Allegra Versace – heiress

‘Favourite niece’ who inherited Gianni fortune

Allegra Versace at a show in Milan
with her mother, Donatella

The heiress Allegra Versace, owner of half the Versace fashion empire, was born on this day in 1986 in Milan.

The daughter of Donatella Versace, the company’s chief designer and vice-president, she was the favourite niece of Gianni Versace, who founded the fashion house in 1978.

When Gianni was shot dead outside his mansion in Miami in July 1997, Allegra was just 11 years old but could look forward to becoming immensely rich after it was announced that her uncle had willed his share of the business, amounting to 50 per cent, when she reached her 18^th birthday.

By the most recent valuation of the Versace group, this means Allegra – now 30 – has a personal fortune worth $800 million. The remainder of the empire is owned by her mother, who has 20 per cent, and Gianni’s older brother, Santo Versace, who has 30 per cent.

Yet the promise of wealth and privilege did not bring her happiness as a young woman.  The daughter of Paul Beck, a former Versace model to whom Donatella was briefly married, Allegra enjoyed a contented childhood in which she read books and played the piano given to her as a gift by Sir Elton John, a family friend, but her world was shattered when her uncle was killed.

A regular visitor to his home in Miami, she reportedly found out about his death watching a television news bulletin before her mother had a chance to break the news to her.  She is said to have been inconsolable at the funeral and though her mother sought counselling for her it did not stop Allegra sliding towards depression.

Donatella Versace 

By the time she reached adulthood and the riches she had been promised became real, she had become almost reclusive, rejecting the family name and, after studying French and art history at the University of California in Los Angeles, attempting to live in anonymity in New York, where she worked as a theatre dresser.

She developed anorexia nervosa, telling friends that she wished she were not a Versace, that she wanted to be no one, but that she could not escape.

It took until 2011 for Donatella to persuade her daughter to return to Italy and take up the role her uncle wanted her to fulfil, as a Versace director, although she still shuns the spotlight and has spent time working with a designer friend from outside the company, helping to organise shows and publicity without ever taking centre stage herself.

The Villa Fontanelle on Lake Como

Travel tip:

Gianni Versace’s homes included the Villa Le Fontanelle, a stunning waterfront property on Lake Como, where Allegra often visited him while he was in Italy. The grounds were designed by the art historian and landscape architect Sir Roy Strong and inside were a collection of 18th century paintings, red marble baths and a crystal chandelier that once hung in the Russian imperial palace in St Petersburg.  As well as 50 per cent of the company, the house was bequeathed to Allegra in Gianni’s will.

Travel tip:

The headquarters of the Versace empire in Milan is the Palazzo Versace in Via Gesù, which adjoins the five-star Four Seasons Hotel and stretches from the main entrance at No 10 towards Via della Spiga.  Via Gesù is off Via Montenapoleone, which is generally recognised as the centre of the Italian high fashion district of Milan, with virtually every top name having a presence there.  The Versace shop is at No 11.

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Oriana Fallaci - journalist

Writer known for exhaustively probing interviews

Oriana Fallaci interviewed politicians and
leaders from around the world 

Oriana Fallaci, who was at different times in her career one of Italy’s most respected journalists and also one of the most controversial, was born in Florence on this day in 1929.

As a foreign correspondent, often reporting from the world’s most hazardous regions in times of war and revolution, Fallaci interviewed most of the key figures on both sides of conflicts.

Many of these were assembled in her book Interview with History, in which she published accounts of lengthy conversations, often lasting six or seven hours, with such personalities as Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Willy Brandt, Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Henry Kissinger and the presidents of both South and North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Others she interviewed included Deng Xiaoping, Lech Wałęsa, Muammar Gaddafi and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

She seldom held back from asking the most penetrating and awkward questions. Henry Kissinger, the diplomat and former US Secretary of State, later described his meeting with Fallaci for a piece published in Playboy magazine as "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press".

During her interview with Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 she called him a “tyrant" to his face and attacked the chador – the full-length cloak she was obliged to wear for the interview – as representing “the apartheid Iranian women have been forced into after the revolution” and described it as “a stupid, medieval rag”.

Henry Kissinger described his encounter
with Fallaci as "disastrous"

Fallaci’s stance on many political issues related to her background. Her father, Edoardo Fallaci, a cabinet maker in Florence, was a political activist opposed to the dictatorship of Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Despite her youth – she was only 10 when the conflict began – she supported her father’s cause during the Second World War by joining the anti-Fascist resistance movement, Giustizia e Libertà.

One of the tasks assigned to her was to smuggle a gun concealed in a basket of food into the Pitti Palace, where the Jewish writer Carlo Levi, author of the 1945 book Christ Stopped at Eboli, was in hiding.

She later wrote: “Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon ... I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.”

As well as a child fighter against the Fascists, Fallaci also displayed precocious talent as a journalist, becoming a special correspondent for the Italian paper Il mattino dell'Italia centrale in 1946, when she was just 16.

Her work as a war correspondent began in earnest 20 years later.  Beginning in 1967, she worked as a war correspondent for a number of newspapers and magazines, covering Vietnam, the Indo-Pakistani War, the Middle East, and South America.  During the 1968 massacre of students at Tiatelolco in Mexico, she herself was shot three times.

Fellaci in the chador she was told to
wear to interview Ayatollah Khomeini

Fallaci won many awards for her work and was also honoured by the Italian state, the city of Milan and the Council of Tuscany, where she kept a home even while living mostly in New York, for her contribution to Italian culture.

Later in her career, she attracted controversy for her writings on Islamic fundamentalism, which she regarded as a threat which was the equal of Fascism in her youth.  She accused European politicians of not taking the threat seriously.

Two books, The Rage and the Pride and The Force of Reason, sold more than a million copies in Italy alone but Fallaci was criticised for using language that was extreme and for appearing to demonise Muslims in general, although a number of legal actions against her failed because the state ruled that she was protected by freedom of speech laws.

Fallaci died in Florence aged 77 in 2006, having suffered from lung cancer.  Although a smoker all her life, she claimed she developed the disease after being exposed to smoke from oil wells torched on the orders of Saddam Hussein while she was reporting from Kuwait in 1991.

She was buried at the Cimitero Evangelico agli Allori in Florence alongside family members and close to a memorial to Alexandros Panagoulis, a former Greek resistance fighter with whom she formed a relationship in the 1970s but who was killed in a mysterious road accident, which Fallaci claimed was an assassination by remnants of the 1960s Greek military junta.

Fallaci's tomb at the Cimitero
Evangelico degli Allori

Travel tip:

The Cimitero Evangelico agli Allori is situated between Florence and Galluzzo Certosa, a town about five kilometres outside the city centre. It was in 1860 when the non-Catholic communities of Florence could no longer bury their dead in the English Cemetery in Piazzale Donatello. Apart from Fellaci, it houses the remains of the British writer and aesthete Sir Harold Acton, the American sculptor Thomas Ball and Alice Keppel, the mistress of the British monarch King Edward VII.

Travel tip:

Florence’s Palazzo Pitti – the Pitti Palace – was originally built in the second half of the 15th century by Filippo Brunelleschi for Luca Pitti, but was unfinished at his death in 1472. The building was purchased in 1550 by Eleonora da Toledo, the wife of the Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, and became the official residence of the family. It was expanded in 1560 by Bartolomeo Ammannati. More work was carried out in the 17th century by Giulio and Alfonso Parigi, giving the building its present day look.

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Pietro Mennea – Olympic sprint champion

200m specialist won gold at Moscow in 1980

Pietro Mennea at his first Olympics in 1972

Pietro Mennea, one of only two Italian sprinters to win an Olympic gold, was born on this day in 1952 in the coastal city of Barletta in Apulia.

Mennea won the 200m final at the Moscow Olympics in 1980, depriving Britain's Allan Wells of a sprint double. In doing so, Mennea emulated his compatriot, Livio Berruti 20 years earlier in Rome.

He held the world record at 200m for almost 17 years, from 1979 until 1996.  His time of 19.72 seconds remains the European record.

It would stand as the world record for 16 years, nine months and 11 days, until Michael Johnson ran 19.66 at the US Olympic trials in 1996.

As well as winning his gold medal, outrunning Britain’s Allan Wells in the last 50m, Mennea’s other great Olympic feat was to reach the 200m final at four consecutive Games, the first track athlete to do at any distance. He also won the bronze medal in Munich in 1972, was fourth in 1976 at Montreal and seventh place in Los Angeles in 1984.

At his last Olympics, in 1988, he carried the Italian flag at the opening ceremony.

Famous for his rather frantic running style, Mennea set the 200m record on September 12 1979 at the World University Games in Mexico City, his time surpassing the record of 19.83, set by the American sprinter Tommie Smith on the same track at the 1968 Olympics.

Pietro Mennea gets down to his mark at the start of his duel
with Allan Wells (left) in the 1980 Moscow final

Although there were some who questioned the authenticity of the record because of the advantages of lower air resistance at high altitudes, Mennea won plenty of races at low altitudes as well.

Known in Italy as “la freccia del sud”  - “the arrow of the south” – he also won gold at the European Championships in Rome in 1974 and Prague in 1978, where he also took the gold in the 100m.

Mennea was born in Barletta, on the Adriatic coast, the son of a tailor. When he was young, the story goes, he would bet against car owners that he could take on their Alfa Romeos and Porsches over 50 metres and win.

Blessed with such pace, it didn't take him long to make an impact on the track. He was a double Italian champion at 19 in 1971. The 1972 Olympics at Munich, where he won a bronze medal, was his first international championship.

His career was not without controversy. After retiring, Mennea admitted taking supplements of human growth hormone, though he added that it was not illegal at the time.

After retiring from sprinting, Mennea drew on the extensive qualifications he acquired as a student, including degrees in political science, law, physical education and literature.  He had been a student at the University of Bari at the time when Aldo Moro, who had been prime minister of Italy and would be again, was a professor.

Mennea was a politician in later life

He practised as a lawyer and a sports agent, working for some years on behalf of the football team, Salernitana. He was an elected politician, serving from 1999 to 2004 as a member of the European parliament, where he lobbied for independent dope-testing authorities in sport.

Mennea also stood at the 2001 general election is a candidate for the Senate in Barletta-Trani under the centre-left Italy of Values banner but was not elected. In 2002 he was a candidate for mayor of Barletta with the centre-right party Forza Italia, but was defeated in the first round.

He died in 2013 aged only 60 after a battle with cancer. Hundreds of Italian athletics fans filed past his open coffin and the headquarters of the Italian Olympic committee in Rome, where World Cup winner Dino Zoff and Olympic boxing champion Nino Benvenuti were among those who paid their respects.  His funeral took place at the Basilica of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill, not far from the Circus Maximus.

The Basilica of Santa Sabina in Rome

Travel tip:

Santa Sabina is perched high above the Tiber river, next to small public park Giardino degli Aranci (Garden of Oranges), which has a scenic terrace overlooking Rome. The oldest extant Roman basilica in Rome, dating back to the fifth century, it preserves its original colonnaded rectangular plan and architectural style, which is said to represent the crossover from a roofed Roman forum to the churches of Christendom.

The Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Barletta

Travel tip:

Mennea’s home city of Barletta lies about 60km (37 miles) north of Bari on the Adriatic coast. It is a working port with modern suburbs and an attractive historic centre, where one of the most famous sights is an ancient bronze 'Colossus', thought to be the oldest surviving bronze Roman statue. The identity of the figure the statue represents is not clear but one theory is that it is the Byzantine Emperor Marcian and that the statue’s original home was in Constantinople.  Barletta has a beautiful 12th century cathedral, renovated in the 14th century, the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.

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The Ustica Massacre

Mystery plane crash blamed on missile strike

The Itavia Airlines DC9 that crashed off Ustica

An Italian commercial flight crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea between Ponza and Ustica, killing everyone on board on this day in 1980.

The aircraft, a McDonnell Douglas DC9-15 in the service of Itavia Airlines was en route from Bologna to Palermo, flight number IH870. All 77 passengers and the four members of the crew were killed, making this the deadliest aviation incident involving a DC9-15 or 10-15 series.

The disaster became known in the Italian media as the Ustica massacre - Strage di Ustica - because Ustica, off the coast of Sicily, was a small island near the site of the crash.

Many investigations, legal actions and accusations resulted from the tragedy, which continues to be a source of speculation in Italy.

The fragments of the aircraft that were recovered from the sea off Ustica were re-assembled at Pratica di Mare Air Force Base near Rome, where they were examined by several teams of investigators.

The remains of the plane were reassembled at an
air base outside Rome

In 1989, the Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism issued a statement asserting that “following a military interception action, the DC9 was shot down, the lives of 81 innocent citizens were destroyed by an action properly described as an act of war, real war undeclared, a covert international police action against our country, which violated its borders and rights.”

However, because the perpetrators of this alleged crime remained unidentified, the commission declared the case to be archived.

It was reopened in 2008 after former president Francesco Cossiga attributed the cause to a missile fired from a French Navy aircraft.

After further investigations and court hearings, in 2013, Italy’s top criminal court in Rome ruled that there was clear evidence the flight was brought down by a missile and upheld a ruling made by a court in Palermo in 2011 that Italian radar systems had failed adequately to protect the skies, and therefore Italy must compensate the victims' families.

The Palermo hearing had ordered the Italian government to pay 100 million euros in civil damages to the families of the victims

Several Italian air force personnel were investigated and charged with offences including falsification of documents, perjury and abuse of office after what appeared to be a concerted attempt to cover up what happened – perhaps to save the careers of officers who might be held accountable for radar system failures or, in a more sinister theory, that they shot down the airliner themselves, by mistake, while engaged in a top-secret operation on behalf of NATO.

The remains were moved from Rome to Bologna and put
on display at a museum in a large hangar

The difficulty the investigators and the victims’ relatives had in receiving information has been described as a rubber wall, un muro di gomma.

Alternative theories were that there could have been a bomb in one of the toilets, or that it could have been brought down in error in a failed assassination attempt by NATO on Libya's Colonel Muammar Gadafy.  

French, US and Nato officials all denied military activity in the skies that night.

The bomb theory was favoured by a British investigation team, who suspected a cover-up on the part of the Italian secret services.

One of the British investigators called in to look at the wreckage, Frank Taylor, commented: “We discovered quite clearly that someone had planted a bomb there, but nobody on the legal side, it would appear, believed us and therefore, so as we are aware, there has been no proper search for who did it, why they did it, or anything else”

Travel tip:

In 2007 the Museum for the Memory of Ustica was opened in Bologna and parts of the plane and objects belonging to people on board are on display there.  The museum is in a large hangar off Via di Saliceto.

A view over the town of Ustica on the island of the same name

Travel tip:

Ustica is a small island north of Sicily in the Tyrrhenian sea. There is a regular ferry service from the island to Palermo in Sicily.  The island is actually the tip of an ancient, extinct volcano. The sea around the island is particularly clear and is therefore popular with divers and swimmers.

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