Franco Nero – actor
The film Camelot sparked long love affair with English actress
Francesco Clemente Giuseppe Sparanero, better known by his stage name Franco Nero, was born on this day in 1941 in San Prospero Parmense. Nero became well-known for playing the title role in Sergio Corbucci’s Spaghetti Western film Django in 1966 and then reprising the role in Nello Rossati’s film Django Strikes Again in 1987. The actor has had a long-standing relationship with British actress Vanessa Redgrave, which began in the 1960s during the filming of the musical comedy-drama Camelot. They had a son, Carlo Gabriel Redgrave Sparanero in 1969. Now known as Carlo Gabriel Nero, their son is a screenwriter and director. Franco Nero was the son of a Carabinieri officer, who was originally from San Severo, a city in the province of Foggia in Puglia. He grew up in Bedonia in Emilia-Romagna and then in Milan. Read more…
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Ludovico Einaudi – composer
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Musician world famous for his unique blend of sounds
Pianist and film music composer Ludovico Einaudi was born on this day in 1955 in Turin. Einaudi has composed the music for films such as The Intouchables and I’m Still Here and has released many solo albums for piano and orchestra. His distinctive music, which mixes classical with contemporary rhythms of rock and electronic, is now played all over the world and has been used as background music and in television commercials. Einaudi’s mother, Renata Aldrovandi, played the piano to him as a child and her father, Waldo Aldrovandi, was a pianist, opera conductor and composer, who went to live in Australia after the Second World War. His father, Giulio Einaudi, was a publisher, who worked with authors Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, and his grandfather, Luigi Einaudi, was President of Italy between 1948 and 1955. Read more…
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Fred Buscaglione - singer and actor
Fifties sensation who died tragically young
The singer and actor Fred Buscaglione, a nightclub singer who became a huge star of the pop world in 1950s Italy, was born on this day in 1921 in Turin. Buscaglione’s style - he portrayed himself tongue-in-cheek as a sharp-suited gangster with a taste for whiskey and women - caught the imagination of an Italian public desperate to be entertained after the austerity of Fascism, when all ‘foreign’ music was banned. He formed a partnership with the writer Leo Chiosso after their first collaboration, on a song called Che bambola (What a Babe!), which resulted in more than one million record sales, catapulting Buscaglione to fame. They had several more hits, including Love in Portofino, which was covered by Andrea Bocelli in 2013 as the title track from an album. Born Ferdinando Buscaglione, he was from a creative family. Read more…
Irpinia earthquake
A day that saw whole towns reduced to rubble in southern Italy
An earthquake that has been described as ‘the worst catastrophe in the history of the Italian republic’ shook Campania and parts of Basilicata and Puglia on this day in 1980. The earthquake, which takes its name from the geographical area of Campania known as Irpinia, had a moment magnitude of 6.9 and left 2483 people dead, about 7,700 injured, and more than 250,000 homeless. The first shock lasted for a little more than a minute, but it was to change the lives forever of the residents in the worst hit towns in the region. The earthquake struck at 18:34 local time and after 70 seconds of shaking there were many aftershocks. Waves from it were felt as far away as Sicily and the Po Valley. The village of Castelnuovo di Conza, in the province of Salerno, was at the centre of the blast and was virtually destroyed. Read more…
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Prospero Alpini - botanist
How coffee was first introduced to Europe
Physician and botanist Prospero Alpini was born on this day in 1553 in Marostica near Vicenza. He is credited with being the first person in Europe to observe and write about the coffee plant. Alpini went to study medicine in Padua in 1574 and after taking his degree settled down to work as a doctor in nearby Campo San Pietro. He was very interested in botany and so to extend his knowledge of exotic plants he travelled to Egypt in 1580 as physician to George Emo, the Venetian consul in Cairo. While in Egypt he studied date trees which helped him to work out that there were gender differences between plants. He wrote that: “the female date trees or palms do not bear fruit unless the branches of the male and female plants are mixed together, or, as is generally done, unless the dust found in the male sheath or male flowers is sprinkled over the female flowers.” Read more…
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Book of the Day: Any Gun Can Play: The Essential Guide to Euro-Westerns, by Kevin Grant, with a foreword by Franco Nero
Kevin Grant is a freelance journalist and film writer with a passion for perfectly crafted genre pieces. A fan of American westerns since childhood, he was soon led astray by the irreverent interpretations of Sergio Leone, whose radical visions placed him - and certain of his European contemporaries - alongside the likes of Peckinpah and Mann in the pantheon of maverick directors of westerns.
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