Pietro Locatelli – musician

Violinist astonished his listeners with his ability

Pietro Antonio Locatelli was playing with an orchestra
in Bergamo when he was only 14 years old

Virtuoso violinist and Baroque composer Pietro Antonio Locatelli was born on this day in 1695 in Bergamo.

He showed an astonishing talent for playing the violin while he was still a young boy and began playing with the orchestra at the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo when he was 14.

In 1711, when he was 16 years old, he left to go to Rome and although it is not known whether he studied with Arcangelo Corelli before the composer’s death in 1713, he will have absorbed a lot of his influence by studying with the other eminent musicians in the city.

In 1714 Locatelli wrote to his father, telling him that he was a member of the band of household musicians working for Prince Michelangelo I Caetani, a notable political figure and scholar. While in Rome he made his debut as a composer, producing his XII Concerto Grossi Op I in 1721.

The house on Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, where Locatelli
died in 1764, is marked with a commemorative plaque

After 1725 his name crops up in Mantua, Venice, Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt and in every city he received rapturous acclaim for his violin performances. Many of his violin concertos were written at this time.

He was known to be in Kassel in Germany in December 1728 where he was paid generously after his performance by Charles I Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. Afterwards the resident organist wrote that Locatelli had ‘astonished his listeners with hugely difficult violin passages.’

The musician moved to live in Amsterdam in 1729 where he gave music lessons, performed privately and had his own music published professionally.

Locatelli died in 1764 in his house on the Prinsengracht in the city.

He is perhaps best remembered for his L’Arte del violino, a group of 12 violin concerti for a solo violin.

The beautiful Piazza Vecchia lies at the heart of Bergamo's
medieval city, the Città Alta

Travel tip:

Pietro Locatelli is remembered in his native city of Bergamo by an area named after him in Longuelo, a suburb of the city. Bergamo is in the Lombardy region of northern Italy and is a fascinating, historic city with two distinct centres. The Città Alta, upper town, is a beautiful walled city with buildings that date back to medieval times, while the elegant Città Bassa that grew up on the plain below has some buildings that date back to the 15th century as well as imposing architecture added in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The north portal of the Basilica of Santa Maria
Maggiore, next to the Colleoni Chapel

Travel tip:

The Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, where Locatelli played as a teenager, is in Piazza Duomo in the Città Alta, The basilica, which dates back to the 12th century, is considered to be one of the finest buildings in Lombardy and has a beautiful interior, with a richly decorated cupola and fine Flemish and Florentine tapestries and works of art. At the back of the church is an elaborate white marble monument designed by Vincenzo Vela, marking the tomb of the 18th century opera composer Gaetano Donizetti, who was born and also died in Bergamo.

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Marie Josephine of Savoy

Italian noblewoman who became titular Queen of France

Detail from a portrait of Marie Josephine by the
French royal portraitist Jean-Martial Frédou

Marie Josephine Louise of Savoy, who married the future King Louis XVIII of France, was born Maria Giuseppina Luigia on this day in 1753 at the Royal Palace in Turin.

She became a Princess of France and Countess of Provence after her marriage, but died before her husband actually became the King of France.

Marie Josephine was the third child of prince Victor Amadeus of Savoy and Infanta Maria Antonio Ferdinanda of Spain.

Her paternal grandfather, Charles Emmanuel III, was King of Sardinia and so her parents were the Duke and Duchess of Savoy.  Her brothers were to become the last three Kings of Sardinia, the future Charles Emmanuel IV, Victor Emmanuel I and Charles Felix.

At the age of 17, Marie Josephine was married by proxy to Prince Louis Stanislas, Count of Provence, the younger brother of the Dauphin, Louis Auguste, who was fated to become Louis XVI of France and to be executed by guillotine.

After the outbreak of the French Revolution, the Count and Countess of Provence stayed in France with the King and Marie Antoinette, but when their situation became too dangerous they successfully escaped to the Austrian Netherlands.

Marie Josephine as a child before her marriage
to Prince Louis Stanislas, the future Louis XVIII

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette also tried to leave the country but were arrested in the small town of Varennes and were taken back to face charges of treason and ultimately to be executed.

In 1795, the only surviving son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who was regarded by the exiled French Court as Louis XVII, died in his prison. Marie Josephine’s husband was therefore proclaimed by loyalists as Louis XVIII and Marie Josephine then became regarded as titular Queen of France.

After years of moving from place to place, often separately, the couple were reunited in England and allowed to set up a French exile court in Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, where Marie Josephine died in 1810.

She had a magnificent funeral attended by many French royalist sympathisers, whose names were recorded by spies and sent to Napoleon.

Members of the British Royal family followed her funeral cortege in a carriage and saw her laid to rest in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey. But her body was removed a year later and taken to the Kingdom of Sardinia, where it was buried in Cagliari Cathedral.

The Palazzo Reale in Turin, by night

Travel tip:

The Royal Palace of Turin, the Palazzo Reale, where Maria Josephine was born, was built by Emmanuel Philibert, who was Duke of Savoy from 1528 to 1580.  He chose the location in Piazza Castello because it had an open and sunny position. In 1946 the building became the property of the state and in 1997 it became a Unesco World Heritage Site.

The Cattedrale di Santa Maria e
Santa Cecilia in Cagliari

Travel tip:

The Cathedral in Cagliari in Sardinia, which was the final resting place of Marie Josephine, is in the medieval quarter of the city called Castello. The Cattedrale di Santa Maria and Santa Cecilia was built in the 13th century. Marie Josephine’s brother, Charles Felix, had an imposing monument erected over her grave, where she is described as ‘wise, prudent, kindest’ and ‘Queen of the Gauls’.

More reading:

Charles Emmanuel IV - the King of Sardinia descended from Charles I of England

The first Victor Emmanuel

The reign of Victor Amadeus of Savoy

Also on this day:

1898: The birth of chocolatier Pietro Ferrero

1938: The birth of actor and stuntman Giuliano Gemma

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Vittorio Gassman - actor

Stage and screen star once dubbed ‘Italy’s Olivier’

Vittorio Gassman in the 1948 movie Riso amaro, which
provided him with his breakthrough as a screen actor

Vittorio Gassman, who is regarded as one of the finest actors in the history of Italian theatre and cinema, was born on this day in 1922 in Genoa.

Tall, dark and handsome in a way that made him a Hollywood producer’s dream, Gassman appeared in almost 150 movies but he was no mere matinée idol.

A highly respected stage actor, he possessed a mellifluous speaking voice, a magisterial presence and such range and versatility in his acting talent that the Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham once called him ‘the Lawrence Olivier of Italy’.

He enjoyed a career that spanned five decades. Inevitably, he is best remembered for his screen roles, although by the time he made his movie debut in 1945, he had appeared in more than 40 productions of classic plays by Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, and others.

On screen, his major successes included his portrayal of the handsome scoundrel Walter opposite Silvana Mangano in Giuseppe De Santis's neorealist melodrama Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1948), and several Commedia all’Italiana classics, including Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal On Madonna Street, 1958), La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959) and L'armata brancaleone (1965), and Dino Risi's Il sorpasso (1962).

With Silvana Mangano and Alberto Sordi (right), his co-stars
in the comedy classic La grande guerra (1959)

At this time, his popularity was rivalled only by Alberto Sordi, his co-star in La grande guerra, which shared the Golden Lion prize at Venice in 1959 with a Rossellini film.

Gassman’s portrayal of a blind military man in Risi’s 1974 film Profumo di donna received the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. Al Pacino played the same part and won an Oscar in the 1992 remake, Scent of a Woman.

His flirtation with Hollywood came after he met and fell in love with the American actress Shelley Winters while she was touring Europe.

When Winters returned to Hollywood because of contractual obligations, he followed her there and married her. With his natural charisma and fluency in English he landed a number of roles in Hollywood, including Charles Vidor’s Rhapsody opposite Elizabeth Taylor, and with Gloria Grahame in Maxwell Shane’s film noir The Glass Wall.

He was the only Italian star in the cast of King Vidor's epic War And Peace (1956), produced by Dino De Laurentiis in Rome and for which the Italian composer Nino Rota wrote the music score. Later, Gassman gave distinguished performances in the Robert Altman films A Wedding (1978) and Quintet (1979).

Gassman was the only Italian cast in the 1956 epic War and
Peace, in which he is pictured with Audrey Hepburn

Born to a German father and a Jewish Italian mother, Gassman had aspirations to be a lawyer. But his mother encouraged him to pursue his interest in acting and he remained devoted to his first love, theatre, throughout his career.

A student at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica in Rome, he made his stage debut in Milan in 1942 before moving back to Rome to work at the Teatro Eliseo.

Even after his film debut in 1946 was followed by his breakthrough role in Bitter Rice two years later, he devoted much energy to Luchino Visconti's theatre company in productions such as Tennessee Williams' Un tram che si chiama desiderio (A Streetcar Named Desire) and Come vi piace (As You Like It) by Shakespeare.

In 1952 he co-founded and co-directed the Teatro d'Arte Italiano, which produced the first complete version of Hamlet in Italy.  Later in his career, he created his own company, Teatro Popolare Itinerante, with which he toured Italy staging the works of 20th century authors and playwrights as well as the classics of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and the Greek tragicians. He also founded a theatre school in Florence.

For a while he was the star of a popular TV series, Il Mattatore, which was later turned into a movie.

Married three times - to actresses Nora Ricci, Shelley Winters and Diletta D'Andrea - he also had numerous affairs.  The father of two daughters and two sons - one of whom, Alessandro, became a film actor - Gassman died in June 2000, in Rome, following a heart attack.

The Piazza de Ferrari in the centre of Genoa

Travel tip:

Gassman’s home city of Genoa boasts Italy's largest sea port, its maritime power going back to the 12th and 13th centuries, when the Republic of Genoa ruled the Mediterranean. The old city is fascinating for its large maze of narrow caruggi (streets), opening out occasionally into grand squares such as Piazza de Ferrari, site of an iconic bronze fountain and Teatro Carlo Felice opera house. There is a Romanesque duomo, the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, recognisable for its black-and-white-striped facade and frescoed interior.

The Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatic in Rome

Travel tip:

The Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica "Silvio d'Amico", the dramatic arts academy where Gassman trained as an actor, can be found in Via Bellini, between Villa Borghese and the Parioli district, in an elegant four-storey building. Founded in 1936 by the critic and theatrical theorist Silvio D'Amico, in addition to Gassman it has seen students such as Rossella Falk, Anna Magnani, Paolo Stoppa, Nino Manfredi, Gian Maria Volonté, Monica Vitti, Michele Placido, Nicoletta Braschi and Luca Zingaretti attend lectures and workshops there.

More reading:

Mario Monicelli - the father of Commedia all'Italiana

The genius of Alberto Sordi

How Silvano Mangano's acting talents overcame her critics

Also on this day:

1878: The birth of conductor Tullio Serafin

1886: The birth of vaudeville star Guido Deiro


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Altiero Spinelli - political visionary

Drafted plan for European Union while in Fascist jail

Spinelli and two fellow prisoners were
the first to propose a united Europe

Altiero Spinelli, a politician who is regarded as one of the founding fathers of the European Union, was born on this day in 1907 in Rome.

A lifelong Communist who was jailed for his opposition to the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, he spent much of the Second World War in confinement on the island of Ventotene in the Tyrrhenian Sea, one of an archipelago known as the Pontine Islands.

It was there that he and two prisoners, Ernesto Rossi and Eugenio Colorni, agreed that if the forces of Fascism in Italy and Germany were defeated, the only way to avoid future European wars was for the sovereign nations of the continent to join together in a federation of states.

The document they drew up, which became known as the Ventotene Manifesto, was the first document to argue for a European constitution and formed the basis for the Movimento Federalista Europeo, which Spinelli, Rossi and some 20 others launched at a secret meeting in Milan as soon as they were able to leave their internment camp.

An official mugshot of Spinelli taken
during his confinement on Ventotene

In a nutshell, the Ventotene Manifesto put forward proposals for creating a European federation of states so closely joined together they would no longer be able to go to war with one another. It argued that if all of the European countries retained their complete national sovereignty in the post-war landscape then the possibility of a Third World War would still exist even if the Nazi attempt to establish the domination of the German race in Europe was defeated.

Throughout the 40s and 50s, Spinelli’s MFE was in the vanguard of the drive for European integration and Spinelli himself, who was elected as a Communist MEP in 1979, its most powerful voice.

By stages, he persuaded the Italian government and then the European Parliament of the wisdom of his proposals and his draft document, known as the Spinelli Plan, became the basis for the Single European Act of 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which formally agreed the establishment of a European Union.

Spinelli himself lived to see none of these developments. His health declined in his late 70s and he died in a Rome clinic in May 1986 at the age of 78.

However, his legacy was recognised when the main building of the European Parliament in Brussels was named after him in 1999.

Spinelli was buried on the island of
Ventotene, where his memory is preserved

Although born in Rome, Spinelli spent his early years in Brazil, where his father was the Italian Vice-Consul. On returning home he joined the Italian Communist Party at the age of 17 in 1924, the year of the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, with Fascism now in power and Communists forced underground.

He was arrested in Milan in June 1927, when the Fascists introduced legislation outlawing political opponents. He was convicted and sentenced to 16 years and eight months in prison.

After a decade, he was transferred to Rome and was led to believe he would be released, only to be told he was instead being transferred to confinement status, first on the island of Ponza, later on Ventotene, a smaller island midway between Ponza and Ischia, off the coast of Naples.

His release eventually came in 1943, after Mussolini had been expelled by the Fascist Grand Council and arrested on the orders of the king, Victor Emmanuel III. 

Ponza has some beautiful coastline and was once a haunt
for movie stars and other celebrities

Travel tip:

The island of Ponza has had a chequered history. Inhabited from neolithic to Roman times, it was abandoned during the middle ages due to frequent attacks by Saracens and pirates and not recolonised until the 18th century. Due to its remoteness, it was used as penal colony by several regimes in addition to the Fascists. Mussolini himself was confined there for a brief period after his arrest in 1943. In more recent years, it was developed for tourism and became a fashionable resort for celebrities, including Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. It has become less attractive since the death of several tourists due to falling rocks led to the permanent closure of the main beach, Chiaia di Luna, although there are many other smaller beaches and several picturesque bays.

The picturesque harbour on the island of Ventotene

Travel tip:

Closer to the mainland than Ponza and therefore more easy to reach, Ventotene attracts many tourists during the summer months but remains in some ways a permanent monument to Spinelli, who was returned to the island following his death and interred in the churchyard of the Parrocchia Santa Candida Vergine e Martire. The former prison has been converted into colorful summer homes and visitors can even sleep in Spinelli’s old apartment.  In 2016, Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi met with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande on the island, where they laid a wreath at the Spinelli’s tomb and staged a mini-summit meeting to discuss the future of the EU following the referendum staged in Britain.

More reading:

Victor Emmanuel III appoints Mussolini as prime minister

The murder of Giacomo Matteotti

How Alcide de Gasperi rebuilt Italy


Also on this day:

1834: The birth of opera composer Amilcare Ponchielli

1900: The birth of Gino Lucetti, anarchist famous for botched attempt to kill Mussolini


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Emanuele Filiberto – Duke of Savoy

Ruler who made Turin the capital of Savoy

A  portrait of Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of
Savoy, by an unknown artist

Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, who was nicknamed testa di ferro (iron head) because of his military prowess, died on this day in 1580 in Turin.

After becoming Duke of Savoy he recovered most of the lands his father Charles III had lost to France and Spain and he restored economic stability to Savoy.

Emanuele Filiberto was born in 1528 in Chambery, now part of France. He grew up to become a skilled soldier and served in the army of the emperor Charles V, who was the brother-in-law of his mother, Beatrice of Portugal, during his war against Francis I of France. He distinguished himself by capturing Hesdin in northern France in July 1553.

When he succeeded his father a month later he began the reacquisition of his lands.

His brilliant victory over the French at Saint Quentin in northern France in 1557 on the side of the Spanish helped to consolidate his power in Savoy.

Emanuele Filiberto, as portrayed by the
Italian painter Giorgio Soleri

The peace of Cateau-Cambresis in 1559 ended the wars between Charles V and the French Kings and restored part of the Duchy of Savoy back to Emanuele Filiberto on the understanding that he would marry Margaret of France, the sister of King Henry II. They had one child, Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy, who succeeded him as duke.

Emanuele Filiberto took advantage of the political struggles between the European powers to slowly increase his domain.

The city of Turin was part of the territory he recovered from the French and he moved Savoy’s capital from Chambery to Turin in 1562, fortifying and enlarging the city. He also substituted Italian for Latin as the official language of Savoy.

Just before his death in the city at the age of 52 he was arranging for Savoy to acquire the Marquisate of Saluzzo.

Emanuele Filiberto was buried in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud in Turin Cathedral.

Turin's duomo - the Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista

Travel tip:

Turin Cathedral, or the Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista as the Duomo is known in Italian, was built between 1491 and 1498 on the site of an old Roman theatre. Emanuele Filiberto is one of the members of the House of Savoy buried there, while others are buried in the Basilica di Superga on the outskirts of the city.

Emanuele Filiberto brought the Shroud of Turin (above)
to Turin from Chambery in France

Travel tip:

It is fitting that Emanuele Filiberto is buried in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud as he was responsible for having the Shroud brought from Chambery in France to the Duomo in Turin in 1578 and it has remained there ever since.  A project for the enlargement of the Duomo in order to create a more luxurious home for the Shroud was begun in 1649 by Bernardino Quadri and completed by Guarino Guarini.  In 2002 the Shroud was restored so that the reverse side of the cloth could be photographed for the first time. In 2013 high definition images of the Shroud were put out on the internet and on television. These could be magnified on computers to show details not visible to the naked eye.  Pope Francis urged people to contemplate the Shroud with awe but he stopped short of asserting its authenticity.

More reading:

The Duke of Savoy responsible for a notorious massacre

Why Savoy duke Victor Amadeus I may have been poisoned

Iolanda of Savoy - the banished princess

Also on this day:

1585: The death of composer Andrea Gabrieli

1860: The birth of New York crime fighter Joe Petrosino


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Tiziana ‘Tosca’ Donati - singer

Versatile performer whose range spans musicals to sacred songs

The singer Tiziana Donati, known as Tosca, during
one of her stage performances

The singer Tiziana Donati, who performs under the stage name Tosca, was born on this day in 1967 in Rome.

Winner of the Sanremo Festival in 1996, Tosca has recorded 10 studio albums, released the same number of singles and has recorded duets with many other artists.

She has enjoyed a successful stage career, appearing in numerous theatrical productions, and has been invited to perform songs for several movies, including the title track for Franco Zeffirelli’s version of Jane Eyre in 1996. She also sang and spoke the part of Anastasia in the Italian dubbed version of the Disney cartoon of the same name.

At Christmas in 1999, she participated in concerts in churches in Italy where she performed Latin songs set to music by Vincenzo Zitello and Stefano Melone.

Following this she began a collaboration with the Vatican, taking part in several televised events to commemorate the Jubilee of 2000, and was chosen to sing the Mater Iubilaei, the Marian anthem of the Jubilee, in a ceremony led by Pope John Paul II.

Throughout 2000, she toured with Musica Caeli, a concert made up of never-before performed sacred chants, staged in some of the biggest churches and cathedrals around the world.

Tosca was spotted singing in a piano bar in Rome in the
1990s before winning the Sanremo Festival in 1996

Tiziana said her love of singing began as a child when she suffered from acute articular rheumatism, a debilitating health condition affecting the joints that prevented her taking part in normal activities.  She did, however, accompany her grandmother to church almost every day and soon set her heart on becoming a member of the choir.

She went along to choir practice and was accepted and drew a sense of pride and self-worth from being asked to stand on a chair and sing at family occasions. Singing and later acting gave her a sense of purpose.

In her teens, Donati joined a theatre company in Rome and began singing in a piano bar in the city, where she was spotted by Renzo Arbore, a musician and television presenter, who invited to sing on the show Il caso Sanremo, a unique programme in which winning songs from different years of the Sanremo Festival were placed on “trial” in a set made to resemble a courtroom.

The exposure propelled her into the public eye. She adopted Tosca as a stage name and released her first album in 1992.

Tiziana Donati pictured during a studio recording
session with fellow musician Chico Buarque

Her big break, though, was winning Sanremo itself in 1996 with Vorrei incontrarti fra cent'anni - I Want To Meet You In One Hundred Years - a song written by Rosalino Cellamare, who performed under the stage name Ron, and who also provided backing vocals and guitar.

After another appearance at Sanremo the following year, she released an album, entitled Incontri e passaggi of songs written for her by artists such as Lucio Dalla, Chico Buarque de Holanda, Grazia Di Michele, Ennio Morricone and Mariella Nava, which won her the Targa Tenco prize as the year’s outstanding performer.

Since 2000, Donati has mixed concerts with stage shows and musicals and has recently worked as a section director at the Pasolini Workshop in Rome, a venture - named in honour of the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini - run in collaboration with the University of Rome and the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia to unearth and nurture new talent.

Still in demand today for high-profile roles, recently starring at the Teatro Argentina in Rome in the touring show Donne come noi - Women Like Us - based on a book of the same name about 100 Italian women who have changed their lives and those of others.

Last year, Tosca celebrated her life in music with a sell-out concert at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome in which she was joined on stage by artists including Nicola Piovani, Danilo Rea and Joe Barbieri, all of whom had become friends at different points of her career.

The saxophonist Bobby Watson has
performed at Gregory's in Rome

Travel tip:

One of Rome’s traditional music venues is the jazz club Gregory’s, which can be found in Via Gregoriana, a short walk from Piazza di Spagna and the Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti. The club has a ‘hall of fame’ that includes the likes of Bobby Durham, Victor Lewis, Steve Grossman, Gregory Hutchinson, Bobby Watson and Scott Hamilton, all of whom have performed at the venue.  The club hosts live sets almost every night, starting at around 9.30pm. A sister venue, Gregory’s By The River, stages live music during the summer months on the edge of the Tiber at Castel Sant’Angelo.

The Teatro Argentina in Rome is one of the city's
oldest opera houses, inaugurated in 1732

Travel tip:

The Teatro Argentina, where Tosca recently performed in the show Donne come noi, is a traditional opera venue in the square Largo di Torre Argentina. Built over the Curia of Pompey - the meeting hall in which Julius Caesar was murdered in 44BC - it is one of the oldest theatres in the city, commissioned by the Sforza-Cesarini family and inaugurated in 1732. Rossini's The Barber of Seville was given its premiere there in February 1816. It has staged drama productions as well as opera and music. In the mid-20th centuries, works by Luigi Pirandello, Henrik Ibsen and Maxim Gorky were performed there for the first time.

More reading:

How Enrico Caruso inspired Lucio Dalla

Why Sanremo winner Adriano Celentano is Italy's biggest-selling recording artist of all time

The Barber of Seville premieres at Teatro Argentina

Also on this day:

1875: The birth of flautist Lorenzo De Lorenzo

1991: Anti-Mafia hero Libero Grassi is murdered in Palermo

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Elisabetta Sirani – artist

Sudden death of talented young woman shocked Bologna

A self-portrait by Elisabetta Sirani

The brilliant Baroque painter and printmaker Elisabetta Sirani died in unexplained circumstances at the age of 27 on this day in 1665 in Bologna.

The body of the artist was carried to the Chapel of the Rosary in the Basilica of San Domenico in Bologna to be mourned, not just by her family, but by an entire community as she was loved and respected as an important female painter.

Elisabetta has been described as beautiful, focused and selfless and she became a symbol of the progressive city of Bologna, where the creativity of women was encouraged and they were able to express themselves through art and music.

Elisabetta’s father, Giovanni Andrea Sirani, was himself an artist and she was trained in his studio, although contemporary writers have recorded that he was reluctant to teach her to paint in the Bolognese style, as established by artists in the city in the 16th and 17th centuries as a way to distinguish themselves from the artists of Florence and Rome.

But Elisabetta acquired the technique anyway and became one of the most renowned painters in Bologna , overshadowing her father. He had been a pupil of the highly regarded Bolognese painter Guido Reni, who had died in 1642, and many local people considered Elisabetta to be a female reincarnation of him.

Sirani's beautiful painting Sant'Antonio da
Padova in adorazione del bambino

When she was just 16 her father became incapacitated by gout and so Elisabetta began running his workshop and became the breadwinner for the whole family.

She never married, despite being described as attractive, lively and warm-hearted. Some people believed that her father prevented her from marrying.

When Elisabetta died suddenly on 28 August 1665 in Bologna her death was treated as suspicious and a servant, Lucia Tolomelli, was charged with poisoning the artist. She was put on trial but Elisabetta’s father later withdrew the charges.

Modern thinking, based on the descriptions recorded of her symptoms, is that she probably died of peritonitis after suffering a ruptured peptic ulcer.

Elisabetta was given an elaborate funeral that included an enormous catafalque - a kind of moving platform - containing a life-sized sculpture of her and she was buried in the same tomb as Guido Reni.

During her brief career she had produced more than 200 paintings, 15 etchings and hundreds of drawings. She painted many religious subjects but was also an accomplished portrait painter and was much mourned by the women of Bologna who had sat for her.

She established an academy for women painters in Bologna and trained many artists at what was the first school in Europe for women painters that was outside a convent.

Her 1663 painting Virgin and Child is now in the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington . In 1994 it was selected by the United States Postal Service for their Christmas holiday stamp series.

The Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna houses a number
of paintings by Elisabetta Sirani

Travel tip:

You can see paintings by Elisabetta Sirani in The Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna in Complesso di Sant’Ignazio in Via Belle Arti, a gallery close to Due Torri, the two towers that have become symbols of Bologna . One of the most beautiful paintings on show is Sant’Antonio da Padova in adorazione del bambino, which shows the saint kneeling at the baby’s feet. Also on display is her striking painting of Santa Maria Maddalena, which shows the saint bare-breasted and holding a crucifix.

Guido Reni's ceiling The Glory of San
Domenico is a feature of the basilica

Travel tip:

Elisabetta Sirani is buried with the artist Guido Reni in the Rosary Chapel of the 13th century Basilica of San Domenico in Piazza San Domenico. The church is close to the Archiginnasio, once the main building of the University of Bologna . Behind the red-brick façade of the church, which was added as recently as 1910, lies a treasure house of art including works by Pisano, Michelangelo, Iacopo da Bologna and Guido Reni. In the Rosary Chapel, the most important work is the Mystery of the Rosary, a group of paintings worked on by Lodovico Carracci, Bartolomeo Cesi, Denis Calvaert, Lavinia Fontana, Guido Reni and Domenichino.

More reading:

The Bolognese master Guercino

How the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci influenced art in Rome

Why Domenichino is seen as the Raphael of the Bolognese School

Also on this day:

1909: The birth of Bicycle Thieves actor Lamberto Maggiorani

1938: The birth of journalist and TV talk show host Maurizio Costanzo


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