Death of the woman who inspired Donizetti and Verdi
Giuseppina Strepponi in a portrait that can
be seen at the museum at Teatro alla Scala
Opera singer Giuseppina Strepponi died on this day in 1897 at the village of Sant’Agata in the province of Piacenza in Emilia-Romagna.
She was the second wife of the composer Giuseppe Verdi and is often credited with helping him achieve his first successes, having starred in several of his early operas.
Strepponi was born Clelia Maria Josepha Strepponi in Lodi, a little over 40km south-east of Milan, in 1815.
Her father was the organist at Monza Cathedral and also a composer and he gave her piano lessons when she was very young. At the age of 15 she was enrolled at the Milan Conservatory and she won first prize for singing in her final year.
Strepponi made her professional debut in 1834 at the Teatro Orfeo in Taranto and enjoyed her first success the following spring in Trieste, singing the title role in Rossini’sMatilde di Shabran. She quickly became a celebrity, singing Donizetti,Bellini and Rossini roles all over Italy to great acclaim.
A portrait of Giuseppe Verdi in 1839, the year of his first opera, Oberto
She made her debut at Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1839 as Leonora in the first production of Giuseppe Verdi’s first opera, Oberto. Her strong performance was one of the main reasons the opera was received so well.
Despite suffering illnesses, Strepponi continued to be a popular singer in the early 1840s. She sang the title role in Donizetti’s Adelia in 1841, which he had written specifically for her. In 1842 she received acclaim for her performance of Abigaille in the world premiere of Verdi’s Nabucco at La Scala.
By 1844 she was beginning to experience vocal problems and she had a disastrous season in Palermo in 1845 when she was booed by the audience.
Most of her performances after that were in Verdi operas and she retired from the stage in February 1846 at the age of 31.
Her voice had been damaged by overwork during a career in which she had several affairs and carried on working through at least three known pregnancies.
It was only after she retired and moved to Paris to become a singing teacher that what had been a professional relationship with Verdi blossomed into something more. A widower whose first wife, Margherita, had died young, Verdi visited her there and they began a romance.
The couple returned to Italy in 1849 and began living together in Busseto, Verdi’s home town. She was shunned in the town and at church because they were not married and so the couple moved to a house in the nearby village of Sant’Agata, which is today known as Villa Verdi.
Strepponi helped Verdi’s work by translating for him and supplying comments and criticism while he was composing.
The Villa Verdi, where Strepponi and Verdi lived for almost half a century before her death in 1897
They were finally married in 1859 and lived together happily until Strepponi became bedridden through arthritis. She was 82 when she died from pneumonia on November 14, 1897, and was initially buried in Milan.
Verdi had left instructions in his will that he wanted to be buried next to her, but after his death he was buried in another cemetery in Milan.
However, so they could be together once again, on February 26, 1901 their bodies were both transferred to be buried in the oratory at the Casa di Riposo, a retirement home for musicians Verdi had created. At the ceremony, Arturo Toscanini directed a choir singing the famous Va, pensiero chorus from Nabucco.
Travel tip:
Villa Verdi, where Strepponi died, is a house Verdi owned from 1848 till his death in 1901 in the village of Sant’Agata in the province of Piacenza. He extended the original house and developed the park around the house, planting many exotic trees. Today visitors can view some of the rooms, including Strepponi’s room, with its original bed, where she died in 1897.
The Basilica Cattedrale della Vergine Assunta
dominates Lodi's Piazza della Vittoria
Travel tip:
Lodi, the birthplace of Strepponi, is a city in Lombardy, to the south-east of Milan. The town’s main square, Piazza della Vittoria, has porticoes on all four sides and is listed by the Italian Touring Club among the most beautiful squares in Italy. In 1796, in his first major battle, the young Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the Austrians in the Battle of Lodi.
Tragic sister’s simple virtue stopped the traffic in the capital
Sister Agostina Livia Pietrantoni
was murdered by a patient
Nun Agostina Livia Pietrantoni died on this day in 1894 in Rome after being attacked by a patient at the hospital where she was working.
Her story touched Romans so deeply that her funeral brought the city to a standstill as thousands of residents lined the streets and knelt before her casket when it passed them.
The November 16 edition of the daily newspaper Il Messaggero reported that a more impressive spectacle had never before been seen in Rome.
‘From one o’clock in the afternoon, the streets close to Santo Spirito, and all the roads it was believed that the funeral procession would pass, were crowded with people to the point of making the flow of traffic difficult.’
Sister Agostina was beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1972 and canonised by Pope John Paul II in 1999. Her feast day is celebrated each year on November 12.
Sant’Agostina was born Livia Pietrantoni in 1864 in Pozzaglia Sabina to the north east of Rome. She was the second of 11 children born to a poor farmer and his wife.
She started work at the age of seven doing manual labour, carrying heavy sacks of stones and sand for road construction.
The former Santo Spirito Hospital, now a convention centre,
is situated on the banks of the Tiber close to the Vatican
When she was 12, she went to Tivoli with other poor children to work during the olive harvesting.
Livia refused offers of marriage when she was older as she had her heart set on entering a religious order and, after an initial rejection, was accepted into the Thouret order, becoming a nun and taking the name of Agostina in 1887.
Sister Agostina was sent to work as a nurse at Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome. While working in the tuberculosis ward she contracted the disease herself, but miraculously recovered from it and continued to work there.
On one occasion while working on the tuberculosis ward she was attacked and beaten after seizing a knife from a male patient.
The patient, Giuseppe Romanelli, began to harass her and send her taunting death threats. Her fellow Sisters asked her to take time off work for her own safety but she refused.
On the morning of November 13, 1894, Romanelli stabbed Sister Agostina to death in a dark corridor at the hospital.
After suffering stab wounds to her shoulder, left arm, jugular and chest, she died, moments after forgiving her killer.
Following her canonisation, Sant’Agostina Pietrantoni was named as the Patron Saint of Nurses in 2003.
The village of Pozzaglia Sabina in Lazio, where Agostina
was born and where her remains are buried
Travel tip:
Pozzaglia Sabina, where Sant’Agostina was born, is a small comune in the province of Rieti in Lazio. In 2004 Sant’Agos- tina’s remains were returned to her home town and buried in her former parish church, the Church of San Nicola di Bari, in the first chapel on the left side of the church, which is now dedicated to her.
Travel tip:
Tivoli, where Sant’Agostina worked as a child harvesting olives, is to the north east of Rome. It is famous for its 16th century Villa d’Este, which has a terraced hillside garden with spectacular fountains. The Villa d’Este is now a state museum and is listed as a UNESCO world heritage site.
Financial crisis brings down 'untouchable' premier
A large crowd assembled outside the Palazzo Quirinale
to celebrate Berlusconi's resignation in 2011
Silvio Berlusconi resigned as prime minister of Italy on this day in 2011. A controversial, polarising figure, he had dominated Italian politics for 17 years.
With Italy in the grip of the economic crisis that had brought severe consequences to other parts of the Euro zone, Berlusconi lost his parliamentary majority a few days earlier and promised to resign when austerity measures demanded by Brussels were passed by both houses of the Italian parliament.
The Senate had approved the measures the day before. When the lower house voted 380-26 in favour, Berlusconi was true to his word, meeting president Giorgio Napoletano within two hours to tender his resignation.
His last journey from the Palazzo Chigi to the Palazzo Quirinale, the respective official residences of the prime minister and the president, was not a dignified one.
When he arrived at the Quirinale, he was booed by a large and somewhat hostile crowd that had gathered, entering the building to shouts of 'buffoon' and 'mafioso'. A gathering of musicians and singers serenaded him with a version of the Hallelujah Chorusfrom Handel's Messiah. After the meeting concluded, he left by a side entrance to avoid further barracking.
Berlusconi had until that moment held a reputation as a consummate survivor, becoming Italy's longest-serving post-war prime minister despite a litany of scandals.
Berlusconi is one of the richest men in Italy
One of Italy's richest men, he built a fortune estimated at $9billion (€9bn) from a business empire that comprised three television channels, a major publishing house, a national newspaper, the AC Milan football club and countless smaller companies.
He entered politics in In 1993, founding his own political party, Forza Italia - literally, Italy Power - named after an Italian football chant, and was prime minister within a year.
As the head of a decidedly right-wing coalition with the post-Fascist Alleanza Nationale (National Alliance) and the separatist Lega Nord (Northern League), he made many Italians uncomfortable about the direction in which the country was moving.
Yet many hoped his business prowess could help revitalize Italy's economy and saw him as a refreshing change from a political establishment associated with instability and corruption.
The coalition was always an uneasy one, however, and the hopes of his supporters began to erode when Berlusconi was indicted for tax fraud. He lost to the left-wing Romani Prodi in the election of 1996.
Berlusconi's capacity for bouncing back, though, was remarkable. By 2001 he was back in power, having rallied his former allies to defeat Prodi and held together the longest-serving Italian government since the Second World War.
Defeated by Prodi again in 2006, he was re-elected in 2008 at the helm of a revamped party, renamed the People of Freedom.
Romano Prodi
But Italy's economic crisis proved too much for him in the end. In the week of his resignation, the interest rate on Italy's enormous public debts - estimated at around $2.6 trillion - touched 7%, the rate at which Greece, Ireland and Portugal were forced to seek bailouts from the EU.
Berlusconi was never far removed from scandal during his political career but his ability to brush off allegations of corruption or sexual indiscretion made him seem untouchable.
Less than a year after his resignation, however, he was given a four-year sentence for tax fraud and barred from public office, a verdict upheld in Italy's supreme court a year later.
Because he was over 75, he could not be jailed under Italian law and instead served four hours a week of community service, working with elderly dementia patients at a Catholic care home near Milan.
A seven-year sentence imposed in 2013 on charges of having sex with an underage girl was overturned in 2015 and Berlusconi says he will make a political comeback. But his reformed Forza Italia party has so far attracted only minimal support
The Palazzo Chigi in Rome, the official residence of
the Italian prime minister
Travel tip:
The 16th-century Palazzo Chigi, which overlooks the Piazza Colonna and the Via del Corso in Rome, was in the ownership of the Chigi family, part of Roman nobility, from 1659 until the 19th century. It became the residence of the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador to Italy in 1878 before being bought by the Italian state in 1916, when it became the home of the Minister for Colonial Affairs. Later it was the official residence of the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and in 1961 became the official meeting place of Council of Ministers, whose President is the head of the Italian government and can now use the palace as his official residence.
Waterways are another key feature of Milano Due
Travel tip:
Berlusconi's business roots are in the groundbreaking 1970s new town of Milano Due, which was built by Berlusconi's company Edilnord as a residential centre close to the Segrate area of suburban Milan. Although property there is nowadays marketed with a well-heeled clientele in mind, Berlusconi conceived it as something different, providing homes for families in a safe environment, an inter-connecting system of walkways ensuring that its residents could reach any part of the community without encountering any vehicular traffic. Every house or apartment was connected to a cable television system run by another Berlusconi company, TeleMilano, Italy's first private television channel, was the project from which the tycoon would eventually grow his national TV company, Mediaset.
(Picture credits: Crowd scene by Lalupa; Berlusconi by European People's Party; Palazzo Chigi by Geobia; Romano Prodi by Presidenza della Repubblica; all via Wikimedia Commons)
Luca Zingaretti: famous for his portrayal
of the Sicily detective Inspector Montalbano
The actor Luca Zingaretti, best known for his portrayal of Inspector Montalbano in the TV series based on Andrea Camilleri's crime novels, was born on this day in 1961 in Rome.
The Montalbano mysteries, now into a 10th series, began broadcasting on Italy's RAI network in 1999 and has become a hit in several countries outside Italy, including France, Spain, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Zingaretti has played the famously maverick Sicilian detective in all 28 feature-length episodes to date, each one based on a novel or short story collection by the Sicilian-born author Camilleri, now in his 92nd year but still writing.
Although he had established himself as a stage actor and had appeared in a number of films, it was the part of Montalbano that established Zingaretti's fame.
Yet he had hoped to become a star on another kind of stage as a professional footballer. Growing up in the Magliana neighbourhood in the south-west of Rome, he spent as much time as he could out in the streets kicking a ball and played for a number of junior teams.
Zingarette in a scene from Inspector Montalbano
He was good enough, at 17, to earn a semi-professional contract with Rimini, then in Serie B, but a scholarship to the Silvio d'Amico Academy of Dramatic Arts persuaded him to return to Rome, abandoning his football career.
Before training to be an actor, Zingaretti had played
football at a semi-professional level in Rimini
On graduating, he began to work in the theatre, appearing in Chekhov's Three Sisters, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. He did his first film work in 1987 and attracted critical acclaim for the first time in the director Marco Risi's movie The Wolfpack in 1994.
His profile was raised a little more when he played a Mafia boss in the popular TV series La Piovra in 1997 and it was soon afterwards that he learned of the plan to adapt Camilleri's Montalbano books for the small screen.
Zingaretti was intrigued because Camilleri had been one of his tutors at the Academy and he was familiar with the novels and their main character. He auditioned and landed the part.
The exposure sent Zingaretti's career to another level, making him the most famous face on Italian TV and Italy's best paid actor. Although he considers himself Roman in character, he immersed himself in the Montalbano role and earned Camilleri's respect for his authentic portrayal of a Sicilian, while the tough but caring detective, always rooting for the disadvantaged and exploited, won him a place in the affections of millions of viewers.
The city of Ragusa in southern Sicily, where much of the
location filming of Inspector Montalbano took place
In Zingaretti's opinion, the show, which is filmed on location in Sicily, is popular because Camilleri captures the lost charm of the island he knew as a child and because he created in Montalbano an old-fashioned character, dealing with the worst the crime world can throw at him, rejecting corruption and retaining a strict moral code.
Zingaretti's film career has continued in tandem, bringing him recognition among his peers. He won two awards for Best Actor - a David di Donatello from the Academy of Italian Cinema and a Karlovy Vary Award from the film festival of the same name - for Alla luce del sole, a real-life drama directed by Roberto Faenza in which Zingaretti played Pino Puglisi, a Roman Catholic priest killed by the Mafia.
Married to the Naples-born actress Luisa Ranieri, whom he met on the set of the TV series Cefalonia, he became a father for the second time in 2015. Their wedding took place in Sicily at the Castello di Donnafugata, near Ragusa.
His brother, Nicola, is a politician, a former MEP and a member of the Democratic Party of Italy. He is currently president of the region of Lazio.
A beautiful, atmospheric picture that captures
the dome of the Duomo di San Giorgio.
Travel tip:
Most of the Commissario Montalbano series is shot on location, mainly around the picturesque city of Ragusa, the historic centre of which perches on top of a hill called Monte Iblei. Rebuilt in Baroque style after the earthquake of 1693, it has charming narrow streets, pretty squares and some elegant buildings, including the 18th century Duomo di San Giorgio.
Travel tip:
The fictional town of Vigà ta, where Montalbano is based in the Camilleri novels, is modelled on Porto Empedocle, a industrial port near Agrigento on the south coast of Sicily and Camilleri's home town. Because of the association, the town changed its name to Porto Empedocle Vigà ta, hoping to attract more visitors, although much of the exterior filming of buildings portrayed as being in Vigà ta actually took place in Ragusa. The police station where Montalbano works is the town hall in Scicli, another inland town a few kilometres south of Ragusa.
He composed the score for Tornatore's hauntingly poignant Cinema Paradiso and for Maddalena, a somewhat obscure 1971 film by the Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz that included the acclaimed Come Maddalena and Chi Mai, which later reached number two in the British singles chart after being used for the 1981 TV series The Life and Times of David Lloyd George.
Much of Morricone's film music, as well as his more than 100 classical compositions and numerous jazz and pop songs from the 1960s and 70s, has been recorded and his commercial sales have topped 70 million records worldwide.
Listen to Morricone's beautiful Gabriel's Oboe from The Mission
Morricone, whose parents moved to Rome from Arpino, an ancient hill town near Frosinone in southern Lazio, was brought up in the Trastevere district of the capital, one of five children raised by his father, Mario, a professional musician who played the trumpet, and mother Libera, who ran a small textile business.
He learned the fundamentals of music from his father before entering the National Academy of St Cecilia, where he first met Sergio Leone.
Sergio Leone, the director behind
the 'Dollars' trilogy
On graduating, he had some success writing for the theatre as well as for radio. After marrying his girlfriend of six years, Maria Travia, in 1956, and becoming a father a year later, he began supporting his family by playing in a jazz band and arranging pop songs for the Italian public broadcaster, RAI.
Over the next few years he composed pop songs for Rita Pavone, Mario Lanza, Paul Anka and Francoise Hardy among many others.
He branched into film music for the first time in the early 1960s, taking the commission that was to change his life when Leone, his friend from St Cecilia's, asked him to write the score for his groundbreaking Western, A Fistful of Dollars.
Starring the 34-year-old American actor, Clint Eastwood, in his first major role, A Fistful of Dollars was a huge success, spawning two more in the genre that became known as 'Spaghetti Westerns'. For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly each grossed more than $20 million.
A Fistful of Dollars made $14.5 million, which was incredible given that Leone made it on a budget of less than $250,000. With only limited access to a full orchestra, Morricone had to improvise, incorporating gunshots, cracking whips, a whistle, a jew's harp, trumpets, and a Fender electric guitar into his score, as well as using human, mainly female voices as musical instruments. The result was a highly distinctive score that it became a classic in the history of cinema music, as instantly recognizable today as it was then, and several of Morricone's innovative measures became part of his repertoire.
Listen to Morricone's music for the opening scene of The Hateful Eight
The trilogy began a relationship with Sergio Leone that would last 20 years and opened many doors for Morricone, whose career prospered from then on.
Morricone was particularly disappointed not to win with The Mission, which features the wonderful melody Gabriel's Oboe as its main theme, complaining that jazz musician Herbie Hancock's score for Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight, while beautifully done, used existing music.
The Hateful Eight: Morricone's score for
Quentin Tarantino's film won an Oscar
Further nominations came for Barry Levison's Bugsy (1991) and Tornatore's Malena (2000), and by the second decade of the new millennium Morricone's 50-year movie career had brought him 44 major awards.
It appeared, though, that the award he craved above all would elude him, and an honorary Oscar in 2007 for his overall contribution to film music seemed a slightly hollow consolation prize.
But then, late in 2014, just past his 86th birthday, he was approached by Quentin Tarantino, with whom he had collaborated previously but had had a difficult relationship. Morricone had not scored a complete Western for 35 years and had not worked on a high-profile Hollywood production since 2000 but The Hateful Eight, set just after the American Civil War, appealed to him.
He produced a score that was magnificent, one that would sit comfortably alongside anything he had done previously, from the sweeping L'Ultima Diligenza per Red Rock that accompanies the chillingly atmospheric opening scenes, to Regan's Theme, a melody of gathering pace with echoes of what he did for Leone half a century previously.
It earned Morricone his third Golden Globe, to go with The Mission and the ragtime-jazz score he wrote for Tornatore's Legend of 1900 and then, at the 87th Academy Awards night of February 22, 2016, the one he thought would never come and which made him, at 87 years, the oldest winner of a competitive Oscar.
Morricone, who has never left Italy despite being offered a villa in Hollywood by one of the studios he worked with, remains an active composer. He and Maria had four children - Marco, Alessandra, Andrea, who himself became a film music composer, and Giovanni, who is a film director and producer in New York.
UPDATE: Morricone died in July 2020, aged 91, as a result of injuries sustained in a fall. Following a private funeral, he was entombed in Cimitero Laurentino in Rome.
The unspoilt hill town of Arpino
Travel tip:
Arpino, home of Morricone's parents, is a hill town situated about 120km south-east of Rome, 46km north-west of Frosinone in Lazio. Clinging to a ridge on top of a hill, it is relatively accessible from a nearby station on one of the Rome-Naples railway lines, yet attracts few tourists and therefore has the unspoilt feel of a traditional southern Italian community.
Travel tip:
The Trastevere district of Rome, which sits alongside the River Tiber, is regarded as one of the city's most charming neighbourhoods, full of winding, cobbled streets and well preserved medieval houses. Increasingly fashionable with Rome's young professional class as a place to live, it has an abundance of restaurants and bars and a lively student music scene.
The military leader - condottiero in Italian -Niccolò III d’Este was born on this day in 1383 in Ferrara.
He was the son of Alberto d’Este, Marquis of Ferrara, and became ruler of the city when he was just ten years old on the death of his father, under the protection of Venice, Florence and Bologna.
A relative, Azzo d’Este, who was working for Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, tried to attack Ferrara, but Venice, Florence and Bologna helped Niccolò see off the challenge to his rule.
In 1403 Niccolò joined the league formed against the Duke of Milan and was appointed Captain General of the Papal Army by Pope Boniface IX.
At the age of 13, Niccolò was married for the first time, to Gigliola da Carrara, the daughter of Francesco II da Carrara, Lord of Padua.
Although his first marriage was childless, he fathered an illegitimate son, Ugo, in 1405. After the death of his wife, he was married for a second time to Parisina Malatesta, the daughter of Andrea Malatesta, and they had three children.
In 1425, Niccolò had Parisina and Ugo executed on charges of adultery, accusing them of having an affair. At the same time he issued a decree that all women within his domains found to be guilty of adultery were to be put to death, although he had to rescind this order once it was determined that this action would depopulate Ferrara.
Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan
He married his third wife, Ricciarda of Saluzzo in 1429. She bore him two children. In total he had five legitimate children and at least 11 illegitimate children.
Niccolò steadily established his reputation as an able military leader with a number of successful campaigns but it was Ferrara's role in brokering a peace between Milan and Venice in 1432 that particularly boosted the city's prestige.
As a result, Ferrara was chosen to be the seat of a council in 1438.
Niccolò died in Milan on Boxing Day in 1441 after the Christmas feast and it was widely suspected he had been poisoned. He had been invited to Milan apparently in friendship by Filippo Maria Visconti, the Duke of Milan, whose father, Gian Galeazzo, Niccolò had previously been in league against.
He was succeeded as Marquis of Ferrara by his illegitimate son, Leonello d’Este, who concentrated on sponsoring the arts and literature to the benefit of the city.
The entrance to Via Garibaldi from Piazza Municipio
Travel tip:
The d’Este family ruled the city of Ferrara in Emilia-Romagna between 1240 and 1598. You can still see the narrow, medieval streets to the west and south of the city centre, between the main thoroughfares of Via Ripa Grande and Via Garibaldi, which were the original core of the city in the middle ages.
Building work on the magnificent, moated Este Castle (Castello Estense) began two years after Niccolò’s birth and it was added to and improved by successive rulers of Ferrara until the end of the Este line. The castle was purchased for 70,000 lire by the province of Ferrara in 1874 to be used as the headquarters of the Prefecture.
(Photo of Via Garibaldi by Geobia via Wikimedia Commons)
Screen siren turned back on glamour roles to prove talent
Virna Lisi in a Hollywood publicity shot
The actress Virna Lisi, born on this day in 1936, might have become the new Marilyn Monroe if she had allowed Hollywood to shape her career in the way the movie moguls had planned.
She was certainly blessed with all the physical attributes to fulfil their commercial ambitions - no less a screen goddess than Brigitte Bardot called her 'the most beautiful woman in the world' - but decided she was too good an actress to be typecast as mere window dressing or eye candy and ultimately rejected their advances.
Born Virna Pieralisi in the town of Jesi, in the province of Ancona in Marche, where her father had a marble importing business, she moved with her family to Rome in the early 1950s and Virna's progress through school had her earmarked for a place at business college.
But on the recommendation of a friend of the family, the singer and actor Giacomo Rondinella, she was given a part in a film, E Napoli canta (And Naples sings). Just 17 years old and a natural beauty, so much did she charm Italian film producers that she was quickly in demand.
It was clear to the critics that she could act, winning praise for her performance in Sergio Corbucci's Romolo e Remo (Romulus and Remus), and she won many parts in Italian TV dramas. But it was her looks that were most sought after, earning her a lucrative contract advertising toothpaste in a TV commercial, her face accompanied by the slogan 'con quella bocca può dire ciò che vuole' (with that mouth, she can say whatever she wants).
Hollywood studio bosses wanted Virna Lisi
to become the new Marilyn
She minded less about her acting talent being overlooked in the early 1960s than she would later, especially when the chance came to make significant money in Hollywood.
Transformed into a blue-eyed blonde temptress, Lisi starred opposite Jack Lemmon in the comedy How to Murder Your Wife, famously making her entrance by emerging from a giant cake, and had other hits with Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra and Rod Steiger.
The press fawned over her, one magazine article describing her as 'like Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly put together', but although she accepted being a cover girl she soon tired of lightweight, fluffy roles. She wanted to be seen as an actress, rather than simply someone who looked good on screen.
She turned down an invitation to pose in Playboy magazine, bought herself out of her contract with United Artists and returned to Italy. Back home, as if to prove she was serious about wanting different, more challenging parts, she rejected the title role offered by Dino de Laurentiis in Roger Vadim's film Barbarella, which went instead to Jane Fonda.
It took a while to achieve her ambitions but, little by little, Lisi shed her former image. Her performance alongside Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani in The Secret of Santa Vittoria, in which an Italian wine-producing village hides millions of bottles from plundering Nazis, was one step in her chosen direction.
She took a break into the early 1970s to spend more time with her husband and their son, Corrado, but on her return was acclaimed for her role as the sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, which won her the first of six Nastro d'Argento awards for best actress or best supporting actress.
Virna Lisi achieved her ambition where her portrayal
of Catherine de' Medici won acclaim and awards
At the age of 57, she was overcome with emotion when he name was read out for La Reine Margot at Cannes. "My son told me not to cry," she said later. "It was very stupid - but it had taken me 35 years."
Two years later, Lisi won an Italian Golden Globe for best actress in Follow Your Heart (1996), in which she played an elderly woman dying of cancer.
Lisi continued to work until she died in Rome in December 2014, aged 78, having filmed a television comedy earlier in the same year. Her husband, Franco Pesci, an architect she had met in Rome in the late 1950s and to whom she had been married 53 years, passed away in 2013.
Travel tip:
Rome's Colosseum, the largest and most famous Roman amphitheatre in the world, was constructed over eight years between 72 AD and 80 AD. It was capable of accommodating 50,000 spectators and had 80 entrances. It remains the city's most visited tourist attraction, ahead of St Peter's Basilica and The Pantheon.
Jesi, which was the site of a settlement in the fourth century BC, has developed as an industrial centre but maintains its cultural heritage within perfectly preserved medieval walls, built along the lines of its old Roman defences between the 13th and 14th centuries. Notable buildings include the Cathedral of San Settimio in Piazza Federico II, the nearby 12th century church of San Floriano, which once contained paintings by Lorenzo Lotto that are now housed in the Pinacoteca Civica. The Teatro Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, named in honour of the 18th century musician and composer who was born in Jesi, stands in the elegant Piazza della Repubblica.
