Antonello Venditti - enduring music star

Roman singer-songwriter's career spans almost 50 years

Antonello Venditti has sold more than
30 million discs in a long career

Singer-songwriter Antonello Venditti, one of Italy's most popular and enduring stars of contemporary music, will celebrate his 68th birthday today with a live performance in his home city of Rome.

Venditti will perform at the PalaLottomatica arena - formerly known as Palazzo dello Sport - in a concert entitled 'Viva le Donne' to mark International Women's Day.

Famous in the 1970s for the strong political and social content of many of his songs, Venditti can look back on a career spanning almost 50 years, in which he has sold more than 30 million records.

Taking into account singles, studio and live albums and compilations, Venditti has released more than 100 recordings.

His biggest success came with the 1988 album In questo mondo di ladri - In this world of thieves - which sold 1.5 million copies, making it jointly the eighth best-selling album in Italian music history.

Venditti's music ranges from folk to soft rock, often with classical overtones. He enjoyed sustained success in the 1980s and 90s, when Cuore - Heart - Benvenuti in Paradiso - Welcome to Paradise - and Prendilo tu questo frutto amaro - Take this bitter fruit - all sold well.  His versatility as a singer was demonstrated with the 1979 album Buona Domenica, which contained several ballads including one, Modena, which regarded as among his finest songs.

Antonello Venditti (right) with Giorgio Lo Cascio and
Francesco De Gregori at Folkstudio in 1975

For some fans, however, he was at his peak during his politicised phase with Lilly (1975) and Ullalà (1976), which featured several tracks bearing powerful social messages, against drugs and corruption among other things.  Ullalà included the song Canzone per Seveso, which was specifically about the accident at a chemical factory in the Lombardy town of Seveso that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths among farm animals and pets exposed to dioxins.

Venditti was born Antonio Venditti on March 8, 1949, in the Trieste quarter of Rome, about 8km (5 miles) to the north-east of the city centre. He was the only child of a middle-class couple. His father was a government official and future deputy-prefect of Rome, his mother a teacher specialising in Latin and Greek.  He was educated to a high standard himself, attending the Giulio Cesare High School and Sapienza University in Rome, where he graduated in law in 1973 before obtaining a further degree in the philosophy of law.

This qualified him, naturally, to build a career in the legal profession.  Yet Venditti was already writing songs and, having been taught to play the piano as a boy, wanted to perform.

Antonello Venditti in 2008

In the late 1960s he began to frequent the famous Roman club Folkstudio, in the Trastevere quarter, where Bob Dylan had performed in 1962.  He made friends with other young musicians and sang some of his own compositions, accompanying himself on a jazz piano, and made such an impression he was offered a recording contract with a new company.

His first album Theorius Campus, which he recorded with another Folkstudio regular, Francesco De Gregori, contained two of the songs he played at that first impromptu gig - Sora Rosa and Roma Capoccia - that would become lasting favourites with his fans.  He wrote both, in Romanesco dialect, when he was 14.

Influenced by the militancy among the student population at the time, Venditti's politics were firmly on the left and his subsequent albums reflected that.  It was the powerful social messages in many of his songs that helped him acquire such a devoted following.  One of his compositions, A cristo - 'Hey, Christ' in Roman dialect - which he performed in Rome in 1974, resulted in his arrest for blasphemy, although he was ultimately acquitted.

However, in time he became less political, particularly after terrorism became such a problem for Italy during the late 1970s, when blame for a number of attacks tended to be laid at the door of left-wing groups.  His friend, De Gregori, was booed at one concert.

Venditti also said that he began to have problems reconciling his strong religious faith with left-wing ideology and felt that while the left offered social changes that he saw as good it did not suggest a path towards happiness and contentment.

The stage at the Arena di Verona, where Venditti performed
at the Wind Music Awards in 2016

Nonetheless, he would return to political themes from time to time.  Benvenuti in Paradiso (1991) contained a song Dolce Enrico, which was a tribute to the former leader of Italy's communists, Enrico Berlinguer, while Che fantastica storia è la vita (2003) included a song satirising Silvio Berlusconi.  His 2015 release Tortuga was his 20th studio album.

A fanatical supporter of AS Roma, he has written a number of songs celebrating the team and gave a free open air concert in Circus Maximus when Roma won the scudetto - the Italian championship - in 2001.

Married briefly in the 1970s to Italian screenwriter and director Simona Izzo, Venditti has a son Francesco Saverio.

He is also the author of two books,  L'importante è che tu sia infelice - The important thing is that you be unhappy - an autobiographical work in which he focussed on his difficult relationship with his mother, and Nella notte di Roma - On Roman nights - a discourse on what he considers good and bad about the city of his birth.

The arch of the Palazzi degli Ambasciatori is one of the
features of the Piazza Mincio in the Trieste quarter

Travel tip:

Antonello Venditti's childhood home was in Via Zara in the Trieste quarter of Rome, a stone's throw from the picturesque Villa Torlonia park, a feature of which is the 18th century Casino Nobile, a house that was once the Rome residence of Benito Mussolini.  Trieste nowadays is a popular district with young professionals and students, with a bustling market, artisan shops and plenty of stylish bars and restaurants, as well as lots of green space within walking distance.  The Villa Ada, Villa Paganini and Villa Borghese parks are all close by. Trieste is also the home of the so-called Coppedè Quarter, an area of beautiful and distinctive buildings designed by the architect Gino Coppedè, fanning out from Piazza Mincio.

Hotels in Rome from Booking.com

The Piazza Guglielmo Marconi, with its obelisk, is typical
of the bold architecture of the EUR district

Travel tip:

The PalaLottomatica, formerly known as Palazzo dello Sport, was designed by the architect Marcello Piacentini and built by Pier Luigi Nervi for the 1960 Olympics, in which it hosted the basketball tournament.  It forms part of the EUR complex, to the south of the centre of Rome, originally developed to host the 1942 World's Fair, which was cancelled because of the Second World War.  A team of prominent architects, headed by Piacentini and including Giovanni Michelucci, contributed to the project, which featured the neoclassical designs that came to be known as Fascist architecture.


More reading:

Singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla's tribute to Enrico Caruso

65 million sales and rising - Eros Ramazotti's lasting appeal

How Laura Pausini keeps turning out hit after hit

Also on this day:

Italy's own Festa della Donna

1566: The birth of composer Carlo Gesualdo

(Picture credits: top picture Fotoguru.it; Venditti in 2008 by Elena Torre; Verona Arena by Raphael Mair; arch of the Palazzi degli Ambasciatori by LPLT; EUR piazza by Blackcat; via Wikimedia Commons)

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Saint Thomas Aquinas - philosopher

Theologian who synthesised Aristotle’s ideas with principles of Christianity

A portrait of Saint Thomas Aquinas
by the Italian artist Carlo Crivelli

Saint Thomas Aquinas, known in Italian as Tommaso d’Aquino, died on this day in 1274 at Fossanova near Terracina in Lazio.

A Dominican friar who became a respected theologian and philosopher, D’Aquino was canonised in 1323, less than 50 years after his death.

He was responsible for two masterpieces of theology, Summa theologiae and Summa contra gentiles. The first sought to explain the Christian faith to students setting out to study theology, the second to explain the Christian faith and defend it in the face of hostile attacks.

As a poet, D'Aquino wrote some of the most beautiful hymns in the church’s liturgy, which are still sung today.

D’Aquino is recognised by the Roman Catholic Church as its foremost philosopher and theologian and he had a considerable influence on the development of Western thought and ideas. His commentaries on Scripture and on Aristotle are an important part of his legacy and he is still regarded as the model teacher for those studying for the priesthood.

D’Aquino was born in Roccasecca in the province of Frosinone in about 1225 in the castle owned by his father, who was count of Aquino.

He was placed in the nearby monastery of Monte Cassino when he was a young boy as a prospective monk. But after nine years in the monastery he was forced to return to his parents when the Holy Roman Emperor expelled all the monks for being too obedient to the Pope.

Fra Angelico's depiction of  Thomas Aquinas with his Summa
Theologiae in the Convent of San Marco in Florence

After D’Aquino was sent to the University of Naples, he encountered scientific and theological works translated from Greek and Arabic for the first time.

He joined the Dominicans, which was a new religious order actively involved in preaching and teaching. His superiors immediately sent him to Paris pursue his studies.

But on the way there he was abducted on his parents’ orders because they did not want him to continue with the Dominicans. After a year in captivity in the family castle, his parents reluctantly liberated him and he was able to continue on his journey.

He studied at the Convent of Saint-Jacques under Saint Albertus Magnus, a scholar with a wide range of intellectual interests.

D’Aquino’s writings have been interpreted as the integration into Christian thought of the recently-discovered Aristotelian philosophy, but they also presented the need for a cultural and spiritual renewal, not only in the lives of individual men, but throughout the church.

He took the degree of Master of Theology, received the licence to teach in 1256 and then started to teach theology in a Dominican school.

The historic Abbey of Monte Cassino, where D'Aquino was
sent to study as a child and where he stayed before his death

D’Aquino returned to Italy after being appointed theological adviser to the Papal Curia, the body that administered the government of the church. He spent two years at Agnani in Lazio at the end of the reign of Pope Alexander IV and four years at Orvieto with Pope Urban IV. He spent two years teaching at the convent of Santa Sabina in Rome and then, at the request of Pope Clement IV, went to the Papal Curia in Viterbo.

On his return to Paris in 1268, D’Aquino became involved in doctrinal arguments. As an Aristotelian, he believed that truth becomes known through both natural revelation - through human nature and human reasoning - and supernatural revelation - the faith-based knowledge revealed through scripture.

Unlike some Christian philosophers, he saw these two elements as complementary rather than contradictory. He believed that the existence of God and his attributes could be deduced through reason, but that certain specifics - the Trinity and the Incarnation, for example - may be known only through special revelation.

When he returned to Italy in 1272, D’Aquino established a Dominican house of studies at the University of Naples and continued to defend his Aristotelian ideas against the criticisms of other scholars.

The main building at the University of Naples, where
D'Aquino set up a Dominican house of studies

He was personally summoned by Pope Gregory X to the second Council of Lyons in 1274 but became ill on the journey.

While riding a donkey along the Appian Way he is thought to have struck his head against the branch of a tree. He was taken to Monte Cassino to convalesce and after resting for a while, he set out on his journey again. However, he fell ill once more and stopped off at the Cistercian Abbey of Fossanova, where he died on March 7.

Three years after D'Aquino's death, the Bishops of Paris and Oxford condemned a series of his theses as heretical, in that they contradicted the orthodox theology which considered human reason inadequate to understand the will of God. As a result, he was excommunicated posthumously.

However, he reputation was rebuilt over time and he was canonised a saint in 1323 by Pope John XXII, officially named Doctor of the Church in 1567 and proclaimed the Protagonist of Orthodoxy at the end of the 19th century. Many schools and colleges throughout the world have been named after him.

His remains were at first placed in the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse but were later moved to the Basilique de Saint-Sernin in Toulouse. In 1974 his remains were returned to the Church of the Jacobins where they have stayed ever since.

An aerial view of Roccasecca, the town of D'Aquino's
birth in the Frosinone province in Lazio

Travel tip:

Roccasecca, D’Aquino’s birthplace, is a town in the province of Frosinone in the Lazio region of central Italy. It is within an area known as Ciociaria by Italians, a name derived from the word ciocie, the footwear worn by the inhabitants in years gone by. Ciociaria hosts food fairs, events and music festivals as well as celebrating traditional feasts, when the local people wear the regional costume and the typical footwear, ciocie.

Hotels in Roccasecca by Booking.com

Travel tip:

The Abbey of Fossanova, where D’Aquino died, is a Cistercian monastery near the railway station of Priverno, about 100 kilometres south-east of Rome. The Abbey dates from around 1135 and is one of the finest example or early Gothic architecture in Italy. Priverno’s patron saint is Saint Thomas Aquinas.

More reading:

Monte Cassino Abbey destroyed by Allies in the Second World War

How bravery of Clare of Assissi was recognised after her death

When the funeral of a nurse brought the city of Rome to a standstill

Also on this day:

1785: The birth of the novelist Alessandro Manzoni

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Francesco Guicciardini - writer and diplomat

Friend of Machiavelli among first to record history in context

A portrait by an unknown artist
of Francesco Guicciardini

The historian and statesman Francesco Guicciardini, best known for writing Storia d'Italia, a book that came to be regarded as a classic history of Italy, was born on this day in 1483 in Florence.

Along with his contemporary Niccolò Machiavelli, Guicciardini is considered one of the major political writers of the Italian Renaissance.

Guicciardini was an adviser and confidant to three popes, the governor of several central Italian states, ambassador, administrator and military captain.  He had a long association with the Medici family, rulers of Florence.

Storia d'Italia - originally titled 'La Historia di Italia' - was notable for Guicciardini's skilful analysis of interrelating political movements in different states and his ability to set in context and with objectivity events in which sometimes he was a direct participant.

Born into a prominent Florentine family who were influential in politics and long-standing supporters of the Medici, Giucciardini was educated in the classics before being sent to study law at a number of universities, including Padua, Ferrara and Pisa.

The title page from Guicciardini's
work in an early printed version

He was interested in pursuing a career in the priesthood but his father, Piero, considered the church to have become decadent, with too many of the clergy drawn to it because of the potential for wealth and power.

Consequently, after graduating in civil law, Guicciardini set up a successful legal practice, finding clients within the leading Florentine families and merchant organisations.

He earned his first political appointment, in the highly prestigious role of Florence's ambassador to Spain, at the age of just 28.

After the restoration of the Medici to power in Florence in 1512, following a period in exile, Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici was elevated to the papacy as Leo X.  Guicciardini returned to Florence and was appointed by Leo X as governor of Modena.

This began a period of service to the popes that lasted until 1534.

For a time he was a military strategist, although his reputation was damaged with the Sack of Rome by troops of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, in 1527, when the papal forces of Pope Clement VII, ultimately under the command of Guicciardini, were unable to resist.

Soon afterwards, Guicciardini returned to Florence only to find that the Medici had been expelled and a new republic established. Because of his close ties to the Medici, Guicciardini was declared a rebel and had his property confiscated. He left Florence in 1529.

The statue of Guicciardini
at the Uffizi Gallery

The republic collapsed a year later and, under the command of Clement VII, Guicciardini was given the task of punishing the Florentine citizens for their resistance to the Medici.

His next assignment was the governorship of Bologna, the most important city in the northern Papal States. He resigned after the death of Clement VII in 1534 and returned to Florence, where he was hired to advise the new duke, Alessandro de' Medici.

Alessandro was assassinated in 1537, after which Guicciardini aligned himself with Cosimo I de' Medici, then only 17 and new to the political system. It was not long, however, before he retired to his villa in Arcetri, just outside Florence, where he spent his last years working on Storia d'Italia.  He died there in 1540.

Guicciardini had been friends with Machiavelli. Guicciardini was from a higher social background, but the two are said to have established a rapport because of mutual regard for each other's intellect.  They did not always agree but their discussion of political ideas influenced each other's work.

The Villa Ravà in Arcetri, where Guicciardini retired

Travel tip:

Arcetri, located in the hills south of the centre of Florence beyond the Arno river, was a village in the time of Guicciardini.  It is famous also as the place in which the astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei was kept under house arrest by the Roman Inquisition and as the home of the Arcetri Observatory. Guicciardini is said to have lived in a house called Villa Ravà while he was writing his Storia d'Italia.

Palazzo Guicciardini is now an hotel

Travel tip:

The 15th-century Palazzo Guicciardini, the family's home in Via Santo Spirito in Florence, situated just across the street from a house once owned by Niccolò Machiavelli and a short walk from the Uffizi Gallery and the Ponte Vecchio, is now a beautifully appointed hotel, comprising just eight rooms, many of which feature frescoed walls and ceilings by the Mannerist painter Bernardo Poccetti, whose work can be found in several churches and palaces in the city, including the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella. There is a statue of Guicciardini in the Uffizi.

Hotels in Florence by Booking.com

More reading:

How the name of Machiavelli became associated with political cunning

The founding of the Medici dynasty

Leo X - the Medici Pope who supported the arts

Also on this day:

1853: The opera La Traviata is performed in public for the first time

(Picture credits: Villa Rava and Palazzo Guicciardini by Sailko via Wikimedia Commons)


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Alessandro Volta – scientist

Invention sparked wave of electrical experiments

Alessandro Volta as depicted in a painting
by an unknown artist

Alessandro Volta, who invented the first electric battery, died on this day in 1827 in Como.

His electric battery had provided the first source of continuous current and the volt, a unit of the electromotive force that drives current, was named in his honour in 1881.

Volta was born Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta in 1745 in Como.

He became professor of physics at the Royal School of Como in 1774. His interest in electricity led him to improve the electrophorus, a device that had been created to generate static electricity. He discovered and isolated methane gas in 1776, after finding it at Lake Maggiore and was then appointed to the chair of physics at the University of Pavia.

Volta was a friend of the scientist Luigi Galvani, a professor at Bologna University, whose experiments led him to announce in 1791 that the contact of two different metals with the muscle of a frog resulted in the generation of an electric current.

Italy's 10,000 lire note used to have an image of Volta
on the front and the Tempio Voltiano on the reverse

Galvani interpreted that as a new form of electricity found in living tissue, which he called animal electricity.

Volta felt that the frog merely conducted a current that flowed between the two metals, which he called metallic electricity. He began experimenting in 1792 with metals alone and found that animal tissue was not needed to produce a current.

This provoked much controversy between the animal-electricity adherents and the metallic-electricity advocates, but Volta won the argument when he unveiled the first electric battery in 1800.

Known as the voltaic pile, or the voltaic column, Volta’s invention led to further electrical experiments.

Within six weeks, English scientists William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle used a voltaic pile to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen, thus discovering electrolysis and creating the field of electrochemistry.

In 1801 in Paris, Volta demonstrated the way his battery generated an electronic current in front of Napoleon, who made Volta a count and a senator of the Kingdom of Lombardy.

A statue at the University of Pavia
commemorates Volta's work

Francis I, Emperor of Austria, made Volta director of the philosophical faculty at the University of Padua in 1815.

Volta retired in 1819 to his estate in Camnago, a frazione of Como, which is now named Camnago Volta in his honour. He died there on 5 March 1827, just after his 82nd birthday, and he was buried in Camnago Volta.

He is commemorated with a statue at the University of Pavia and another in Piazza Volta in Como. A house in the Via Brera in Milan in which he lived in the early part of the 19th century is marked with a plaque.

Travel tip:

Como, where Volta was born and died, is a city at the foot of Lake Como. It has become a popular tourist destination because it is close to the lake and has many attractive churches, gardens, museums, theatres, parks and palaces to visit. The Villa Olmo, built in neoclassical style there in 1797 by an aristocratic family, has hosted Napoleon, Ugo Foscolo, Prince Metternich, Archduke Franz Ferdinand I and Giuseppe Garibaldi, to name but a few of the eminent people who have stayed there.

Hotels in Como by Booking.com

The Tempio Voltiano by Lake Como houses a museum
dedicated to the life of Alessandro Volta

Travel tip:

The Tempio Voltiano is in a public garden near the side of the lake in Como and houses a museum dedicated to the life and work of Alessandro Volta. The museum has a collection of scientific instruments used by the inventor, including his early voltaic piles, and some of his personal belongings and awards he received. A picture of the temple used to be featured on the back of a 10,000 lire banknote, with Volta’s portrait on the front.

More reading:

How Luigi Galvani appeared to give new life to a dead frog

The transatlantic message that marked a breakthrough for Marconi

Paolo Gorini's technique pioneered preservation of corpses

Also on this day:

1696: The birth of Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

1834: The birth of 19th century opera star Marietta Piccolomini

1922: The birth of controversial writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini

(Picture credits: Volta statue by Nemo_bis; Tempio Voltiano by Christophe.Finot; via Wikimedia Commons)


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