Ugo Tognazzi - comic actor

Achieved international fame through La Cage aux Folles

Ugo Tognazzi became known for playing
suave bon viveurs in Commedia all'Italiana

Ugo Tognazzi, the actor who achieved international fame in the film La Cage aux Folles, was born on this day in 1922 in Cremona.

Renowned for his wide repertoire in portraying comic characters, Tognazzi made more than 62 films and worked with many of Italy's top directors.

Along with Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi and Nino Manfredi, Tognazzi was regarded as one of the four top stars of Commedia all'Italiana - comedy the Italian way - in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1981 he won the award for best actor at the Cannes International Film Festival for his role in Bernardo Bertolucci's Tragedia di un Uomo Ridicolo (The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man).

His work was widely acclaimed in Italy, but it was not until he was cast in the role of homosexual cabaret owner Renato Baldi in the French director Édouard Molinaro's 1979 movie La Cage Aux Folles that he became known outside Italy.   The film became in its time the most successful foreign language film ever released in the United States, with box office receipts of more than $20 million.

A publicity poster from the French film La
Cage aux Folles in which Tognazzi starred

The film spawned two sequels in which Tognazzi reprieved the role of the mincing Baldi, who in the story was the joint owner of a night club in St Tropez that specialised in drag acts.

The son of an insurance agent, Tognazzi left school at 14 to help supplement the family income, taking a job as an accountancy clerk in the Negroni salami factory in his home town.  His father had wanted him to become a musician, his mother a priest.

Although he had made his stage debut as a four-year-old child in a charity show at the Teatro Donizetti in Bergamo, he had no thoughts of an acting career until he began participating in amateur dramatics via Negroni's recreational club.

During his military service with the Navy, he became involved with putting on entertainment for his fellow sailors.  After the Second World War, he moved to Milan in search of opportunities in theatre and found work with a number of companies, but it was after he landed his first film role in 1950, in I cadetti di Guascogna, directed by Mario Mattoli.  that his career began to take off.

The following year he met his fellow comic actor Raimondo Vianello, and their collaboration led them to form a successful comedy duo for the fledgling RAI television network.  Their show Un Due Tre (One Two Three) became famous for its wry satire and was among the first to be censored on Italian television.  It ran from 1954 to 1960.

Ugo Tognazzi as Il Commissario Pepe in Ettore Scola's
1969 film of the same name 

After his first major big screen success in Il Federale (The Fascist), a 1961 film by Luciano Salce, Tognazzi became one of the leading performers of Commedia all'Italiana. 

Excelling as bon vivants, adulterous husbands and other suave individuals, he made many films with the writer-director  Marco Ferreri.  He also worked with Mario Monicelli, Carlo Lizzani, Dino Risi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ettore Scola and Pupi Avati among others.

Risi's Marcia su Roma (The March on Rome) brought him praise but it was with Ferreri that he enjoyed sustained success. Together they made films that included Una Storia Moderna: L'Ape Regina (also called The Conjugal Bed) in 1963, La Donna Scimmia (The Ape Woman) in 1964, Marcia Nuziale (Wedding March) in 1966, L'Udienza (The Audience) in 1971 and La Grande Bouffe in 1973.

As well as La Cage Aux Folles, in which he surprised critics by accepting a role so different from his usual range, he appeared before wider film audiences after Roger Vadim cast Tognazzi as Mark Hand, the Catchman, opposite Jane Fonda in Barbarella (1968).

He had children by three women - the Irish dancer Pat O'Hara, with whom he had a son, Ricky, the Norwegian actress Margarete Robsahm, the mother of his second son, Thomas Robsahm, and Franca Bettoia, an actress, with whom he settled in Velletri, near Rome, after their marriage in 1972.  They had a son, Gianmarco, and a daughter, Maria Sole.  All of his children followed him into the movie business.

Tognazzi, a passionate supporter of AC Milan and a lover of food who also put his name to a number of recipe books, died in 1990 after suffering a brain hemorrhage.

The Duomo and Baptistery in the centre of Cremona

Travel tip:

Cremona, well known for its tradition of violin making, is a prosperous city in Lombardy with a wealth of fine medieval architecture, much of it concentrated around the Piazza del Comune, including the cathedral, finished in 1107 and rebuilt in 1190 after suffering damage in an earthquake, which includes impressive frescoes - the Storie di Cristo - by Pordenone.  A chapel inside the Duomo contains what is said to be a thorn from Jesus's crown of thorns.

The Corso della Repubblica in Velletri is typical of the
narrow streets in the town near Rome where Tognazzi died

Travel tip:

Velletri, a town of 50,000 inhabitants, lies just southeast of the Castelli Romani to the south of Rome.  It was once a popular place for Rome's wealthiest to build their country villas.  It suffered considerable damage soon after the Allied landing at Anzio during the Second World War after the advancing army met resistance from German forces in and around the town.  Many monuments were beyond repair, sadly, but the town remains an attractive alternative to staying in the capital and the towns of the Colli Albani are close by, including Castel Gandolfo, the summer residence of the Pope.

More reading:

The comic genius of Alberto Sordi

Cesare Danova - from medical school to Mean Streets

Was Otto e mezzo (8½) Fellini's finest work?

Also on this day:

1919: The founding of Mussolini's Fascist Party

(Picture credits: Cremona cathedral by Jakub Halun; Velletri street by Deblu68; via Wikimedia Commons)




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Michele Sindona - fraudster and killer

Failed banker ordered murder of investigating lawyer

Michele Sindona - banker whose empire collapsed
after failure of Franklin National Bank in America

The shadowy banker Michele Sindona, who had links to underworld figures in Italy and America as well as prominent politicians, died in hospital in the Lombardy town of Voghera, 70km (43 miles) south of Milan, on this day in 1986.

His death, attributed to cyanide poisoning, came four days after he had been sentenced to life imprisonment for ordering the killing of a lawyer investigating the collapse of his $450 million financial empire.

His own lawyer claimed he had been murdered but although it was never established beyond doubt, the circumstances of his death, caused by drinking coffee laced with the poison at breakfast in Voghera's maximum-security prison, pointed towards suicide.

During his chequered career, which also saw him sentenced to 25 years' jail in America for fraud following the failure of the Franklin National Bank on Long Island, Sindona had links with Mafia bosses in Sicily and New York, with the illegal Propaganda Due masonic lodge and with the controversial head of the Vatican Bank, the American Archbishop, Paul Marcinkus.

His close ties with another Vatican Bank client, Roberto Calvi, gave rise to theories that both he and Calvi, whose body was found hanging from the underside of Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1980 following the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, of which he was president, were killed because they knew too much.

Roberto Calvi

Sindona's political associates included the former Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, who hailed him as the "saviour of the lira" just weeks before the Franklin National Bank went down, with catastrophic consequences for the many banks and financial institutions in Italy that Sindona controlled.

He also enjoyed a friendship with the former American president, Richard Nixon. Ironically, through Italy's giant construction conglomerate, Società Generale Immobiliare, Sindona was the part-owner of the Watergate Building in Washington, which housed the Democratic National Committee office, the bugging of which led to Nixon's resignation and impeachment.

Born in Patti, a town on the northern coast of Sicily some 76km (47 miles) from Messina, the son of a florist, Sindona went to a Jesuit school, where he showed an aptitude for maths and economics. He attended Messina University, where he graduated in law in 1942 and completed a thesis on The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli's 16th century treatise on political philosophy.

He moved to Milan in 1946 at the age of 26 and opened a tax consultancy business, soon gaining a reputation for his knowledge of tax havens and the export of capital.  He began to build capital and within 15 years had amassed a fortune through his shrewd investments, mainly in the banking sector.

He acquired the Banca Unione di Vaticano with the aid of London's Hambros Bank, then the Banca Privata Italiana.  In due course, he added controlling interests in the Wolff Bank of West Germany, the Finabank and Amincorn Banks of Switzerland, the Banca di Messina in his native Sicily and finally the Franklin National Bank.

Carlo Gambino, the New
York Mafia boss

His association with the Vatican Bank led to joint investments not only in the banking sector but in a chain of luxury hotels in Europe and a string of companies in the United States, including the Watergate real-estate development in Washington.

At the same time, though, as investigations later revealed, Sindona had become involved with the Cosa Nostra in Sicily and the Gambino crime family in New York, largely in the area of money laundering, and it transpired that a good deal of the capital he was investing to build his empire came from the proceeds of the Gambino family's heroin trafficking.

All of this went on unnoticed, however, until a sudden stock market crash in April 1974 left the Franklin National, the 20th largest bank in the United States, badly exposed.  In what became known as Il Crack Sindona, Franklin National's profits plunged by 98 per cent compared with the previous year, Sindona lost $40 million dollars and the domino effect brought down most of the other banks he had acquired.

Under pressure from the Gambinos to recover their money, Sindona promised to inject new capital up to the sum of $50 million but by October of that year the Franklin Bank had been declared insolvent and Sindona was being investigated for fraud.

Giorgio Ambrosoli - Sindona was jailed for life for arranging
the murder of the lawyer appointed to look into his affairs

Meanwhile, in Italy, the Bank of Italy had begun to look into Sindona's activities and ultimately a suspension of his banking empire was ordered and a liquidator, the lawyer Giorgio Ambrosoli, appointed.

Sindona urged Licio Gelli, the self-appointed 'grand master' of Propaganda Due, to use his influence and contacts to call off the process, but to no avail. Sindona is said also to have asked Roberto Calvi to provide the capital to rebuild his empire and, when rebuffed, began to leak information about Calvi's activities to a journalist, whose investigations were central to the ultimate collapse of Banco Ambrosiano.

Meanwhile, it was not long before Ambrosoli was receiving telephone calls offering bribes to facilitate the approval of documents proving that Sindona had acted in good faith, which would have exempted him from criminal proceedings and required the Italian government to use public money to bail out his ailing empire.

Ambrosoli refused all offers, however, and paid the price. On July 12, 1979, arriving home from his office in Milan, he was walking between his car and the door of his apartment when he was approached by three men, one of whom shot him five times in the chest.

Investigations concluded that the killer was an Italian-American, William Arico, who had been commissioned on behalf of Sindona by Roberto Venetucci, a heroin trafficker.

The following month, while awaiting trial in New York over the Franklin National Bank collapse, Sindona defied orders restricting his movement by returning to Sicily, where he threatened Enrico Cuccia, the president of Mediobanca and an opponent of any rescue plan for Sindona's empire, and asked Licio Gelli to put pressure on Giulio Andreotti to intervene, threatening to name five prominent individuals who had profited from illegal currency deals.

None of this worked, however, and on his return to the United States he gave himself up.  After his conviction for fraud relating to the Franklin Bank collapse, he was extradited to Italy and found guilty of ordering the murder of Ambrosoli.

In the days before his death, he repeatedly spoke about his fears of being poisoned. On the day of his poisoning, prison guards noted that he took his coffee from his cell into the bathroom, which he had not done before, and emerged gasping for breath and claiming he had been poisoned. This led investigators to conclude that, on the balance of probability, he had taken his own life.

Patti, the town in Sicily where Sindona was born

Travel tip:

Situated close to the ruins of the Greek city of Tyndaris (Tindari), the town of Patti, birthplace of Michele Sindona, has an old town characterized by narrow streets, stairways and squares, with the different styles that reflect the area's diverse cultural heritage, having been a settlement for Greek, Roman, Arab, Norman and Spanish people. There is a 12th-century cathedral that underwent reconstruction in the 15th century and again  after the earthquake of 1693.

Hotels in Patti by Booking.com

The remodelled cathedral in the town of Voghera in Lombardy

Travel tip:

Voghera, which has a castle erected by the Visconti family between 1335 and 1372 and an 11th century cathedral later remodelled in Baroque style, is famous for the term 'Casalinga di Voghera' - Voghera housewife - which is often used in the media and political discourse to refer to the average Italian citizen - not particularly well educated or sophisticated but working hard and striving through self-sacrifice to raise a family in the best way possible.  In England, an equivalent but now somewhat archaic phrase is 'the man on the Clapham omnibus', which was once regularly used in courtrooms to represent someone whose hypothetical opinion might determine whether an action was or was not reasonable.

More reading:

Unanswered questions over bizarre death of Roberto Calvi

Carlo Gambino - the Mafia boss who inspired fictional Godfather

Giulio Andreotti - Italy's political survivor

Also on this day:

1837: The birth 'La Castiglione' - countess, model and secret agent


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Alberto Marvelli - Rimini's Good Samaritan

Heroic deeds helped victims of bombing raids

Alberto Marvelli devoted his life to
serving his community

Alberto Marvelli, who came to be seen as a modern day Good Samaritan after risking his life repeatedly to help the victims of devastating air raids in the Second World War, was born on this day in 1918 in Ferrara.

He died in 1946 at the age of only 28 when he was struck by a truck while riding his bicycle but in his short life identified himself to many as a true hero.

He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004.

Marvelli's acts of heroism occurred mainly in Rimini, his adopted home town, which suffered heavy bombing from the Allies due to its proximity to the Gothic or Green Line, a wide belt of German defensive fortifications that ran across the whole peninsula from La Spezia to the Adriatic coast.

As well as giving aid and comfort to the wounded and dying and to those whose homes and possessions had been destroyed, Marvelli also rescued many Rimini citizens from trains destined for concentration camps.

Alberto was the second of six children born to Luigi Marvelli and Maria Mayr. Growing up, he was set a powerful example by his mother, who always kept open house for the poor and regularly gave away food intended for her own family.

In June 1930 the Marvellis moved to Rimini on the Adriatic coast and Alberto, having already embraced the strong values instilled in him by his devoutly Catholic parents, began to attend the Salesian Oratory and Catholic Action group.

Alberto Marvelli was a prominent member of the group
Catholic Action, becoming president at the age of 18

He had a wide social circle - his friends included Federico Fellini, who would go on to become famous as a film director - and enjoyed sport, in particular cycling. Yet he also maintained a strict observance of the rituals of his faith, which included Mass every morning, Holy Communion, and 30 minutes each of meditation and spiritual reading every day.

He was held in such high esteem that he was elected president of Catholic Action for the whole of Italy at the age of just 18.

Marvelli attended Bologna University and graduated in engineering in 1941.  He moved to Turin, where he began working for Fiat, but left after only a few weeks to do military service in Trieste.  In the event, he returned to Rimini after only a few months after he was exempted on account of three of his brothers being already in service

By then he was effectively head of the family following the unexpected death of his father and took a teaching job at a local high school, devoting his spare time to helping the sick and poor on behalf of Catholic Action.

When the bombing of Rimini began in earnest in 1944, ahead of the Battle of Rimini in which the Allies achieved a decisive victory, the Marvelli family moved inland to the village of Vergiano.

German soldiers in Rimini in 1944 before being driven
out by the Allies at the Battle of Rimini

With each report of new air raids, however, Alberto would insist on taking his bicycle and riding the 8km into Rimini to lend assistance to the clear-up operations, giving no thought to his own safety, often arriving with bombs still dropping.

He bought food, clothing, mattresses and blankets with his own money or money he had collected, using his bicycle to distribute it to those in need. Many times, it is said, he would return to Vergiano having given away his bicycle and even the shoes on his feet.

During the German occupation, he made repeated journeys from Vergiano to the nearby village of Santarcangelo, sneaking past security at the railway station and breaking open the doors of carriages into which Jews and others had been herded for deportation to the concentration camps, saving many lives in the process, at grave risk of his own.

He helped many refugees reach the safety of San Marino by arranging transportation to the nearby republic, which remained neutral during the conflict.  When he was beatified in 2004, San Marino issued some stamps commemorating his life.

Once the war was over, the interim authorities entrusted Marvelli with the allocation of housing. Within a few months, he was appointed to Rimini's town council as an alderman and was put in charge of civil engineering as the city began to rebuild.

He also opened a soup kitchen for the poor and, as co-founder of Italian Workers' Catholic Action, formed a cooperative for construction workers.

Marvelli had not expressed a strong interest in politics previously but he became convinced he could make a difference and joined the Christian Democrats.

San Marino commemorated Marvelli with a set of stamps

He planned to stand in local elections and appeared to have considerable support and respect, even from the Communists, whose ideology he openly criticized. He was seen by all sides as an honest candidate dedicated to the well-being of the community.

Sadly, Marvelli never had the chance to serve.  Cycling to a party meeting on a poorly lit road on the evening of October 5, 1946, the day before polling, he was run over by an army truck and died a few hours later without regaining consciousness.

Voting was under way as news of his death spread throughout the city. Many citizens still voted for him, to express their faith in him and respect for him, and he was posthumously elected. Afterwards, his mother agreed to serve in his place.

He was buried in the Church of Sant' Agostino in Rimini.  The Catholic Church has honoured him by marking October 5 as a feast day in his name.

A square at the end of Viale Tripoli has been renamed Piazza Alberto Marvelli in his honour, while the Alberto Marvelli Foundation set up in his name helps fund projects dedicated to the community including the Alberto Marvelli Institute, a comprehensive school in Rimini.

The Grand Hotel on the seafront at Rimini

Travel tip:

Rimini's history as a tourist resort began in the mid-19th century with the construction of the Kursaal, a seafront bathing establishment that doubled as a prestigious venue for social events.  It became the symbol of Rimini's Belle Époque, the period of European history before the First World War, which also saw the town's first major hotel, the Grand Hotel, built near the beach.  Its major development as a resort came after the Second World War and the city now has a population close to 150,000.

Rimini hotels by Booking.com  

Travel tip:

Ferrara, the city of Marvelli's birth, is notable for being a combination of Medieval and Renaissance architecture, its history bound up with that of the d'Este family, whose castle has dominated the centre of the city since the late 14th century.  The most significant legacy of the city's thriving status in the Middle Ages is the Cattedrale di San Giorgio, built in the 1100s, which has a facade that blends Romanesque style in the lower section with Gothic in the upper.

More reading:

Agostina Livia Pietrantoni - nurse whose death brought Rome to a standstill

Saint Giustina - the girl from Padua slain for preaching Christianity

Pope John Paul II - first non-Italian to hold office for 455 years

Also on this day:

1858: The death of Benedetta Cambiagio Frassinello - Nun who battled for educational rights for girls


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Fulco di Verdura - jeweller

Exclusive brand favoured by stars and royalty

Fulco di Verdura, pictured in around 1939 at the time
of launching the Verdura business in New York

The man behind the exclusive jewellery brand Verdura was born Fulco Santostefano della Cerda, Duke of Verdura, on this day in 1898 in Palermo.

Usually known as Fulco di Verdura, he founded the Verdura company in 1939, when he opened a shop on Fifth Avenue in New York and became one of the premier jewellery designers of the 20th century.

Well connected through his own heritage and through his friendship with the songwriter Cole Porter, Verdura found favour with royalty and with movie stars.

Among his clients were the Duchess of Windsor - the former socialite Wallis Simpson - and stars such as Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth, Katharine Hepburn, Paulette Goddard, Millicent Rogers and Marlene Dietrich.

Although Verdura died in 1978, the company lives on and continues to specialise in using large, brightly coloured gemstones.

The Oppenheimer Blue, the most expensive
diamond ever sold at auction

The most expensive gemstone ever sold at auction, the so-called Oppenheimer Blue diamond, was set in a ring designed by Verdura. It changed hands at Christie's in Geneva for $50.6 million (£34.7 million) in May 2016.

The last to bear the now defunct Sicilian title of Duke of Verdura, Fulco grew up in aristocratic surroundings largely unchanged since the 18th century.  The novel The Leopard, written by his cousin, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, is said to depict his eccentric and artistic family.

However, his family were not so wealthy that he could live a life of leisure and it became clear he would need to find a profession appropriate to his stature in society and lucrative enough to fund the lifestyle he wished to maintain.

He wanted to be an artist but his destiny was shaped by meeting Linda and Cole Porter in Palermo in 1919.  They became friends and it was through the Porters that Di Ventura met Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel in Venice in 1925, when they were both guests at a party hosted by the American couple.

Chanel invited him to Paris, initially as a textile designer, but then asked him to update the settings of jewellery she had been given by a number of former lovers and it became clear where his talents lay. They began an eight-year collaboration when Chanel made him head designer of Chanel jewellery.

Cole Porter became a friend and financial
backer of Fulco di Verdura

It was not long after Fulco started working for Chanel that he designed the Maltese Cross Cuffs that are now considered the hallmark of the Verdura brand.

Fulco left Chanel in 1934 and moved to the United States, where Diana Vreeland, a Chanel client based in New York, introduced him to the jeweller Paul Flato, with whom he opened a boutique in Hollywood.

He set up on his own in 1939, opening a small salon called Verdura in New York at 712 Fifth Avenue, with the financial backing of Cole Porter and Vincent Astor. His designs were influenced by both his love of nature as a child in Sicily and his admiration for the art of the Renaissance.

His long list of celebrity clients prompted the New York Times to dub him "America's Crown Jeweller".

In 1941, Di Verdura collaborated with Salvador Dalí on a collection of jewellery designs and in the same year designed “Night and Day” cufflinks for Cole Porter, inspired by the lyrics of the hit song.

He continued to work in the United States until 1973, when he sold his stake in the Verdura business to Joseph Alfano, his business partner, and moved to London, where he would focus on painting. He died there five years later at the age of 80.

In 1985, Alfano sold the company to Ward Landrigan, a former head of Sotheby's American jewellery department. Landrigan decided to preserve the Verdura aesthetic and made jewellery the same way Fulco had, using many of the same jewellers Fulco used.

Landrigan's son, Nico Landrigan, joined Verdura in 2003, becoming President of the company in 2009.

Today, Verdura continues to appear on the pages of the top fashion magazines and celebrity clients include Sarah Jessica Parker, Brooke Shields, Anne Hathaway and Cameron Diaz.

Most of Fulco's designs were from individual commissions, yet he produced an estimated 5,000 items of jewellery during his lifetime.

Travel tip:

If there is one attraction in Palermo that most visitors would describe as a must-see it is the Palatine Chapel, the royal chapel of the Norman kings of Sicily situated on the ground floor of the Palazzo Reale.  The mosaics of the chapel are of unrivalled elegance, noted for subtle changes in colour and luminance. The mosaics of the transept, dating from the 1140s and attributed to Byzantine artists and include an illustrated scene, along the north wall, of St. John in the desert. The rest of the mosaics, dated to the 1160s or the 1170s, feature Latin rather than Greek inscriptions.

Palermo hotels by Booking.com

The Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi in Palermo

Travel tip:

Fulco di Verdura was a cousin of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of the novel The Leopard, much of which is set in Palermo.  The director Luchino Visconti, who made a film of the book, chose for the magnificent ball at the end of the book the Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi in Piazza Croce dei Vespri, a palace designed in Baroque style.

More reading:

Guccio Gucci - the lift boy who went from carrying bags to designing them for the rich and famous

Miuccia Prada's journey from the Communist Party to head of family fashion empire

Gianfranco Ferré's quest to make clothes for real women

Also on this day:

1934: The birth of Italy's 1990 World Cup coach Azeglio Vicini

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