Francesco Cirio - canning pioneer

Market trader whose name became known worldwide

Francesco Cirio

Francesco Cirio, who pioneered the technique of canning food products to preserve their freshness, was born on this day in 1836 in the town of Nizza Monferrato in what is now Piedmont.

His father was a grain trader and Francesco developed entrepreneurial instincts at an early age.  By the age of 14 he was working at the fruit and vegetable market of Porta Palazzo in Turin.

He soon became aware that there was a demand for fresh Italian produce in London and Paris and set up a company to export fruit and vegetables to other cities in Europe.

At the same time he heard about the work of Nicolas Appert, the French confectioner and chef, whose attempts to find ways to preserve food led him to discover that heat could be used as a method of sterilisation and that foods treated in that way could be sealed in cans and would retain their fresh condition for many months.

The method, which became known as Appertisation, was taken up by Cirio, who set up his first canning factory in Turin in 1856 at the age of 20, concentrating first on peas and then achieving similar success with other vegetables.

A poster from the early part of the 20th century
advertising Cirio's most famous product

Within a decade, the Cirio brand was appearing on the shelves of grocery stores all over the world and by 1885 the Societa Anonima di Esportazione Agricola Francesco Cirio, with its headquarters in Turin, had opened subsidiaries in Milan, Naples, Belgrade, Berlin, Brussels, London, Paris and Vienna.

Francesco died in 1900 but his partner, Pietro Signorini, continued the development of the company, which invested in the agricultural development of Southern Italy.  Canned tomatoes became a major part of the business and from the 1920s onwards, the name Cirio became synonymous with Italian tomatoes.

The business continued to thrive through the 20th century before it became engulfed in the financial scandals of the late 1990s. The company was wound up after a number of executives were arrested on fraud charges during the anti-corruption drive in Italy that saw several other of the country's biggest commercial names disappear from the shelves.

However, the Cirio brand lives on as part of the Gruppo Cooperativo Conserve Italia, a cooperative consortium of vegetable producers based in San Lazzaro in Emilia-Romagna.

Travel tip:

Nizza Monferrato, in the province of Asti, grew up around the Abbey of San Giovanni in Lanero in the 13th century.  It passed into the hands of the House of Savoy in 1703 and began to flourish in the 18th century, when it was noted for its silk production.  Interesting buildings include the Palazzo Comunale, the seat of the local government since the 14th century, and the Palazzo Crova, which is a good example of the town houses favoured by the nobility in the 18th century.  The red wine Nizza, a DOCG wine made with Barbera grapes, is produced in just 18 municipalities around the town.

Stalls on the Porta Palazzo market in Turin, where
Francesco Cirio worked from the age of 14

Travel tip:

The Porta Palazzo market, located in Piazza della Repubblica in Turin, where Cirio cut his teeth in the fruit and vegetable business, is the largest open air market in Europe with around 800 stalls.  It trades from Monday to Friday and attracts not only customers from the city but from neighbourhoods further afield and many foreign visitors.  There is a strong representation of local producers with more than 100 stalls every day directly selling products from farmers around Turin. The market was renovated in 2006.

More reading:

Michele Ferrero - the man who invented Nutella spread

Piedmont roots of chef and TV presenter Antonio Carluccio

Soave - the classic Italian wine

Also on this day:

Christmas Eve - la Vigilia di Natale

(Picture credit: Porta Palazzo market by Xadhoomx via Wikimedia commons)



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Michele Alboreto - racing driver

Last Italian to go close to Formula One title 

Michele Alboreto is the last Italian
to win a Grand Prix in a Ferrari

No Italian motor racing driver has won the Formula One world championship since 1953 but Michele Alboreto, who was born on this day in 1956, went as close as anyone.

Racing for Ferrari, Alboreto finished runner-up in 1985, beaten by just 20 points by Alain Prost. Riccardo Patrese finished second in 1992 but the gap between him and champion Nigel Mansell was a massive 52 points after the British driver won nine Grand Prix victories to Patrese's one.

Patrese was never even in the hunt in 1992 after Mansell began the season with five straight wins.By contrast, Alboreto's 1985 duel with Prost could have gone either way until well into the second half of the campaign. Alboreto scored two race wins and four second places to lead by five points after winning race nine of the 16-race series in Germany.

However, a series of disastrous engine failures late in the season wrecked Alboreto's chance to be the first Italian champion since Alberto Ascari in 1953.

Michele Alboreto during
 his period driving for Tyrrell

Prost won the next race in Austria to draw level and after both finished on the podium in the Netherlands the Frenchman led by just three points with five races left.

Next up was the Italian Grand Prix at Monza and never would a home victory have been cheered so loudly had Alboreto been able to finish in front and regain the initiative. As it was, the Ferrari's reliability suddenly disappeared and Alboreto came home last of the 13 drivers to complete the race.

In the final four events, he was forced to retire each time, unable to secure even a single point.

It was a profound disappointment for the Italian, for whom being hired to drive for Ferrari had been the pinnacle of his career.  Ironically, the appointment came after he had openly criticised owner Enzo Ferrari for failing to hire an Italian driver, arguing that both Patrese and Elio de Angelis were perfectly qualified.

Enzo Ferrari's counter argument was that for Italian drivers there was too much emotion attached to driving the iconic red car and that under the weight of patriotic expectation they were too inclined to let passion get the better of professionalism.

Michele Alboreto at the wheel of the Ferrari in which he
finished runner-up to Prost in the 1985 F1 championship

Yet he was impressed enough with Alboreto's performances with Tyrrell, for whom he won two Grand Prix at Caesar's Palace and Detroit, to be persuaded to take a chance.  Alboreto was an intelligent, gracious and companionable man, hugely popular on the circuit, but had few peers for skill and competitiveness.

Alboreto was born in Milan, where his father was a sales representative and his mother worked for the municipal authority. His career in motorsport began in 1976, racing a car he and a number of his friends had built for the Formula Monza series. Two years later Alboreto moved up to Formula Three and began to enjoy considerable success.

He was runner-up in the Italian Formula Three championship in 1979 and in 1980 won the European Formula Three title that Prost had taken in 1979.  This paved the way for his entrance into F1 with Tyrrell.

In his debut season for Ferrari, Alboreto took victory in the third round in Belgium, where he became the first Italian driver to win an F1 Grand Prix for Ferrari since Ludovico Scarfiotti in 1966.  Alboreto finished the 1984 season in fourth place.

After his peak of 1985, however, he never won another race for Ferrari in three seasons, the closest he came being runner-up at Monza to Austrian teammate Gerhard Berger in 1988, an extraordinary result that came days after Enzo Ferrari had died at the age of 90.

Alboreto was driving an Audi R8 when he suffered his
fatal crash while testing in Germany

The wave of emotion that accompanied the occasion soon faded, however, and Alboreto's drive went to Mansell the following season.

He spent 1989 back with Tyrrell, but thereafter moved from one small team to another, the last of them the low-budget Minardi operation from Faenza, in Emila-Romagna.  From 1995 he concentrated on sports cars, competing in Ferraris, Porsches and then the all-conquering Audi works team.

Victory in the Le Mans 24 Hour race in 1997, sharing the wheel of a Porsche with the Swede Stefan Johansson, was the highlight of his post-Formula One career.

He won the Sebring 12-hour race in an Audi R8 in 2001 and that proved to be his last victory.  Two weeks later, while testing the Audi at Lausitzring, near Dresden, in preparation for another attempt at the Le Mans 24 Hours, he suffered fatal injuries when the car left the track, hit a wall and somersaulted several times.

At the request of his wife, Nadia, he was cremated at the Lambrate cemetery in Milan.  Aged just 44 at the time of his death, he left behind two children, Alice and Noemi, as well as countless friends and admirers.  Alboreto remains the last Italian to have won a Grand Prix for Ferrari.

The Basilica of San Giovanni Battista in Monza

Travel tip:

Apart from the motor racing circuit, Monza is notable for its 13th century Basilica of San Giovanni Battista, often known as Monza Cathedral, which contains the famous Corona Ferrea or Iron Crown, bearing precious stones.  According to tradition, the crown was found on Jesus's Cross.  Note also the Villa Reale, built in the neoclassical style by Piermarini at the end of the 18th Century, which has a sumptuous interior and a court theatre.

Hotels in Monza by Hotels.com

Travel tip:

The town of Maranello in Emilia-Romagna, about 18km from Modena, would probably have remained relatively anonymous but for the decision taken in the early 1940s by Enzo Ferrari to relocate there after his factory in Modena suffered from repeated bombing raids in the Second World War.  The town houses the Museo Ferrari, which details the history of the company and has many vintage racing and sports cars on display, and is also the starting point for the annual Italian Marathon, which finishes in nearby Carpi.

Hotels in Maranello by Expedia

More reading:

Vittorio Jano - genius designer behind Italy's Formula One success

Luigi Fagioli - Formula One's oldest winner

How little 'Pinin' Farina became a giant of car design

Also on this day:

1896: The birth of writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa


(Picture credits: Ferrari in 1985 by Spurzem; Audi R8 by dro!d; Basilica in Monza by Francescogb; all via Wikimedia Commons)

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Giacomo Manzù – sculptor

Shoemaker’s son who became internationally acclaimed sculptor

Giacomo Manzù, pictured in 1966 at his
studio in Ardea, near Rome

Sculptor Giacomo Manzù was born Giacomo Manzoni on this day in 1908 in Bergamo in Lombardy.

The son of a shoemaker, he taught himself to be a sculptor, helped only by a few evening classes in art, and went on to achieve international acclaim.

Manzoni changed his name to Manzù and started working in wood while he was doing his military service in the Veneto in 1928.

After moving to Milan, he was commissioned by the architect, Giovanni Muzio, to decorate the Chapel of the Sacred Heart Catholic University.

But he achieved national recognition after he exhibited a series of busts at the Triennale di Milano.

The following year he held a personal exhibition with the painter, Aligi Sassu, with whom he shared a studio.

He attracted controversy in 1942 when a series of bronze bas reliefs about the death of Christ were exhibited in Rome. They were criticised by the Fascist Government after they were interpreted as an indictment of Nazi-Fascist violence and Manzù had to go into hiding for a while, fearful of arrest.

Manzù's Monument to the Partisan in his
home city of Bergamo

Manzù had started teaching at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, but during the war he went back north to live in Clusone, to the north of Bergamo, in Val Seriana. He returned to teach in Milan at the end of the war.

He then moved to Salzburg, where he met his wife, Inge Schabel, who became the model for several of his sculptures.

One of his most striking works is his Monument to the Partisan, which he completed in 1977 and gave to his home city of Bergamo as a gift.

He built an 11-foot high sculpture, Passo di Danza, in Detroit and his last great work was a six-metre tall sculpture in New York in 1989, representing a woman holding a child.

During his long career he also built stage sets for the composer Igor Stravinsky and he eventually designed his tomb in Venice.

A devout Catholic, Manzù was a personal friend of Pope John XXIII, who was also from Bergamo, and he completed some important commissions for the Vatican and St Peter’s Basilica.

While in Rome he lived in Ardea, south of the capital and close to the sea, in a locality that has since been renamed Colle Manzù in his honour.  Ardea has a museum dedicated to his work.

His son, Pio, was a car designer who is credited with the design for the groundbreaking Fiat 127, the 'people's car' of the 1970s, although he never saw the project completed. Pio died tragically young in a road accident at the age of just 30 in 1969.

Manzù died in Ardea in 1991. The New York Times described him in an obituary as ‘one of Italy’s leading sculptors whose work often mixed religious, allegorical and sexual imagery’.

Piazza Vecchia, in Bergamo's Città Alta, has been
described as the most beautiful square in Italy

Travel tip:

Bergamo in Lombardy, where Giacomo Manzù was born, 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. The elegant Città Bassa, lower town, still has some buildings that date back to the 15th century, but more imposing and elaborate architecture was added in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Hotels in Bergamo by Hotels.com

Travel tip:

Piazza Matteotti, in the Città Bassa in Bergamo, is the site of Manzù’s remarkable work, Monument to the Partisan, which the sculptor dedicated to the Italian partisans who fought against the Germans to liberate their country during the Second World War.

More reading:

Gian Lorenzo Bernini - the greatest sculptor of the 17th century

Michelangelo's legacy as the greatest artist of all time

How Canova's genius brought marble to life

Also on this day:

1858: Birth of opera composer Giacomo Puccini

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Lorenzo Perosi - priest and composer

Puccini contemporary chose sacred music over opera

Lorenzo Perosi forsook opera in
 favour of religious music

Don Lorenzo Perosi, a brilliant composer of sacred music who was musical director of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican for almost half a century, was born on this day in 1872 in the city of Tortona in Piedmont.

A devoutly religious man who was ordained as a priest at the age of 22, Perosi was a contemporary of Giacomo Puccini and Pietro Mascagni, both of whom he counted as close friends, but was the only member of the so-called Giovane Scuola of late 19th century and early 20th century composers who did not write opera.

Instead, he concentrated entirely on church music and was particularly noted for his large-scale oratorios, for which he enjoyed international fame.

Unlike Puccini and Mascagni, or others from the Giovane Scuola such as Ruggero Leoncavallo, Umberto Giordano and Francesco Cilea, Perosi's work has not endured enough for him to be well known today.

Yet at his peak, which music scholars consider to be the period between his appointment as Maestro of the Choir of St Mark's in Venice in 1894 and a serious mental breakdown suffered in 1907, he was hugely admired by his fellows in the Giovane Scuola and beyond.

Perosi with Arturo Toscanini before the
premiere of his work Mosè in Milan 

Arturo Toscanini conducted his work Mosè on the occasion of its premiere at La Scala in Milan in November 1901, his French admirers included Claude Debussy and Jules Massenet and many of the great opera singers on his day were keen to perform in his works, including Enrico Caruso, Mario Sammarco, Carlo Tagliabue and Beniamino Gigli.

Puccini is quoted as saying that "there is more music in Perosi's head than mine and Mascagni's put together".

Perosi is credited with reviving the oratorio as a musical genre. His grand productions for chorus, soloists, and orchestra based on Latin texts were noted for their bringing together of Renaissance harmony, Gregorian chant, and the flamboyant melodies and orchestrations characteristic of the Giovane Scuola. 

Perosi was one of 12 children born into a pious Catholic family in Tortona, only half of whom survived infancy.  His own birth was said to have been difficult and music historians believe it was probably the cause of the mental health problems he suffered in adulthood.

His father, Giuseppe, was choir director at the cathedral in Tortona and his talent for music was shared with his brothers Carlo, who also became a priest, and Marziano, who would later be musical director at the Duomo of Milan.

Listen to the choir of the church of the Beata Vergine in Mandria, near Padua

Lorenzo enrolled at Milan Conservatory, where he began his association with Puccini and Mascagni, after which he took his first professional post as organist at the Abbey of Montecassino.  He spent a year studying in Germany under Franz Xaver Haberl, where he learnt Renaissance polyphony, but declined a permanent teaching position in Germany in favour of a position nearer home as director of sacred music at the Duomo in Imola.

The bust of Lorenzo Perosi in the
gardens at the Pincio in Rome

From Imola he went to Solesmes Abbey, a Benedictine Monastery in France to study under the Gregorianists Dom André Mocquereau and Dom Joseph Pothier.

The appointment at St Mark's in Venice came in 1894 and brought Perosi under the influence of Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto, the Patriarch of Venice who would go on to be elected as Pope Pius X.  It was Sarto who ordained Perosi to the priesthood but just as importantly encouraged his music and was influential in his appointment in Rome.

Perosi's mental health problems began to manifest themselves in 1906, when doctors felt he was suffering from nervous exhaustion as a consequence of the hours he spent writing music in addition to his duties as a priest.

They became so severe following the deaths of both his parents within the space of a few years that at one stage his brother, Carlo, was nominated legal guardian as some doctors deemed him incurable. In time, however, his condition improved and he returned to a normal life.

He added to an already enormous body of work and the popes Pius XI and Pius XII waived the rules regarding mandatory retirement and retained him as 'maestro perpetuo' into his 80s. By the time his health deteriorated irreversibly he had served under five popes.  He died in Rome in October 1956.

The Duomo of Tortona, where Lorenzo Perosi is
buried along with his brother, Carlo

Travel tip:

Tortona is an elegant small city of around 27,000 inhabitants in the eastern part of Piedmont, roughly halfway between Milan and the Ligurian coast at Genoa.  It sits on the right bank of the Scrivia river between the plain of Marengo and the foothills of the Ligurian Apennines.  Lorenzo Perosi, along with his brother, Carlo, is buried at the Duomo, where his father was the choir director.  The Duomo has a 19th century neoclassical facade but the building itself dates back to the 16th century.


Travel tip:

The Sistine Chapel choir is one of the oldest religious choirs in the world, consisting today of 20 adult professional singers and 30 unpaid boy choristers.   Its reputation today owes much to Lorenzo Perosi, who raised its artistic level to a level as high as any it had known during his time as Maestro di Cappella and supported Pope Pius X in outlawing the use of boys whose voices were preserved by the barbaric practice of castration. Pius declared that only "whole men" should be allowed to be choristers or priests, and the last of the castrati were in time eased out of the choir.  A bust of Perosi can be found in the gardens on Pincian Hill - the Pincio - in Rome.

More reading:

How Giovanni Gabrieli helped popularity of Venetian Baroque

What made Puccini one of the greatest of opera composers

The genius of Venice's musical priest, Antonio Vivaldi

Also on this day:

1401: Birth of the great Renaissance artist Massacio

(Picture credits: bust by Lalupa; Tortona Duomo by Vincenzo da Tortona; both via Wikimedia Commons)


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