Rodolfo Siviero - art historian and secret agent

Life’s work earned nickname ‘the 007 of art’

Rodolfo Siviero spent his entire career
hunting down plundered works of art

Rodolfo Siviero, an Italian intelligence officer who recovered hundreds of priceless works of art stolen from Italy by the Nazis in World War Two, was born on this day in 1911 in Guardistallo, a village just inland from the Tuscan coast about 50km (30 miles) south of Pisa.

Siviero spent the whole of his adult life working for Italian military intelligence, first under the Fascist regime and then in the permanent employ of postwar Italian governments until his death in 1983.

During that time, effectively his sole mission was to track down and repatriate works of art taken from Italy during World War Two, many of which had been destined for a museum of the German dictator Adolf Hitler planned to open in Linz, or to the private collection of his long-time ally and Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Göring.

He achieved remarkable success, not only in bringing looted works back to Italy, but also in establishing a country’s right to ask for the return even of works that were previously seen as having been acquired legitimately by the aggressor in a conflict.

In all, Siviero is thought to have recovered more than 3,000 works of art, including masterpieces by Fra Angelico, Titian, Tintoretto, Masaccio and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, as well as the so-called Lancellotti Discobulus, an Italian-owned copy by an unknown sculptor of the ancient Greek original by Myron that the Fascist Italian government had been effectively coerced into selling to the Nazis.

Siviero’s association with the world of the arts began after his father’s career as a Carabinieri officer led the family to move to Florence in 1924. With ambitions to become an art critic, Siviero enrolled at the University of Florence.

In the 1930s, convinced that only a totalitarian regime could solve Italy’s problems as a country, he became a Fascist and at the same time joined the Servizio Informazioni Militare, Italy's secret service. 

In 1937, even though by this time Italy and Germany were allies, Siviero was sent by the SIM to spy on the Nazi regime in Berlin. His cover was that he was studying the history of art on a scholarship from the University of Florence. His mission ended in 1938 when Germany expelled him as an ‘undesirable person’ for reasons that remain unexplained.

German soldiers in Rome posing with a painting by
Giovanni Paolo Panini stolen from a Naples museum

At the same time, Siviero’s views on Italy’s Fascists began to change. He was dismayed by Benito Mussolini’s apparent desire to align Italy’s policies with those of the Nazis, becoming particularly fearful for the future of Italy’s Jews after the introduction of Mussolini’s race laws in 1938.

When the armistice between Italy and the Allies was announced in 1943, he switched sides, becoming an undercover operative for the anti-Fascist front, supplying intelligence for the partisans and monitoring the activities of the Kunstschutz, the body originally set up to protect cultural heritage during the war years but was now suspected of co-ordinating the large-scale shipping of artworks from Italy to Germany under Nazi direction.

During this time, Siviero was based at the Jewish art historian Giorgio Castelfranco's house on the Lungarno Serristori in Florence, which today houses the Casa Siviero museum. At one point, he was imprisoned and tortured by Fascist militias but stood firm against their interrogation. Happily, he escaped with the help of Fascist officials working undercover for the Allies.

The Servizio Informazioni Militare was disbanded in 1944 but Siviero continued to work with the Allies and for the new Armed Forces Intelligence Service established in 1949. In the meantime, postwar prime minister Alcide De Gasperi in 1946 appointed him "minister plenipotentiary".

Tintoretto's Leda and the Swan, which Siviero 
repatriated despite it having been sold to Germany

It was in this role that he undertook a diplomatic mission to the Allied military government of Germany, in which role he successfully lobbied for Article 77 of the Peace Treaty signed by Italy and the Allies after the 1943 armistice to be revised. Siviero argued that artworks acquired by the Nazis, even through ‘legitimate’ purchase, from the point at which they became allies with Italy in 1937 should be returned to Italy, rather than simply those taken after the armistice.

This enabled him to repatriate the Lancellotti Discobolus - a statue of a discus-throwing athlete wanted by Hitler himself - along with the Leda and the Swan by Tintoretto, the Equestrian Portrait of Giovanni Carlo Doria by Rubens, and 36 other works, all ‘sold’ to Germany between 1937 to 1943 with the complicity of the Mussolini’s regime.  The sale of the Discobolus was agreed only after the direct intervention of Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and his Foreign Minister.

Other major works saved or recovered by Siviero included Fra Angelico’s Annunciation of San Giovanni Valdarno, which with the help of two monks he hid in the convent of Piazza Savonarola in Florence, and the Danae by Titian, which was taken from the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples and hidden in the Abbey of Monte Cassino, where the Apollo from the ruins of Pompeii was also secreted. 

Siviero recovered more than 200 paintings taken from the Uffizi and other Florence museums and hidden in a castle in South Tyrol, and tracked down two paintings of The Labours of Hercules by Antonio del Pollaiuolo to an address in Los Angeles, where they had been smuggled by two German soldiers.

He also saved several modern paintings by Giorgio De Chirico, founder of the Scuola Metafisica, that had been taken from his villa in Fiesole, outside Florence, after he and his wife - a Russian Jew - had gone into hiding.

Siviero continued recovering missing paintings and sculptures for the remainder of his life, acquiring the ‘007 of art’ nickname in the 1960s, after the first James Bond films appeared on cinema screens. In the 1970s, he became president of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence.

He died from cancer in the Tuscan capital in October 1983, his body laid to rest in the Chapel of Painters in the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata. In his will, he left his house and all its contents to the Regione Toscana, which turned it into a museum dedicated to him eight years after his death.

Guardistallo is full of pretty
narrow stone streets

Travel tip

Guardistallo, where Rodolfo Siviero was born, is a picturesque hilltop village in Tuscany known for its medieval origins, charming stone streets, and sweeping views over the nearby coastline. Originally built around a Lombard castle in the seventh century, it later became part of the Republic of Pisa and then Florence, flourishing after agrarian reforms in the 18th century created a new class of wealthy landowners. Pastel-painted houses and stone stairways line the narrow streets of Guardistallo, which retains a medieval layout. The village, which has a population of around 1,200, is home to the historic Teatro Marchionneschi, a beautiful 19th-century theatre built by the wealthy Marchionneschi family. Opened in 1883, it eventually fell into disuse, but was reopened in 1990 following extensive restoration and today hosts theatre performances, concerts, and special events. Siviero's birthplace in Via dell'Erbaio is marked with a plaque.

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The Basilica della Santissima Annunziata in
Florence, where Siviero was laid to rest

Travel tip:

The Basilica della Santissima Annunziata, where Rodolfo Siviero is buried, is in the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata in the San Marco district of Florence. Considered the mother church of the Servite Order, it is located at the northeastern side of the square. The facade of the church is by the architect Giovanni Battista Caccini, added in 1601 to imitate the Renaissance-style loggia of Filippo Brunelleschi's facade of the Foundling Hospital, which defines the eastern side of the piazza. The main part of the church, founded in 1250, was rebuilt by Michelozzo between 1444 and 1481. Art works in the church include frescoes by Volterrano and Andrea del Sarto. The Cappella della Madonna del Soccorso was designed by the sculptor Giambologna for his own tomb and includes a large, bronze Crucifix, showing the dead Christ with his head reclining and his eyes closed. Other notable Florentines buried in the basilica include painter Jacopo Carucci da Pontormo, the architect Caccini’s brother, Giulio, a composer, and the musician Bernardo Pisano, thought to have composed the first madrigal.  By tradition, newly-wed couples visit the church to present a bouquet of flowers to a painting of the Virgin by a 13th century monk, where they pray for a long and fruitful marriage.

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More reading:

Umberto Baldini, the art restorer who saved hundreds of works damaged by Arno floods

Why family ties could not save Galeazzo Ciano from Mussolini’s wrath

The armistice that ended Italy’s war with the Allies

Also on this day:

1639: The birth of composer Domenico Sarro

1836: The birth of canning pioneer Francesco Cirio

1897: The birth of supercentenarian war veteran Lazzaro Ponticelli

1930: The birth of electronics engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto

Vigilia di Natale - Christmas Eve

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23 December

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa – writer

Sicilian prince whose novel achieved recognition after his death

The Sicilian writer, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, was born on this day in 1896 in Palermo in Sicily.  He became the last Prince of Lampedusa after the death of his father and his only novel, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), was published in 1958 after his death, soon becoming recognised as a great work of Italian literature.  The novel, which is set in his native Sicily during the Risorgimento, won the Strega Prize in 1959 for him posthumously.  After starting to study jurisprudence at university in Rome he was drafted into the army in 1915.  He fought in the battle of Caporetto and was taken prisoner by The Austro-Hungarian army. He was held in a prisoner of war camp for a while in Hungary but managed to escape and return to Italy.  Giuseppe inherited his father’s title in 1934 and eventually settled down to write his novel. Read more…

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Dino Risi – film director

Film comedy director helped launch career of Sophia Loren

The director Dino Risi, who was regarded as one of the masters of Italian film comedy, was born on this day in 1916 in Milan.  He had a string of hits in the 1950s and 1960s and gave future stars Sophia Loren, Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman opportunities early in their careers.  Risi’s older brother, Fernando, was a cinematographer and his younger brother, Nelo, was a director and writer.  He started his career as an assistant to Mario Soldati and Alberto Lattuada and then began directing his own films.  One of Risi’s early successes was the 1951 comedy, Vacation with a Gangster, in which he cast the 12-year-old actor Mario Girotti, who later became well known under the name Terence Hill.  His 1966 film, Treasure of San Gennaro, was entered into the 5th Moscow International Film Festival where it won a silver prize.  Read more…

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Michele Novaro - composer

Patriot who wrote music for Italian national anthem

The composer and singer Michele Novaro, who wrote the music that accompanies Goffredo Mameli’s words in Italy’s national anthem, was born on this day in 1818 in Genoa.  While not as actively involved in the Risorgimento movement as Mameli, who took part in various insurrections and died fighting alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi in the battle for Italian independence, Novaro was a patriot nonetheless.  A committed liberal in his politics, he was a supporter of the cause of independence and composed the music for several patriotic songs in addition to Mameli’s Il canto degli Italiani - The Song of the Italians - which is also known as Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) and L’inno di Mameli (Mameli’s hymn). The oldest of five children, Novaro was born into a theatrical background. His father, Gerolamo, was a stagehand at the Teatro Carlo Felice, the Genoa opera house.  Read more…

Giovanni Battista Crespi - Baroque artist

Religious painter portrayed saints expressing human emotions

Painter, sculptor and architect Giovanni Battista Crespi was born on this day in 1573 in Romagnano Sesia in the Piedmont region of Italy.  His father was the painter Raffaele Crespi, who eventually moved his family to live in Cerano near Novara. When Giovanni Battista Crespi became one of the chief Lombardy artists of the early 17th century, he was often referred to as Il Cerano.  Reflecting the Counter Reformation pious mood of the time, many of his paintings focused on mysteries and mystical episodes in the lives of the saints, capturing their emotions.  Crespi spent some time in Rome, where he formed a friendship with the Milanese cardinal, Federico Borromeo, who became his patron. Together, they went to Milan, which was under the inspiration of the cardinal’s uncle, Charles Borromeo, and was a centre for the fervent spiritual revival in art.  Read more…

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Michele Alboreto - racing driver

Last Italian to go close to Formula One title 

No Italian motor racing driver has won the Formula One world championship since 1953 but Michele Alboreto, who was born on this day in 1956, went as close as anyone.  Racing for Ferrari, Alboreto finished runner-up in 1985, beaten by just 20 points by Alain Prost. Riccardo Patrese finished second in 1992 but the gap between him and champion Nigel Mansell was a massive 52 points after the British driver won nine Grand Prix victories to Patrese's one.  Patrese was never even in the hunt in 1992 after Mansell began the season with five straight wins. By contrast, Alboreto's 1985 duel with Prost could have gone either way until well into the second half of the campaign. Alboreto scored two race wins and four second places to lead by five points after winning race nine of the 16-race series in Germany.  Read more…

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Carla Bruni - former First Lady of France

Ex-model and singer who married Nicolas Sarkozy

Carla Bruni, the model and singer who became the wife of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, was born on this day in 1967 in Turin.  She and Sarkozy were married in February 2008, just three months after they met at a dinner party. Sarkozy, who was in office from May 2007 until May 2012, had recently divorced his second wife.  Previously, Bruni had spent 10 years as a model, treading the catwalk for some of the biggest designers and fashion houses in Europe and establishing herself as one of the top 20 earners in the modelling world.  After retiring from the modelling world, she enjoyed considerable success as a songwriter and then as a singer. Music remains a passion; to date, her record sales stand at more than five million.  Born Carla Gilberta Bruni Tedeschi, she is legally the daughter of Italian concert pianist Marisa Borini and industrialist and classical composer Alberto Bruni Tedeschi.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's classic work is both a funny and tragic depiction of Sicily in the 1860s, which was united with the rest of Italy, and the story of the greatness and fall of a noble family. A great story about a country and a family in change. The Prince of Salina, or the Leopard, as he is also called, is a powerful man in Sicily. In the family's coat of arms, the strong predator is the leopard - and so is the prince. But in the revolutionary year of 1860, the decline of the Sicilian nobility has begun, and the old aristocracy fears for its privileges and instinctively supports King Ferdinando against Garibaldi's revolutionary forces. However, there are also internal disputes in the old families, and Don Fabrizio from the proud Salino family does not understand why his beloved nephew, Tancredi, is fighting on the opposite side. A review in the Sunday Times said of The Leopard: 'No novel is perfect, but this small, wonderfully atmospheric and immensely poignant story...comes very close'.

Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa, known as Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, was a Sicilian writer, as well as the last generation of Tomasi Princes of Lampedusa before the family's and their titles' extinction. Il Gattorpardo was his only novel. 

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22 December

The Totonero betting scandal

Match-fixing scheme saw players banned and clubs relegated

Italian football fans learned the full list of punishments handed down as a result of the Totonero match-fixing scandal on this day in 1980. Two Serie A clubs - AC Milan and Lazio - were relegated to Serie B. Three others in Serie A and two in Serie B were handed a penalty in the form of a five-point deduction in their respective league tables.  Of 20 players banned, some indefinitely, by the Italian Football Federation (FIGC), half had represented the Italy national team. The most famous were Paolo Rossi, who would go on to be part of the Azzurri team that won the World Cup in Spain in 1982, and Enrico Albertosi, who had been goalkeeper in the Italian team that won the European championships in 1968.   Rossi, who scored six goals in Spain ‘82, would have missed the tournament had his sentence not been reduced, somewhat controversially, from three years to two.  Read more…

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Alessandro Bonvicino – Renaissance painter

Talented artist from Brescia acclaimed for sacred paintings and portraits

Alessandro Bonvicino, who became famous for the altarpieces he painted for churches in northern Italy, died on this day in 1554 in Brescia in Lombardy.  Nicknamed Il Moretto da Brescia - the little moor from Brescia - Bonvicino is known to have painted alongside the Venetian artist Lorenzo Lotto in Bergamo. The portrait painter Giovanni Battista Moroni from Albino, in the province of Bergamo, was one of his pupils.  Bonvicino, sometimes known as Buonvicino, was born in Rovato, a town in the province of Brescia, in about 1498. It is not known how he acquired his nickname of Il Moretto.  He studied painting under Floriano Ferramola, but is also believed to have trained with Vincenzo Foppa, a painter who was active in Brescia in the early years of the 16th century.  It is thought he may also have been an apprentice to Titian in Venice.  Read more…

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Giacomo Puccini – opera composer

Musical genius who took the baton from Verdi

Giacomo Puccini, one of the greatest composers of Italian opera, was born on this day in 1858 in Lucca in Tuscany.  He had his first success with his opera, Manon Lescaut, just after the premiere of Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff. Manon Lescaut was a triumph with both the public and the critics, and he was hailed as a worthy successor to Verdi.  Puccini was born into a musical family who encouraged him to study music as a child while he was growing up in Lucca.  He moved to Milan to continue his studies at the Milan Conservatory, where he was able to study under the guidance of the composer, Amilcare Ponchielli.  He wrote an orchestral piece that impressed Ponchielli and his other teachers when it was first performed at a student concert. Ponchielli then suggested that Puccini’s next work might be an opera.  Read more…

Giuseppe Bergomi – footballer

World Cup winner who spent his whole career with Inter

The footballer Giuseppe Bergomi, renowned as one of the best defenders in the history of Italian football and a World Cup winner in 1982, was born on this day in 1963 in Milan.  Bergomi spent his entire 20-year club career with the Milan side Internazionale, making 756 appearances, including 519 in Serie A, which was a club record until overtaken by the Argentine-born defender Javier Zanetti, who went on to total 856 club appearances. In international football, Bergomi played 87 times for the Italian national team, of which he was captain during the 1990 World Cup finals, in which Italy reached the semi-finals as hosts.  Alongside the brothers Franco, of AC Milan, and Giuseppe Baresi, his team-mate at Inter, and the Juventus trio Gaetano Scirea, Antonio Cabrini and Claudio Gentile, he was part of the backbone of the Italian national team for much of the 1980s.  Read more…

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Giacomo Manzù – sculptor

Shoemaker’s son who became internationally acclaimed sculptor

Sculptor Giacomo Manzù was born Giacomo Manzoni on this day in 1908 in Bergamo in Lombardy.  The son of a shoemaker, he taught himself to be a sculptor, helped only by a few evening classes in art, and went on to achieve international acclaim.  Manzoni changed his name to Manzù and started working in wood while he was doing his military service in the Veneto in 1928.  After moving to Milan, he was commissioned by the architect, Giovanni Muzio, to decorate the Chapel of the Sacred Heart Catholic University.  But he achieved national recognition after he exhibited a series of busts at the Triennale di Milano.  The following year he held a personal exhibition with the painter, Aligi Sassu, with whom he shared a studio.  He attracted controversy in 1942 when a series of bronze bas reliefs about the death of Christ were exhibited in Rome. Read more…

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Giovanni Bottesini - double bass virtuoso

Musician was also a composer and conductor

The composer, conductor and double bassist Giovanni Bottesini was born on this day in 1821 in Crema, now a city in Lombardy although then part of the Austrian Empire.  He became such a brilliant and innovative performer on his chosen instrument that he became known as “the Paganini of the double bass” - a reference to the great violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini, whose career was ending just as his was beginning.  Bottesini was one of the first bassists to adopt the French-style bow grip, previously used solely by violinists, violists and cellists.  He was also a respected conductor, often called upon by the leading theatres in Europe and elsewhere, and a prolific composer. A close friend of Giuseppe Verdi, he wrote a dozen operas himself, music for chamber and full orchestras, and a considerable catalogue of pieces for double bass.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football,  by Tobias Jones

Italy's ultras are the most organised and violent fans in European football. Many groups have evolved into criminal gangs, involved in ticket-touting, drug-dealing and murder. A cross between the Hell's Angels and hooligans, they're often the foot-soldiers of the Mafia and have been instrumental in the rise of the far-right.  But the purist ultras say that they are insurgents fighting against a police state and modern football. Only amongst the ultras, they say, can you find belonging, community and a sacred concept of sport. They champion not just their teams, they say, but their forgotten suburbs and the dispossessed.  Through the prism of the ultras, Jones crafts a compelling investigation into Italian society and its favourite sport. He writes about not just the ultras of some of Italy's biggest clubs - Juventus, Torino, Lazio, Roma and Genoa - but also about its lesser-known ones from Cosenza and Catania. Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football examines the sinister side of football fandom, with its violence and political extremism, but also admires the passion, wit, solidarity and style of a fascinating and contradictory subculture.

Tobias Jones is a prize-winning author and investigative journalist. Based in Italy, he writes about the country’s true-crimes, customs, politics and football, and has written and presented documentaries for the BBC and for RAI, the Italian state broadcaster. He is the co-founder of Windsor Hill Wood, a refuge for people in crisis. 

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21 December

Strife-torn Rome turns to Vespasian

Elevation of military leader ends Year of Four Emperors

The ninth Roman emperor, Vespasian, began his 10-year rule on this day in 69AD, ending a period of civil war that brought the death of Nero and encompassed a series of short-lived administrations that became known as the Year of the Four Emperors.  Nero committed suicide in June 68 AD, having lost the support of the Praetorian Guard and been declared an enemy of the state by the Senate.  However, his successor, Galba, after initially having the support of the Praetorian Guard, quickly became unpopular.  On his march to Rome, he imposed heavy fines on or vengefully destroyed towns that did not declare their immediate allegiance to him and then refused to pay the bonuses he had promised the soldiers who had supported his elevation to power.  After he then had several senators and officials executed without trial on suspicion of conspiracy, the Germanic legions openly revolted. Read more…

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Moira Orfei - circus owner and actress

‘Queen of the Big Top’ became cultural icon

Moira Orfei, an entertainer regarded as the Queen of the Italian circus and an actress who starred in more than 40 films, was born on this day in 1931 in Codroipo, a town in Friuli-Venezia Giulia about 25km (16 miles) southwest of Udine.  She had a trademark look that became so recognisable that advertising posters for the Moira Orfei Circus, which she founded in 1961 with her new husband, the circus acrobat and animal trainer Walter Nones, carried simply her face and the name 'Moira'. As a young woman, she was a strikingly glamorous Hollywood-style beauty but in later years she took to wearing heavy make-up, dark eye-liner and bright lipstick, topped off with her bouffant hair gathered up in a way that resembled a turban.  Her camped-up appearance made her an unlikely icon for Italy’s gay community.  Read more…

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Giovanni Boccaccio – writer and scholar

Renaissance humanist who changed literature

One of the most important literary figures of the 14th century in Italy, Giovanni Boccaccio, died on this day in 1375 in Certaldo in Tuscany.  The greatest prose writer of his time in Europe, Boccaccio is still remembered as the writer of The Decameron, a collection of short stories and poetry, which influenced not only Italian literary development but that of the rest of Europe as well, including Geoffrey Chaucer in England and Miguel de Cervantes in Spain.  With the writers Dante Alighieri (Dante) and Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), Boccaccio is considered one of the three most important figures in the history of Italian literature. Along with Petrarch, he raised vernacular literature to the level and status of the classics of antiquity.  Boccaccio is thought to have been born in about 1313.  He was the son of a merchant in Florence.  Read more…

Masaccio – Renaissance artist

Innovative painter had brief but brilliant career

The 15th century artist Masaccio was born on this day in 1401 in Tuscany.  He is now judged to have been the first truly great painter of the early Renaissance in Italy because of his skill at painting lifelike figures and his use of perspective.  Christened Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, the artist came into the world in a small town near Arezzo, which is now known as San Giovanni Valdarno.  Little is known about his early life but it is likely he would have moved to Florence to be apprenticed to an established artist while still young.  The first evidence of him definitely being in the city was when he joined the painters’ guild in Florence in 1422.  The name Masaccio derives from Maso, a shortened form of his first name, Tommaso. Maso has become Masaccio, meaning ‘clumsy or messy Maso’. But it may just have been given to him to distinguish him from his contemporary, Masolino Da Panicale.  Read more…

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Italo Marchioni - ice cream maker

Italian-American inventor of the waffle cone

Italo Marchioni, the ice cream manufacturer credited by many as the inventor of the ice cream cone, was born in the tiny mountain hamlet of Peaio in northern Veneto on this day in 1868.  Marchioni learned his skills in Italy, where gelato was well established as a popular treat, but in common with so many Italians during what were tough economic times in the late 19th century he took the bold step of emigrating to the United States in 1890.  Records suggest his first American home was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and that it was there that he married Elvira De Lorenzo in 1893. Marchioni - by then known by his Americanised name of Marchiony - later settled in Hoboken, a city in New Jersey with a strong pull for Italian immigrants that retains an Italian flavour to this day, with almost a quarter of the area’s population thought to have Italian roots.  Read more…

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Lorenzo Perosi - priest and composer

Puccini contemporary chose sacred music over opera

Don Lorenzo Perosi, a brilliant composer of sacred music who was musical director of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican for almost half a century, was born on this day in 1872 in the city of Tortona in Piedmont.  A devoutly religious man who was ordained as a priest at the age of 22, Perosi was a contemporary of Giacomo Puccini and Pietro Mascagni, both of whom he counted as close friends, but was the only member of the so-called Giovane Scuola of late 19th century and early 20th century composers who did not write opera.  Instead, he concentrated entirely on church music and was particularly noted for his large-scale oratorios, for which he enjoyed international fame.  Unlike Puccini and Mascagni, or others from the Giovane Scuola such as Ruggero Leoncavallo, Umberto Giordano and Francesco Cilea, Perosi's work has not endured enough for him to be well known today.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Vespasian, by Barbara Levick

From a pre-eminent biographer in the field, this volume examines the life and times of the emperor Vespasian and challenges the validity of his perennial good reputation and universally acknowledged achievements. Levick examines how this plebeian and uncharismatic emperor restored peace and confidence to Rome and ensured a smooth succession, how he coped with the military, political and economic problems of his reign, and his evaluation of the solutions to these problems, before she finally examines his posthumous reputation.  Now updated to take account of the past 15 years of scholarship, and with a new chapter on literature under the Flavians, Vespasian is a fascinating study for students of Roman history and the general classical enthusiast alike.

Barbara Levick is Fellow and Tutor Emeritus, St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. She has published extensively on Roman history, with titles including Tiberius the Politician, The Government of the Roman Empire, Julia Domna: Syrian Empress and Augustus: Image and Substance. 

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