the secondary school in Faenza in Emilia-Romagna and principal of the technological institute of Brescia in Lombardy. 

Abba was nominated as a senator in June 1910, but he died in Brescia in November 1910 at the age of 72 and was laid to rest in the cemetery at Cairo Montenotte. 

A commemorative plaque to Abba can be seen on a wall of the Palazzo Martinengo Colleoni di Pianezza in Corso Matteotti in Brescia, while the Italian destroyer Giuseppe Cesare Abba was named in his honour.

Porta Soprana, one of the ancient
gateways into Cairo Montenotte

Travel tip:

Cairo Montenotte, where Abba was born and is buried, is a comune in the province of Savona in Liguria, located about 50km (31 miles) west of Genoa and 20km (12 miles) northwest of Savona.  Archaeological finds indicate that Cairo Montenotte - which now has a population of around 12,500 - was inhabited in the Neolithic age and was conquered by the Romans more than 100 years before the birth of Christ. Roman artefacts and the remains of a villa from the Imperial period have been found there. The name Cairo is thought to have come from the ancient Ligurian word Carium, which is used to refer to the comune in a document from the tenth century. There is a legend that Francis of Assisi went through the town in the 13th century on his way to Spain but there is no evidence for this. King Victor Emmanuel II authorised Cairo to add Montenotte to its name in memory of a 1796 battle fought there, with a royal decree issued in 1863. Among the many interesting sites in the comune are a ruined castle and Porta Soprana, with its 15th century quadrangular tower.

Find accommodation in Cairo Montenotte with Expedia

Piazza della Loggia, the elegant square at the
heart of the beautiful Lombardy city of Brescia

Travel tip:

Brescia, where Abba taught in later life and died in 1910, is the second city in Lombardy, after Milan, and has Roman remains and well-preserved Renaissance buildings.  Brescia became a Roman colony before the birth of Christ and you can still see remains from the forum, theatre, and a temple. The town was fought over by different rulers in the middle ages but came under the protection of Venice in the 15th century. There is a distinct Venetian influence in the architecture of the Piazza della Loggia, an elegant square in the centre of the town, which has a clock tower similar to the one in Saint Mark’s square in Venice. Next to the 17th century Duomo is an older cathedral, the unusually shaped Duomo Vecchio, also known as la Rotonda, which is open to the public. The Santa Giulia Museo covers more than 3,000 years of Brescia’s history, housed within the Benedictine Nunnery of San Salvatore and Santa Giulia in Via Musei. The nunnery was built over a Roman residential quarter, but some of the houses, with their original mosaics and frescoes, have now been excavated and can be seen by visitors looking round the museum.

Brescia hotels from Hotels.com

More reading:

The Expedition of the Thousand and what it achieved

Victory at the Battle of Calatafimi

Nino Bixio - the patriotic general who helped unite Italy

Also on this day:

1888: The birth of wartime nurse Saint Maria Bertilla Boscardin

1935: The birth of champion wrestler Bruno Sammartino

1943: The birth of football coach Ottavio Bianchi

1943: The massacre of civilians in Lanciano, Abruzzo

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5 October

Francesco Guardi - painter

Artist evoked image of republic’s final years

One of the last great artists of the Venetian school, Francesco Lazzaro Guardi, was born on this day in 1712 in Venice.  Guardi’s wonderful scenes of crowds, festivals, regattas and concerts in Venice have kept the heyday of the republic alive for future generations to enjoy in art galleries all over the world.  The artist was born into a family of nobility from Trentino, who lived in a house in the Cannaregio district of Venice.  Guardi’s father and brothers were also painters and his sister, Maria Cecilia, married the great Venetian artist, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.  Guardi’s first known works were painted in the 1730s in Vigo Anuania in Trentino, where he was working alongside his older brother, Gian Antonio.  The first work to be signed by Guardi is the picture Saint Adoring the Eucharist, which was painted in about 1739.  Read more…

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Nicola Rizzoli - football referee

Third Italian to take charge of World Cup Final

The football referee Nicola Rizzoli, who in 2014 became the third Italian to take charge of a men’s World Cup Final, was born on this day in 1971 in Mirandola, a town in Emilia-Romagna about 35km (22 miles) north of Modena.  Rizzoli, who had refereed the UEFA Champions League Final in 2013, followed Sergio Gonella (1978) and Pierluigi Collina (2002) in being handed the ultimate honour for football officials.  It was his responsibility to officiate in the match between Germany and Argentina in the Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro to decide the winners of the 2014 tournament, hosted by Brazil.  At the age of 42, he was the same age as Collina had been when he refereed the Brazil-Germany final in 2002, but three years younger than Gonella was when given charge of hosts Argentina against the Netherlands in 1978.  Read more…

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Mary of Modena – Queen of England

Catholic wife of James II greeted with suspicion

Maria Beatrice Anna Margherita Isabella d'Este, who would become known in England as Mary of Modena when she served as queen consort for almost four years in the 17th century, was born on this day in 1658.  The daughter of Alfonso IV, Duke of Modena, the princess, descended from the Bourbon royal family of France and the Medici family of Italy, was born in the Ducal Palace in Modena. Her mother, Laura Martinozzi, from Fano in the Marche, hailed from a noble Roman family.  Tall, elegant and highly educated – she was fluent in French as well as Italian and had a good knowledge of Latin – Maria Beatrice was sought after as a bride for James, Duke of York, heir to Charles II.  She was picked as a suitable prospective bride for his Catholic master by Lord Peterborough, one of the Duke’s closest aides. Read more…

Andrea De Cesaris - racing driver

Career defined by unwanted record

The racing driver Andrea De Cesaris, who competed in 15 consecutive Formula One seasons between 1980 and 1994, died on this day in 2014 as a result of injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident.  De Cesaris lost control of his Suzuki motorcycle on Rome’s orbital motorway, the Grande Raccordo Anulare, and collided with a guard rail.  The Rome-born driver, the son of a tobacco merchant, retired from competition with the unwanted record of having never won a race in 208 Formula One starts, the most by any driver without a victory to his name in the sport’s history.  He needed no second invitation to hit the accelerator on the track but his daring often veered towards the wild and erratic and had a reputation for being accident prone, putting not only himself but other drivers at risk.  He also held the record for the most non-finishes in a single, 16-race season, at 14. Read more…

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Alberto Sughi - painter

20th century artist who was unwitting victim of plagiarism

The artist Alberto Sughi, an acclaimed  20th century painter whose style was defined as “existential realism”, was born on this day in 1928 in Cesena in Emilia-Romagna.  Sughi was regarded as one of the greatest artists of his generation but is often remembered mainly for his unwitting part in a famous case of plagiarism.  It happened in 2006 when a Japanese painter, Yoshihiko Wada, was awarded the prestigious Art Encouragement Prize, the Japanese equivalent of the Turner Prize, for a series of paintings depicting urban life in Italy - one of Sughi’s specialities.  A month after the award was announced in March of that year, the Japan Artists Association and Agency for Cultural Affairs received an anonymous tip-off questioning the authenticity of Wada's work, which then sparked an investigation into possible plagiarism.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Venice: City of Pictures, by Martin Gayford

Venice was a major centre of art in the Renaissance: the city where the medium of oil on canvas became the norm. Nowhere else has been depicted by so many great painters in so many diverse styles and moods. Venetian views were a speciality of native artists such as Canaletto and Guardi, but the city has also been represented by outsiders: J M W Turner, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Howard Hodgkin, and many more. Then there are those who came to look at and write about art. The reactions of Henry James, George Eliot, Richard Wagner and others enrich this tale. Nor is the story over. Since the advent of the Venice Biennale in the 1890s, and the arrival of Peggy Guggenheim in the late 1940s, the city has become a shop window for the contemporary art of the whole world, and it remains the site of important artistic events.  In this elegant volume, Gayford takes us on a visual journey through the city’s past five centuries. A Sunday Times Art Book of the Year, Venice: City of Pictures is a compelling journey through five centuries of the city known as ‘La Serenissima’ – a perfect companion for both lovers of Venice and lovers of its art.

Martin Gayford is a writer and art critic. His books include Man with a Blue Scarf (in which he recounts the experience of being painted by Lucian Freud); Modernists and Mavericks; Spring Cannot be Cancelled and A History of Pictures, both with David Hockney; Shaping the World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now, with Antony Gormley; and Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939–1954, with David Dawson.

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4 October

The Gregorian Calendar

Why a 16th century Pope decreed that 10 days would not happen

The Gregorian Calendar, which is used today by every country in the world with just four exceptions, was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII on this day in 1582.  The calendar replaced the Julian calendar, which had been implemented by Julius Caesar in 46 BC but which was based on a miscalculation of the length of the solar year and had gradually fallen out of sync with the seasons.  The Catholic Church wanted to make the change because the actual spring equinox - one of the two days in each year when the sun appears directly above the equator - was drifting further away from the ecclesiastical date of the equinox, which in turn determines the date of Easter.  In Christian tradition, Easter marks the resurrection of Jesus three days after his crucifixion, which historical evidence suggests occurred around the time of the spring equinox, nominally dated as March 21. Read more…

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Francesco Solimena - painter

Neapolitan artist who influenced a generation

Francesco Solimena, a prolific painter in the Baroque style who became one of the wealthiest and most influential artists in Europe, was born on this day in 1657 in Canale di Sereno, a village in Campania about 14km (9 miles) southeast of Avellino.  He spent most of his working life in Naples yet his fame spread far beyond and his work was in such demand among his wealthy patrons, including Prince Eugene of Savoy, Louis XIV of France and Pope Benedict XIII, that he acquired a considerable fortune, was given the title of baron and lived in a palace.  His workshop became effectively an academy, at the heart of the Naples cultural scene. Among many who trained there were the leading painters Francesco de Mura, Giuseppe Bonito, Corrado Giaquinto and Sebastiano Conca.  The Scottish portraitist Allan Ramsay was a pupil in his studio in around 1737-38.  Read more…

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi – artist

Genius who put 18th century Rome on the map

Draftsman, printmaker and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi was born on this day in 1720 in Mogliano Veneto near Treviso in the Veneto.  He became famous for his large prints depicting the buildings of Rome, which stimulated interest in Rome and inspired the neoclassical movement in art in the 18th century.  Piranesi went to Rome to work as a draftsman for the Venetian ambassador when he was 20. There he studied with some of the leading printmakers of the day.  He developed his own, original etching technique, producing rich textures and bold contrasts of light and shadow by means of intricate, repeated bitings of the copperplate.  Among his finest early prints are the Prisons - Carceri - imaginary scenes depicting ancient Roman ruins, which are converted into fantastic dungeons filled with scaffolding and instruments of torture.  Read more…

Ignazio Boschetto - tenor

Talented singer is known for being the funny guy in Il Volo

Ignazio Boschetto, a singer in the award-winning pop and opera trio Il Volo, was born on this day in 1994 in Bologna in the region of Emilia-Romagna.  His Sicilian parents, Vito Boschetto and Caterina Licari, took him back to live in Sicily and he grew up in Marsala in the province of Trapani in the most western part of Sicily.  He has said in interviews that from being about three years old he used to sing operatic arias alone in his room, such as La donna e mobile from Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi, much to the surprise of his parents.  Ignazio could be classed as a lyric tenor, considering the timbre of his voice, which is warm and soft, but strong enough to sing over an orchestra. A complete artist, Ignazio also plays the piano, guitar and drums.  When he was 12 he started to take part in festivals and competitions.  Read more…

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Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi

Lamps light up Assisi in memory of saint

The city of Assisi in Umbria is today celebrating the Feast Day - la festa - of their famous Saint, Francis - Francesco -  who is one of the most venerated religious figures in history.  It is the most important festival in the Franciscan calendar as it commemorates Saint Francis’s transition from this life to the afterlife.  For two days Assisi is illuminated by lamps burning consecrated oil. Special services are held in the Basilica Papale di San Francesco and the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli.  The feast day is also celebrated in other churches all over the world.  Saint Francis was born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone in about 1181 in Assisi but he was informally known as Francesco by his family.  A theory is that his father, Pietro di Bernardone, a silk merchant, decided to call his new son Francesco - the Frenchman - because he had been on business in France at the time of the birth.   Read more…

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Bernardino Ramazzini - physician

Pioneer in knowledge of occupational diseases, cancer and malaria

The physician Bernardino Ramazzini, often described as the “father of occupational medicine” and responsible also for pioneering work in the study of cancer and the treatment of malaria, was born in Carpi in Emilia-Romagna on this day in 1633.  Ramazzini’s tour de force, which he completed at the age of 67, was his book De Morbis Artificum Diatriba - Discourse of the Diseases of Workers - which came to be regarded as a seminal work in his field, the lessons from which still influence the prevention and treatment of occupational diseases today.  A student at the University of Parma, Ramazzini was appointed chair of theory of medicine at the University of Modena in 1682 and professor of medicine at the University of Padua from 1700 until his death in 1714.  It was while he was in Parma that he began to take an interest in diseases suffered by workers. Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Calendar: The 5000 Year Struggle To Align The Clock and the Heavens, and What Happened To The Missing Ten Days, by David Ewing Duncan

Measuring the daily and yearly cycle of the cosmos has never been entirely straightforward. The year 2000 was alternatively the year 2544 (Buddhist), 6236 (Ancient Egyptian), 5761 (Jewish) or simply the year of the Dragon (Chinese). The story of the creation of the Western calendar is a story of emperors and popes, mathematicians and monks, and the growth of scientific calculation to the point where, bizarrely, our measurement of time by atomic pulses is now more accurate than Time itself: the Earth is an elderly lady and slightly eccentric – she loses half a second a century. Days have been invented (Julius Caesar needed an extra 80 days in 46BC), lost (Pope Gregory XIII ditched ten days in 1582) and moved (because Julius Caesar had thirty-one in his month, Augustus determined that he should have the same, so he pinched one from February. The Calendar links politics and religion, astronomy and mathematics, Cleopatra and Stephen Hawking. It was first published as millions of computer users still wondered what would happen after December 31, 1999…

David Ewing Duncan is a writer and traveller. The author of three previous books, this is his first UK publication. He is also the curator of the Smithsonian exhibition of The Calendar.

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