4 August

Pope Urban VII

Pope for just 12 days but introduced world's first smoking ban

Pope Urban VII was born Giovanni Battista Castagna on this day in 1521 in Rome.  Although his 12-day papacy in 1590 was the shortest in history, he is remembered as being the first person in the world to declare a ban on smoking.  He was against the use of tobacco generally, threatening to excommunicate anyone who ‘took tobacco in the porchway of, or inside a church, whether it be by chewing it, smoking it with a pipe, or sniffing it in powdered form through the nose’.  The ban is thought to have been upheld for the most part until 1724, when Pope Benedict XIII, himself a smoker, repealed it.  Castagna was the son of a nobleman of Genovese origin and studied in universities all over Italy. He obtained a doctorate in civil law and canon law from the University of Bologna.  He served as a constitutional lawyer to Pope Julius III and was then ordained a priest.  He took part in the Council of Trent and then served as an apostolic nuncio in Spain for four years.  Castagna was also Governor of Bologna, apostolic nuncio to Venice and then Papal Legate to Flanders and Cologne.  He is remembered for his charity to the poor.  Read more…

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Giovanni Spadolini - politician

The first non-Christian Democrat to lead Italian Republic

Giovanni Spadolini, who was the Italian Republic’s first prime minister not to be drawn from the Christian Democrats and was one of Italy's most respected politicians, died on this day in 1994.  In a country where leading politicians and businessmen rarely survive a whole career without becoming embroiled in one corruption scandal or another, he went to the grave with his reputation for honesty intact.  Although he was an expert on Italian unification and became a professor of contemporary history at the University of Florence when he was only 25, a background that gave him a deep knowledge of Italian politics, he first built a career as a journalist.  He became a political columnist for several magazines and newspapers, including Il Borghese, Il Mondo and Il Messaggero, and was appointed editor of the Bologna daily II Resto del Carlino in 1955, at the age of 30.  In 1968, having doubled Il Resto’s circulation, he left Bologna to become the editor at Corriere della Sera, in Milan, where he remained until 1972.  It was while editing the Corriere that he became known for his anti-extremist stance, condemning violent student activists on the left and terrorists on the right in equal measure.  Read more…

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Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici - banker

Art enthusiast who was Botticelli’s major patron

The Florentine banker and politician Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, who was a significant figure in Renaissance art as the main sponsor and patron of the painter Sandro Botticelli, was born on this day in 1463.  The great-grandson of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, the founder of the Medici bank, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco belonged to the junior, sometimes known as ‘Popolani’ branch of the House of Medici.  In 1476, when he and his brother, Giovanni, were still boys, their father, Pierfrancesco de’ Medici the Elder, died. They became wards, effectively, of their cousin, Lorenzo il Magnifico - Lorenzo the Magnificent - a member of the senior branch of the family and the effective ruler of Florence.  Relations between the two branches had been tense for some years and were not helped when Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco discovered, on becoming an adult, that Lorenzo had plundered a considerable sum from he and his brother’s joint inheritance in order to stave off a threatened bankruptcy of the family’s financial empire.  Although Lorenzo had provided the boys with the best education money could buy - the notable Florentine Renaissance humanists Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano and Giorgio Antonio Vespucci (uncle of Amerigo) were among their tutors - and given them a number of properties in compensation, the incident created a lingering bitterness.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Absolute Monarchs - A History of the Papacy, by John Julius Norwich.

In Absolute Monarchs, a chronicle that captures nearly two thousand years of inspiration and intrigue, John Julius Norwich recounts in riveting detail the histories of the most significant popes and what they meant politically, culturally, and socially to Rome and to the world. Norwich presents such popes as Innocent I, who in the fifth century successfully negotiated with Alaric the Goth, an invader civil authorities could not defeat; Leo I, who two decades later tamed (and perhaps paid off) Attila the Hun; the infamous "pornocracy"- the five libertines who were descendants or lovers of Marozia, debauched daughter of one of Rome's most powerful families; Pope Paul III, "the greatest pontiff of the 16th century," who reinterpreted the Church's teaching and discipline; John XXIII, who in five short years starting in 1958 instituted reforms that led to Vatican II; and Benedict XVI, who had to contend with a modern global priest sex scandal. Epic and compelling, Absolute Monarchs is an enthralling history.

John Julius Norwich was the author of more than 20 books, including the New York Times bestseller Absolute Monarchs. He began his career in the British foreign service, but resigned his diplomatic post to become a writer. He was a chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund and the honorary chairman of the World Monuments Fund. He died in 2018.

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3 August

NEW - Omero Antonutti - actor and voice dubber

Narrator of Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful had long career

The actor Omero Antonutti, who acted in around 60 films and was the Italian voice of many international stars, was born on this day in 1935 in Basiliano, a village about 13km (eight miles) west of the city of Udine in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northeast Italy.   His most acclaimed performance came in Padre padrone, a 1977 film directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, a Palme d’Or winner at Cannes that was considered by many critics to be the co-directing brothers’ finest work.  Antonutti worked with the Taviani brothers again on La notte di San Lorenzo (1982), which won the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes, and Kaos (1984), in which he took the part of the playwright Luigi Pirandello in a film based on some of Pirandello’s own short stories.  He was often asked to portray significant figures in dramatisations of real-life events. For example, he took the part of Roberto Calvi, the ill-fated chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano in the Giuseppe Ferrara’s 2002 feature The Bankers of God: The Calvi Affair, and played the shady Sicilian banker Michele Sindona in Michele Placido’s 1995 film Un eroe borghese - A Bourgeois Hero.  Read more…

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Imperia Cognati - courtesan

Prostitute who became a celebrity

Imperia Cognati, who acquired celebrity status in Rome in the early 16th century as a courtesan to a number of rich and powerful figures, was born on this day in 1486.  Courtesans were originally the female companions of courtiers of the papal court, whose duties required them to be educated and familiar with etiquette, so that they could participate in the formalities of court life and take part in polite conversation.  In time, however, in some cases their companionship became of a more intimate nature and they became the mistresses of their courtiers, who in the papal court were clerics not permitted to marry.  It was common, too, for courtesans to be the companions of several clients simultaneously.  They were in effect a new class of prostitute, refined and educated enough to hold their own in polite society.  Imperia Cognati acquired her elevated status mainly through being the chosen companion of Agostino Chigi, a Sienese banker closely associated with Pope Alexander VI and others and a patron of the Renaissance.  At one time he was thought to be the richest banker in the world.  He lavished Imperia – as she was usually known – to the extent that she could afford to keep both a palace in Rome and a country villa.  Read more…

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Antonio da Sangallo the Younger - architect

Talented Florentine was commissioned by the Popes

Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, who left his mark on Rome during the Renaissance, died on this day in 1546 in Terni in Umbria.  Sangallo was the chief architect on St Peter’s Basilica from 1520 onwards and built many other beautiful churches and palaces in the city and throughout the Papal States.  He was born Antonio Cordiani in Florence in 1484. His grandfather had been a woodworker and his uncles, Giuliano and Antonio da Sangallo, were architects.  The young man followed his uncles to Rome to pursue a career in architecture and ended up taking the name Sangallo himself.  He became an assistant to Donato Bramante and started by preparing sketches for his master.  Recognising his talent, Bramante gave Sangallo projects to complete with no more than an outline of the design and motifs.  Sangallo’s first major commission was for the Church of Santa Maria di Loreto in 1507.  He came to the attention of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who later became Pope Paul III, and was commissioned to design the Farnese Palace in Piazza Farnese and a palace and church in the Cardinal’s home town of Gradoli.  Read more…

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Francesco Ferruccio - military leader

Florentine soldier celebrated in Italy’s national anthem 

Francesco Ferruccio, the military leader whose heroic attempt to defend Florence against the powerful army of the Holy Roman Empire is recalled in Italy’s national anthem, died on the battlefield on this day in 1530.  A Florentine by birth, Ferruccio had been charged with leading the army of the Republic of Florence as the city came under attack during the War of the League of Cognac, when the Pope Clement VII connived with the emperor Charles V to overthrow the republic and restore power in Florence to his own family, the Medici.  Despite being outnumbered, Ferruccio’s soldiers engaged the Imperial forces at Gavinana, just outside Florence, killed their leader and drove them back, only for the enemy to be reinforced by the arrival of 2,000 German mercenaries under the leadership of the condottiero, Fabrizio Maramaldo.  His army almost annihilated, Ferruccio was taken prisoner and, despite being wounded, was stabbed in the throat by Maramaldo and bled to death, an act considered against the code of chivalrous conduct that honourable soldiers were expected to observe.  More than 300 years later, Goffredo Mameli, the poet and patriot, recalled Ferruccio in the lyrics of a song, Il Canto degli Italiani, that would later be adopted as the national anthem of the united Italy.  Read more...

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La Scala - opera and ballet theatre

First night at the world’s most famous opera house

Milan’s Teatro alla Scala was officially inaugurated on this day in 1778.  Known to Italians simply as La Scala, the theatre has become the leading opera house in the world and many famous artists have appeared there. A fire had destroyed the Teatro Regio Ducale, which had previously been the home of opera in Milan. A group of 90 wealthy patrons, the owners of private boxes in the theatre, wrote to Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Este asking that a new theatre be built.  The new theatre was built on the site of the former Church of Santa Maria alla Scala, which is how the theatre got its name. The church was deconsecrated and demolished to make way for the theatre.  With the cost of the project met by the 90 patrons, who paid in advance for boxes, the new theatre was designed by neoclassical architect Giuseppe Piermarini and at the official opening on 3 August 1778, Antonio Salieri’s opera L’Europa riconosciuta was premiered.  As with most theatres at the time, the main floor had no seats, with audience members standing to watch the performances. This had the effect of making the theatre a meeting place, but also a venue for business dealings. Read more…

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Book of the Day: The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide To Italian Film From Its Origins To The Twenty-First Century, by Gian Piero Brunetta

Published in English for the first time, The History of Italian Cinema is the most comprehensive guide to Italian film ever assembled, tracing the complete history of filmmaking in Italy, from its origins in the silent era through its golden age in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and its subsequent decline to its resurgence today. Gian Piero Brunetta covers more than 1,500 films, discussing renowned masters including Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini, as well as directors lesser known outside Italy such as Dino Risi and Ettore Scola. He examines overlooked Italian genre films such as horror movies, comedies, and Westerns, and he also devotes attention to neglected periods such as the Fascist era. Brunetta illuminates the epic scope of Italian filmmaking, showing it to be a powerful cultural force in Italy and leaving no doubt about its enduring influence abroad. Encompassing the social, political, and technical aspects of the craft, he recreates the world of Italian cinema, giving readers rare insights into the actors, cinematographers, film critics, and producers that have made Italian cinema unique. 

Gian Piero Brunetta, an Italian film critic, historian and academic. is the foremost scholar of Italian cinema. Professor of cinema history and criticism at the University of Padua, he is the author of more than 20 books and has written about cinema for the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica as well as numerous Italian and foreign literary and film magazines.

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Omero Antonutti - actor and voice dubber

Narrator of Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful enjoyed long and successul career

Omero Antonutti had success on
screen and as a stage actor

The actor Omero Antonutti, who acted in around 60 films and was the Italian voice of many international stars, was born on this day in 1935 in Basiliano, a village about 13km (eight miles) west of the city of Udine in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northeast Italy.

His most acclaimed performance came in Padre padrone, a 1977 film directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, a Palme d’Or winner at Cannes that was considered by many critics to be the co-directing brothers’ finest work.

Antonutti worked with the Taviani brothers again on La notte di San Lorenzo (1982), which won the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes, and Kaos (1984) in which he took the part of the playwright Luigi Pirandello in a film based on some of Pirandello’s own short stories.

He was often asked to portray significant figures in dramatisations of real-life events. For example, he took the part of Roberto Calvi, the ill-fated chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano in the Giuseppe Ferrara’s 2002 feature The Bankers of God: The Calvi Affair, and played the shady Sicilian banker Michele Sindona in Michele Placido’s 1995 film Un eroe borghese - A Bourgeois Hero. In Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy, directed by Marco Tullio Giordano in 2012, Antonutti was cast as the Italian president, Giuseppe Saragat.

At the same time, his strong, deep voice meant his skills were in big demand as a voice dubber, with Italian cinema and television audiences preferring international productions to be voiced over by Italian actors, rather than have the visual experience spoiled by subtitles.

Antonutti was the Italian voice of Christopher Lee in the Lord of the Rings series, Sleepy Hollow, The Hobbit and other films. He voiced over Michael Gambon in The King’s Speech, Christopher Plummer in The Mystery of the Templars - National Treasure and Millennium - The Girl with the Hatred, and John Hurt in V for Vendetta. Omar Sharif, Robert Duvall, Donald Sutherland and Rutger Hauer were others whose words were interpreted by Antonutti.

Antonutti's voice can be heard as
the narrator in Life is Beautiful

Robert Benigni chose him to narrate Life is Beautiful in 1997, the film going on to win Oscars for Best Foreign Film, Best Leading Actor for Benigni himself and Best Soundtrack for Nicola Piovani.

As a young man, Antonutti lived in Trieste, the port city on the border of Italy and Slovenia. He found work in the shipyards but acted in his spare time, in the late 1950s appearing in the shows of the Silvio D’Amico Acting School before joining the company of the Teatro Stabile di Trieste.

His first film part came in 1966, when he appeared in Le piacevoli notte - Pleasant Nights, a trilogy of comedic tales set in the Middle Ages directed by Luciano Lucignani, acting in the illustrious company of Ugo Tognazzi, Gina Lollobrigida and Vittorio Gassman.

But it was not until the 1970s that his big screen career began in earnest. After landing a part in La donna della domenica (1975), the dramatisation of a popular murder mystery starring Marcello Mastroianni and Jacqueline Bisset and directed by Luigi Comencini, it was only two years before the Taviani brothers cast him as Efisio Ledda, the despotic father of Gavino Ledda in Padre Padrone, based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same title by Gavino Ledda, which describes the way Efisio refused to let his son attend elementary school in the 1940s and forced him instead to work on the family sheep farm in Sardinia, which meant he grew up illiterate.

The acclaim Antonutti received for the dramatic intensity of his portrayal of Efisio set him up for a long career in the cinema, part of which he spent in Spain, where his life is commemorated at the Valencia Film Festival.

Antonutti (left) played opposite Saverio Marconi
in the Taviani brothers' Padre Padrone

The last important movie in which he appeared was Gianna Amelio’s Hammamet, released in 2020, a story about the last years in Tunisia of the controversial former prime minister, Bettino Craxi, who went into voluntary exile there to escape jail after being prosecuted as part of the Tangentopoli bribes scandal that rocked Italian politics in the 1990s. Antonutti, by then in his 80s, played Craxi’s father.

In his 50-plus years as a movie and television actor, Antonutti never forgot his theatrical roots. He often returned to the Teatro Stabile in Trieste, taking part whenever a milestone was celebrated in the theatre’s history and occasionally even accepting a part in a play, such was his love of acting in its purest form, on stage in front of a live audience.

Sadly, he did not live long enough to witness the release of his final film. In declining health for a number of years, he died from cancer in November 2019 at the Ospedale Civile in Udine where he was receiving treatment.

Antonutti had spent the final 10 years of his life with his wife, Graziella, whom he married in 2009. His funeral took place at the Chiesa di Sant'Antonio Nuovo in Trieste.

The Loggia del Lionello is one of the architectural
features of Udine's Piazza della Libertà

Travel tip:

Udine, the nearest city to Antonutti’s home village of Basiliano, is an attractive and wealthy provincial city, known as the gastronomic capital of Friuli. Udine's most attractive area lies within the mediaeval centre, which has Venetian, Greek and Roman influences. The main square, Piazza della Libertà, features the town hall, the Loggia del Lionello, built in 1448–1457 in the Venetian-Gothic style, and a clock tower, the Torre dell’Orologio, which is similar to the clock tower in Piazza San Marco - St Mark's Square - in Venice. Long regarded as something of a hidden gem, Udine does not attract the tourist traffic of other, better-known Italian cities, yet with its upmarket coffee shops, artisan boutiques and warm, traditional eating places in an elegant setting, it has much to commend it.

Trieste's Canal Grande is overlooked by the 
Chiesa di Sant'Antonio Nuovo

Travel tip:

The port of Trieste, tucked away in a bay at the top of the Adriatic sea, is the capital of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region. Within only a few kilometres of the border with Slovenia to its east and south and less than 30km (19 miles) from the northern border of Croatia, Trieste had been disputed territory for thousands of years and officially became part of the Italian Republic only as recently as 1954. Previously it had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and then Yugoslavia, who disputed the border until the Treaty of Osimo in 1975.  The area today is one of the most prosperous in Italy and Trieste is a lively, cosmopolitan city and a major centre for trade and ship building.  The city has a coffee house culture that dates back to the Habsburg era.  Caffè Tommaseo, in Piazza Nicolò Tommaseo, near the grand open space of the Piazza Unità d’Italia, is the oldest in the city, dating back to 1830.

Also on this day:

1486: The birth of celebrated courtesan Imperia Cognati

1530: The death of Florentine military leader Francesco Ferruccio

1546: The death of architect Antonio da Sangallo the Younger

1778: The inauguration of Milan’s Teatro alla Scala

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2 August

Pietro Mascagni – composer

One opera was enough to build reputation of musician

Pietro Mascagni, the creator of the opera Cavalleria rusticana, died on this day in 1945 in Rome, at the age of 81.  Cavalleria rusticana was an outstanding success when it was first performed in Rome in 1890 and was said to have single-handedly brought the Verismo movement, in which the characters were ordinary people rather than gods, mythological figures or kings and queens, into Italian opera.  The beautiful intermezzo from the opera was used in the soundtrack of the 1980 film Raging Bull and a production of the opera was used as the setting for the climax of the 1990 film The Godfather Part III, with Michael Corleone’s son Anthony playing Turridu, the opera’s male protagonist. The film ends with the intermezzo playing.  In 2001 Andrea Bocelli recorded a song entitled Mascagni on his Cieli di Toscana album and had an excerpt from Cavalleria rusticana incorporated into the music.  The opera has been so successful that it has led to Mascagni sometimes being dismissed as a one-opera composer, but, in fact, the composer wrote 15 operas, as well as orchestral and piano music and songs.  Read more…

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Bologna railway station bombed

Biggest terrorist atrocity in Italy's history killed 85

Italy suffered the most devastating terrorist outrage in its history on this day in 1980 with the bombing of Bologna's main railway station.   A massive 23kg (51lbs) of explosive packed into a suitcase left in a crowded waiting room was detonated at 10.25am, creating a blast that destroyed much of the main building of the station and badly damaged a train on one of the platforms.  Many people, locals and tourists, Italians and foreign nationals, were caught up in the explosion. Some were killed instantly, others died as a result of the roof of the waiting room collapsing on to the victims. There were 85 deaths and more than 200 other people were wounded.  The bomb was clearly placed to cause mass casualties. It was the first Saturday in the traditional August holiday period, one of the busiest days of the year for rail travel, and the explosive-laden suitcase was left in a room with air conditioning, then still relatively rare in Italy. On a hot day, the room was naturally full of people.  The attack was the deadliest of several during a bleak period of 10-12 years in Italian history that became known as the Years of Lead, when the ideological struggle between the left and right in Italian politics was at its height.  Read more…

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Carlo Savina - film composer and musical director

Worked on major scores including The Godfather and Fellini’s Amarcord

Musical director Carlo Savina, who arranged soundtracks written by such luminaries of the film music industry as Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, was born on this day in 1919 in Turin.  Savina was also a prolific film composer in his own right and is credited with writing or arranging the scores of at least 200 movies in a career spanning more than 35 years. He won a David di Donatello award for Best Music for the 1985 crime drama The Pizza Connection, directed by Damiano Damiani and starring Michele Placido, a version of which was released in the United States as The Sicilian Connection.  Yet Savina is more frequently remembered for his work with Rota on the multi-award winning soundtrack of the first film in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy in 1972 and with Federico Fellini the following year on Amarcord, the maestro’s semi-autobiographical film about growing up in a village in the Fascist Italy of the 1930s.  He worked with Fellini and Rota on many projects, including La dolce vita (1960), which remains their most famous collaboration.  Read more…

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Francis Marion Crawford – author

Novelist found inspiration while living in Sorrento

The American writer Francis Marion Crawford was born on this day in 1854 in Bagni di Lucca in Tuscany.  A prolific novelist, Crawford became known for the vividness of his characterisations and the realism of his settings, many of which were places he had visited in Italy.  He chose to settle in later life in the coastal resort of Sorrento in Campania where he even had a street named after him, Corso Marion Crawford.  Crawford was the only son of the American sculptor, Thomas Crawford. He spent his childhood going backwards and forwards between Italy and America and studied at various American and European Universities.  He spent some time in India where he found the inspiration for his first successful novel, Mr Isaacs, which was published in 1882.  In 1883 he returned to Italy to settle there permanently. He lived at the Hotel Cocumella in the village of Sant’Agnello just outside Sorrento to begin with. He then bought a nearby farmhouse, from which he developed the Villa Crawford, an impressive clifftop residence easily identifiable from the sea by the tall buttresses Crawford added as a safeguard against erosion.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Understanding Italian Opera, by Tim Carter

Opera is often regarded as the pinnacle of high art. A "Western" genre with global reach, it is where music and drama come together in unique ways, supported by stellar singers and spectacular scenic effects. Yet it is also patently absurd -- why should anyone break into song on the dramatic stage? -- and shrouded in mystique. In Understanding Italian Opera, an engaging and entertaining guide, renowned music scholar Tim Carter unravels its many layers to offer a thorough introduction to Italian opera from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries.  Carter  offers explorations of five of the most enduring and emblematic Italian operas: Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea; Handel's Julius Caesar in Egypt; Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro; Verdi's Rigoletto; and Puccini's La Boheme. Shedding light on the creative collusions and collisions involved in bringing opera to the stage, the various, and varying, demands of the text and music, and the nature of its musical drama, Carter also shows how Italian opera has developed over the course of music history.

Tim Carter, professor of music at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has published widely on music in late Renaissance and early Baroque Italy, Mozart's operas, and American musical theater in the 1930s and '40s.

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1 August

Cosimo de' Medici

Banker who founded the Medici dynasty

The first of the Medici rulers of Florence, Cosimo di Giovanni de' Medici, died on this day in 1464 in Careggi in Tuscany.  Cosimo had political influence and power because of the wealth he had acquired as a banker and he is also remembered as a patron of learning, the arts and architecture.  Cosimo, who is sometimes referred to as Cosimo the Elder (il Vecchio) was born into a wealthy family in Florence in 1389. His father was a moneylender who then joined the bank of a relative before opening up his own bank in 1397.  The Medici Bank opened branches in Rome, Geneva, Venice and Naples and the Rome branch managed the papal finances in return for a commission.  The bank later opened branches in London, Pisa, Avignon, Bruges, Milan and Lubeck, which meant that bishoprics could pay their money into their nearest branch for the Pope to use.  In 1410, Baldassarre Cossa, who was on one side of a power struggle within the Catholic Church, borrowed money from the bank to buy himself into the office of Cardinal and in return put the Medici in charge of all the papal finances.   This gave the Medici family the power to threaten defaulting debtors with excommunication.  Read more…

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Antonio Cotogni – baritone

Singer who moved the composer Verdi to tears

Antonio ‘Toto’ Cotogni, who achieved international recognition as one of the greatest male opera singers of the 19th century, was born on this day in 1831 in Rome.  Cotogni’s fine baritone voice was particularly admired by the composer Giuseppe Verdi and music journalists wrote reviews full of superlatives after his performances.  Cotogni studied music theory and singing from an early age and began singing in churches and at summer music festivals outside the city.  He made his opera debut in 1852 at Rome’s Teatro Metastasio as Belcore in Donizetti's L’elisir d’amore.  After that he did not sing in public for a while, concentrating instead on building up his repertoire.  After singing in various Italian cities outside Rome he was signed up to sing at Rome’s Teatro Argentina in 1857 in Lucia di Lammermoor and Gemma di Vergy, also by Donizetti. Later that year he performed in Verdi's I due Foscari and Sanelli's Luisa Strozzi at Teatro Rossini in Turin. He met the soprano Maria Ballerini there and married her the following year.  His major breakthrough came in 1858 when he was asked to take the place of the famous baritone Felice Varesi in Nice.  Read more…

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Francesca Scanagatta - soldier

Woman pretended to be a man to join Austrian army

Francesca Scanagatta, an Italian woman who served in the Imperial Austrian army for seven years while pretending to be a man, was born on this day in 1776 in Milan.  Scanagatta – sometimes known as Franziska – was a small and apparently rather plain girl, who was brought up in Milan while the city was under Austrian rule. She admired the Austrian soldiers to the extent of wishing she could join the army, yet knew that as a girl she would not be allowed to.  Even so, it did not stop her dreaming and throughout her childhood and teenage years she worked on becoming physically stronger through exercise while reading as much literature as she could about the army.  By contrast, her brother Giacomo hated the idea of joining up. He was rather effeminate in nature and the very thought of becoming a soldier filled him with dread.  Yet his father wanted him to serve and arranged for him to attend a military school in Vienna.  Giacomo confided his fears in Francesca and she suddenly realised she had an opportunity to fulfil her dreams by signing up in his place.  So, in June 1794, dressed as a man, the 17-year-old travelled with Giacomo to Austria.  Read more…

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Paolo De Poli – enameller and painter

Artist devoted his life to an ancient technique

A painter who became fascinated with the ancient art of enamelling, Paolo De Poli was born on this day in 1905 in Padua.  At first De Poli experimented with enamelling small, decorative objects but after he mastered his craft he moved on to creating large panels for the interiors of ships, hotels and public buildings.  De Poli trained in drawing and embossing on metal at the art school Pietro Selvatico of Padua and then studied oil painting in Verona. He embarked on a career as a portrait and landscape painter.  In 1926 he participated for the first time in the Biennale di Venezia with the oil painting Still Life.  While travelling in the 1930s he visited art museums and archaeological sites and became interested in the traditional art of working with vitreous enamel.  From 1933 onwards, he devoted himself to creating enamel works on metal, experimenting with refined objects of many shapes in brilliant colours. He continued to improve his technique, reaching the highest level of skill.  In the 1940s, he collaborated with Milanese architect Gio Ponti in the production of furniture and decorative panels.  Read more…

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The Arab conquest of Sicily

Fall of Taormina put island in Muslim control

The Arab conquest of Sicily, which began in 827, was completed on this day in 902 with the fall of Taormina, the city in the northeast of the island that was the last stronghold of the Byzantine Empire, which had been in control for more than 350 years.  The island had been coveted by powers around the Mediterranean for centuries and raids by Saracens, as the Muslim Arabs from Roman Arabia became known, had been taking place since the mid-7th century without threatening to make substantial territorial gains.  However, in 827 the commander of the island's fleet, Euphemius, led a revolt against Michael II, the Byzantine Emperor, and when he and his supporters were at first driven from the island by forces loyal to Michael II, he turned to the Aghlabids, the rulers of Ifriqiya, the area of north Africa now known as Tunisia, for help.  The Aghlabids saw this as a strategic opportunity too good to miss and, with Euphemius’s forces to supplement their own, completed a successful landing on the southern coast and began to establish fortresses.  An attempt to capture Syracuse, which was then the capital, was beaten back, but when they turned their attention to Palermo it was a different story.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence, by Tim Parks

The Medici are famous as the rulers of Florence at the high point of the Renaissance, their power derived from the family bank. Medici Money tells the fascinating, frequently bloody story of the family and the dramatic development and collapse of their bank (from Cosimo who took it over in 1419 to his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent who presided over its precipitous decline). The Medici faced two apparently insuperable problems: how did a banker deal with the fact that the Church regarded interest as a sin and had made it illegal? How in a small republic like Florence could he avoid having his wealth taken away by taxation? But the bank became indispensable to the Church. And the family completely subverted Florence's claims to being democratic. They ran the city. Medici Money explores a crucial moment in the passage from the Middle Ages to the modern world, a moment when our own attitudes to money and morals were being formed.To read this book is to understand how much the Renaissance has to tell us about our own world. 

Tim Parks has lived in Italy since 1981. He is the author of 11 novels, three accounts of life in Italy, two collections of essays and many translations of Italian writers.

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31 July

NEW - Mario Bava - filmmaker

‘Master of Italian Horror’ had far-reaching influence

Mario Bava, whose near-50 year career in the film business saw him become a pioneer for horror and other genres in Italian cinema, was born on this day in 1914 in Sanremo.  At various times a screenwriter, director, cinematographer and special effects artist, Bava’s work was largely on low-budget productions, yet with his imagination and artistic flair he created films that would have far-reaching influence in the movie industry.  Although the content tended towards the macabre, Bava is credited as the driving force behind the first Italian science fiction film in The Day the Sky Exploded (1958), the first big-screen giallo - the Italian murder mystery genre - in The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), and the first Italian horror film in I Vampiri - The Vampires - in 1957.  His 1960 movie La maschera del demonio - The Mask of the Devil - was Italy’s first Gothic horror, his 1964 production Six Women for the Assassin is considered one of the earliest examples of the so-called ‘slasher’ movies, featuring mass murder. Steve Miner’s 1981 cult ‘slasher’ movie Friday the 13th Part II was directly inspired by Bava’s A Bay of Blood, which appeared a decade earlier.  Read more…

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Alessandro Algardi – sculptor

Baroque works of art were designed to illustrate papal power

Alessandro Algardi, whose Baroque sculptures grace many churches in Rome, was born on this day in 1598 in Bologna.  Algardi emerged as the principal rival of Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the field of portrait sculpture and although Bernini’s creations were known for their dynamic vitality and penetrating characterisation, Algardi’s works were appreciated for their sobriety and surface realism. Many of his smaller works of arts, such as marble busts and terracotta figures are now in collections and museums all over the world.  Algardi was born in Bologna, where he was apprenticed in the studio of Agostino Carracci from a young age.  He soon showed an aptitude for sculpture and his earliest known works, two statues of saints, were created for the Oratory of Santa Maria della Vita in Bologna.  After a short stay in Venice, he went to Rome in 1625 with an introduction from the Duke of Mantua to the late pope’s nephew, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, who employed him to restore ancient statues.  Although it was a time for great architectural initiatives in Rome, Algardi struggled for recognition at the start as Bernini was given most of the major sculptural commissions.  Read more…

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Salvatore Maranzano - crime boss

Sicilian ‘Little Caesar’ who established New York’s Five Families

The criminal boss Salvatore Maranzano, who became the head of organised crime in New York City after the so-called Castellammarese War of 1930-31, was born on this day in 1886 in Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily.  Maranzano’s position as ‘capo di tutti capi’ - boss of all bosses - in the city lasted only a few months before he was killed, but during that time he came up with the idea of organising criminal activity in New York along the lines of the military chain of command established in ancient Rome by his hero, Julius Caesar.  His fascination with and deep knowledge of the Roman general and politician led to him being nicknamed 'Little Caesar' by his Mafia contemporaries in New York.  Installing himself and four other survivors of the Castellammarese War as bosses, he established the principle of replacing the unstructured gang rivalry in New York with five areas of strictly demarcated territory to be controlled by criminal networks known as the Five Families.  Originally the Maranzano, Profaci, Mangano, Luciano and Gagliano families, they are now known by different names - Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese to be precise - but are essentially based on the same structure.  Read more…

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Antonio Conte - football coach

Southern Italian roots of the former boss of Chelsea

Antonio Conte, the coach who led Italy to the quarter-finals of Euro 2016 and later became head coach of Tottenham Hotspur, having previously managed Chelsea in the English Premier League, was born on this day in 1969 in Lecce, the Puglian city almost at the tip of the heel of Italy.  As a midfield player for Juventus, he won five Serie A titles and a Champions League. He also played in the European Championships and the World Cup for the Italy national team.  After returning to the Turin club as head coach, he won the Serie A title in each of his three seasons in charge before succeeding Cesare Prandelli as Italy's head coach.  Conte hails from a close-knit family in which his parents, Cosimino and Ada, imposed strict rules, although as a child Antonio was allowed to spend many hours playing football and tennis in the street with his brothers, Gianluca and Daniele.  He began to play organised football with Juventina Lecce, an amateur team coached by his father, but it was not long before US Lecce, the local professional club, recognised his potential and offered him an opportunity.   Juventina received compensation of 200,000 lire - the equivalent of about €300 or £250 in today's money - plus eight new footballs.  Read more…

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Book of the Day:  The Haunted World of Mario Bava, by Troy Howarth

The Haunted World of Mario Bava was first published in 2002. It has now been updated, revised and expanded by author Troy Howarth to give a better overview of Bava’s remarkable legacy as a director and “cinema magician.” This new edition contains new contributions from Bava’s son, director Lamberto Bava, and genre icon Barbara Steele. The book examines all of Bava’s directorial works in detail while also providing a portrait of the man himself—a man for whom publicity and self-promotion was always shied away from, even as he continued to work himself to the point of exhaustion as he improvised and pushed himself to deliver films which would go on to influence such major filmmakers as William Friedkin, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Tim Burton and Joe Dante.

Troy Howarth, who was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1997, began work on The Haunted World of Mario Bava - his first book - while still in college. The book was first published in England to very good reviews, eventually selling out. This revised and expanded edition was published in 2014, marking the start of a relationship between Howarth and Midnight Marquee Press which has also yielded So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years of Italian Thriller Films and Splintered Visions: Lucio Fulci and His Films.

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Mario Bava - filmmaker

‘Master of Italian Horror’ had far-reaching influence

Mario Bava followed his father
into the film industry

Mario Bava, whose near-50 year career in the film business saw him become a pioneer for horror and other genres in Italian cinema, was born on this day in 1914 in Sanremo.

At various times a screenwriter, director, cinematographer and special effects artist, Bava’s work was largely on low-budget productions, yet with his imagination and artistic flair he created films that would have far-reaching influence in the movie industry.

Although the content tended towards the macabre, Bava is credited as the driving force behind the first Italian science fiction film in The Day the Sky Exploded (1958), the first big-screen giallo - the Italian murder mystery genre - in The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), and the first Italian horror film in I Vampiri - The Vampires - in 1957.

His 1960 movie La maschera del demonio - The Mask of the Devil - was Italy’s first Gothic horror, his 1964 production Six Women for the Assassin is considered one of the earliest examples of the so-called ‘slasher’ movies, featuring mass murder. Steve Miner’s 1981 cult ‘slasher’ movie Friday the 13th Part II was directly inspired by Bava’s A Bay of Blood, which appeared a decade earlier.

Directors such a Martin Scorcese, Quentin Tarantino, Francis Ford Coppola  and Tim Burton all cite Bava as an influence on their own work, while the British rock band Black Sabbath, pioneers of the heavy metal genre, admitted that when they changed their name from Earth in 1968, they chose Black Sabbath because it was the title of a Bava film playing in a local cinema.

Although Bava’s father, Eugenio, was working as a special effects photographer and cameraman on Italian silent films when he was growing up, Mario’s first ambition was to make a living from painting. He had some talent, yet his paintings sold for relatively small amounts and turning them out with a frequency that could generate a living was impossible.

He needed a job in addition to his painting and through his father’s contacts found work as an assistant to other Italian cinematographers. He helped his father directly in the special effects department of the Istituto Luce, the film production plant created by the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who wanted Italy to be at the forefront of the movie business as it began to take off as an entertainment industry in the 1920s.

Bava rejected several opportunities to take
his many talents to Hollywood

By the late 1930s, Bava had set up as a cinematographer in his own right and worked with the up-and-coming director Roberto Rossellini on two short films in 1940.

He began directing in the 1950s, taking over when Riccardo Freda walked out on the project, to finish I vampiri and working jointly with Paolo Heusch on The Day the Sky Exploded.

A somewhat unassuming person, Bava turned down several opportunities in Hollywood that would have enhanced both his standing and his bank balance. Indeed, most of the 72 films he made as director failed to achieve major commercial success. 

Yet many came to be regarded as classics, earning favourable comparison with the works of directors of much higher profile such as Alfred Hitchcock.  Movie historians now regard Bava as 'the Master of Italian Horror'.

Bava was proud that his son, Lamberto, followed him into the business. Lamberto worked as assistant to his father for 14 years before directing his first solo film in 1980.

His death in Rome in 1980 from a heart attack at the age of 65 came as a major shock to his friends and family and to the industry as a whole, given that he had undergone a physical a few days earlier and was declared by his doctor to be in perfect health.  He was buried at the Flaminio Cemetery in Rome.

The port of Sanremo in Liguria was one of the
first Italian resorts to become a tourist destination

Travel tip:

Sanremo, an Italian Riviera resort most famous as the home of the Sanremo Music Festival, the prestigious song contest that has been held there every year since 1951, is an historic Italian holiday destination that was one of the first to benefit when the phenomenon of tourism began to take hold in the mid-18th century, albeit primarily among the wealthy. Several grand hotels were established in the Ligurian town and the Emperor Nicholas II of Russia was among the European royals who took holidays there. The Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel Prize, made it his permanent home.  Blessed with a comfortable climate most of the year, the area produces notable olive oils and is an important centre for the commercial growing of flowers.

Rome's Flaminio Cemetery is known for
its striking contemporary architecture

Travel tip:

Rome’s Flaminio Cemetery, established in 1945, is the largest cemetery in Italy, covering an area of 140 hectares. Also known as the Prima Porta cemetery, it can be found some 17km (11 miles) north of the centre of Rome. Designed by Elena Luzzato, it is considered a masterpiece of contemporary cemetery architecture. It houses the tombs of many famous personalities of Italian culture, art, entertainment, sport and politics, including the TV journalist Ilaria Alpi, the Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer, actors Rossano Brazzi, Gino Cervi and Virna Lisi, the athlete Pietro Mennea, the footballer Giorgio Chinaglia, singers Alberto Rabagliati and Renato Rascel, and Natasha Sophia Simpson, an 11-year-old American killed in the December 27, 1985 terrorist attack on Rome’s Fiumicino Airport.

Also on this day:

1598: The birth of sculptor Alessandro Algardi

1886: The birth of New York Mafia crime boss Salvatore Maranzano

1969: The birth of footballer and coach Antonio Conte

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