Claudius - Roman emperor

Suspicious death of leader who conquered Britain

Claudius - as depicted in a marble bust at the
 National Archaeological Museum in Naples

The Roman emperor Claudius, whose reign was notable among other things for turning Britain into a province of the Empire, died on this day in 54 AD.

It is a widely held view that he was murdered, by poisoning, on the orders of his scheming fourth wife, Julia Agrippina, the mother of his successor, Nero, in one of the power struggles that at the time were ever present.

It is thought he ingested some poisonous mushrooms that his taster, the eunuch Halotus, had assured him were safe to eat, either at an official banquet on the evening of October 12 or at his first meal of the following day.

When Claudius began to show signs of distress, one version of the story is that his physician, Xenophon, pushed a feather into his throat, ostensibly to make him vomit, but actually to ensure that he did not recover by administering more poison, with which he had coated the feather.

There have been arguments that the poisoning story was nonsense and that, at 63, Claudius died from natural causes related to ageing. Yet Agrippina - sometimes referred to as Agrippina the Younger - seemed to have had a clear motive.

Beautiful and ambitious, she had seduced Claudius into marriage even though their coupling was against the law – he was her uncle – and even though after surviving one plot against him by his third wife, Valeria Messalina, Claudius had vowed never to marry again.

He had the Senate pass a special decree to authorise his union with Agrippina and was sufficiently besotted with her to trust there would be no repeat of Messalina’s attempt, with her lover, Gaius Silius, to instigate a coup.

Agrippina the Younger, mother of Nero, who
is thought to have ordered Claudius's murder

Agrippina was no innocent, however.  Her real motive was to persuade Claudius that Nero – otherwise known as Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, one of the last male descendants of Augustus – was a better choice to succeed him than his own, younger son Britannicus, whom he had fathered with Messalina.

Claudius duly adopted Nero as his own and promised him the hand of his daughter, Octavia, in marriage.   As Britannicus grew up, though, there were suggestions that he might be reinstated as the emperor’s heir, which is thought to have been the reason Agrippina decided to take action.

She was determined that Nero would be proclaimed emperor while he was still young, with her acting as guardian, so that she could influence the way he ran the empire. The move backfired spectacularly when, as soon as he was old enough to govern in his own right, he had her murdered.

Claudius had been an unlikely emperor.  As a child and adolescent, he suffered from a number of physical ailments including tremors, a stammer, a limp, and foaming at the mouth. Historians have speculated that he may have had Tourette’s syndrome.

Even his own family mocked his afflictions. His mother described him as a “monstrosity” and Caligula - his nephew and predecessor as emperor – was relentlessly cruel to him.

Over time his handicaps eased and he had ambitions of a political career. But he was passed over time and again for public office and eventually took to filling his days with drinking, womanising and gambling, although he was intellectual enough in sober moments to spend long hours immersed in books, expanding his knowledge.

Later in life, he would produce many volumes of history, on Carthage, the Etruscans and the Roman Republic.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema's 1867 painting shows Claudius
pleading for his life with the Praetorian Guard

Things changed when Caligula ascended to power at the age of 25 and, suddenly vulnerable when confronted with responsibility, turned to Claudius, then 46, to act as his consul.

In the event, Caligula was murdered by his own supposed protectors, the Praetorian Guard, in a sudden but seemingly long-planned coup in 41 AD.  Claudius is said to have cowered behind a curtain while the bloody deed was taking place and expected himself to be slain.

Instead, when he was discovered by soldiers, he was saluted as the new emperor and taken to a place of safety to prepare for office.

It took a substantial pay rise to ensure the support of the Praetorian Guard going forward but once installed Claudius proved a clever and effective leader.

Domestically, he improved the judicial system, encouraged urbanisation, revived several old religious festivals, organised a spectacular Secular Games and ordered the construction of a new port at Ostia.

But by far his most eyecatching achievements were in foreign policy, where he annexed several territories in Africa and Asia and succeeded where others before him had failed in launching and completing the conquest of Britain.

Assembling a force of 40,000 soldiers and accompanying war elephants, he targeted the tribal stronghold at what is now Colchester and captured their leader, Caratacus. 

He made a personal visit to Britain during the invasion and remained for 16 days before returning to a hero’s welcome in Rome.

The ruins of the Forum in Rome

A triumphal arch on the Via Flaminia was built in his honour, and he was hailed him as the man who “brought barbarian peoples beyond Ocean for the first time under Rome’s sway.”

Travel tip:

For a fine view across the ruins of ancient Rome towards the Colosseum in the distance, head for Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio, next to the Palazzo Nuovo and Capitoline musuems, where there is a balcony that looks out across the ancient city.

Travel tip:

From the time of Augustus, who ruled from 27 BC to 14 AD, Roman emperors traditionally lived in an imperial palace atop the Palatine Hill, the central hill among the seven hills of ancient Rome.  The remains visible today are of at least three  palaces, built next to one another over the years, in which Augustus, Tiberius and Domitian lived.  The word ‘palace’ – palazzo in Italian – derives from the name of the hill.

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Piero della Francesca - Renaissance painter

Mathematician famous for exploring perspective

Della Francesca's assumed self-
portrait in his Ressurrection

Piero della Francesca, recognised as one of the greatest painters of the early Renaissance, died on this day in 1492 in what was then Borgo Santo Sepolcro, near Arezzo.

He was thought to have been around 77 years old – his exact birth date is not known – and it has been popularly theorised that he was blind in the later years of his life, although evidence to support the claim is sketchy.

Della Francesca’s work was characterised by his exploration of perspective and geometric form, which was hardly surprising since in his own time he was as famous among his peers as a mathematician and geometer as well as an artist.

He came to be recognized in the 20th century as having made a major contribution to the Renaissance.

His fresco cycle The History – or Legend – of the True Cross in the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, painted between 1452 and 1466, and his diptych – two-panelled – portraits of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza - the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, dated at between 1465 and 1472, which can be seen in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, are among his best-known works.

Detail from Della Francesca's stunning History of the True
Cross fresco cycle in the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo

He had been born in Borgo Santo Sepolcro – now known as Sansepolcro – in around 1415, into a fairly prosperous family. His father, Benedetto dei Franceschi, is thought to have been a wool and leather merchant, while his mother was the daughter of another wool merchant.  They saw to it that Piero had a good education. At that time, he was known as Piero di Benedetto dei Franceschi.

He may have learned his trade from one of several Sienese artists working in the town as he was growing up.  It is known that he was an associate in Florence of Domenico Veneziano, with whom he worked in 1439 on frescoes in the church of Sant’Egidio for the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. He also knew Fra' Angelico, who introduced him to other leading masters of the time, including Masaccio and Brunelleschi.

In 1442 he returned to Santo Sepolcro, where he was commissioned for an altarpiece in the church of the Misericordia, which showed the influence of Masaccio and also Donatello and highlighted the deliberation with which he worked. The altarpiece was not completed until 1462.

Della Francesca's diptych of the Dukes of Urbino

In 1449 he executed several frescoes in the Castello Estense and the church of Sant'Andrea of Ferrara and, during a period in Rimini, working for the condottiero Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, he painted the fresco of St. Sigismund and Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta in the Tempio Malatestiano, as well as Sigismondo's portrait.

In 1452 Della Francesca was called to Arezzo to replace Bicci di Lorenzo in painting the frescoes of the Basilica of San Francesco. The History of the True Cross cycle is generally considered not only to be among his masterworks but of Renaissance painting in general.

Experts say that “the simplicity and clarity of structure, controlled use of perspective, and aura of serenity (in The History of the True Cross) are all typical of Piero’s art at its best.”

Painted at the same time as the Arezzo cycle are a fine depiction of Mary Magdalene in Arezzo cathedral, the Resurrection in the Palazzo Comunale at Sansepolcro, which features a self-portrait of the artist, and his Madonna del parto in the chapel of the cemetery at Monterchi.

The Flagellation of Christ aroused controversy

In 1454 he signed a contract for the multi-panelled polyptych of Saint Augustine in the church of Sant'Agostino in Sansepolcro. The central panel was lost and the four wing panels, with representations of Saints, are in different places around the world.

However, The Baptism of Christ, which was executed around 1460 for the high altar of the church of the Priory of San Giovanni Battista at Sansepolcro, is in The National Gallery in London.

During his time working in Urbino, in the service of Count Federico III da Montefeltro, in addition to his famous diptych, Della Francesca also painted The Flagellation of Christ, which became one of the most famous and controversial pictures of the early Renaissance, with Christ pictured in the background as three unidentified figures dominate the foreground.

Della Francesca was much less active in his declining years, with little evidence that he painted much at all, yet 16^th century artist and historian Giorgio Vasari's contention that he was blind in his 60s does not tally with his completion in his final decade of a geometrical treatise dedicated to Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, son and heir of Duke Federico, written in his own handwriting, and another on perspective in painting.

He passed away in his own house in Santo Sepolcro on the same day that Christopher Columbus made landfall in The Bahamas, believing he had reached Asia.

The Duomo in Sansepolcro

Travel tip:

Sansepolcro is a town of 16,000 inhabitants situated about 38km (24 miles) northeast of Arezzo in the east of Tuscany, close to the borders with Umbria and Marche. The historic centre is entirely surrounded with fortified walls, built in the early part of the 16^th century. The centre of the town is the Piazza Torre di Berta, named after the 13^th-century tower of the same name, off which can be found the impressive Palazzi Pichi and Giovagnoli and the 14^th-century cathedral, dedicated to St John the Evangelist.  As well as being the place in which Piero della Francesca was born and died, it is also the home of Buitoni pasta.

Arezzo's sharply sloping Piazza Grande

Travel tip:

Arezzo is one of the wealthiest cities in Tuscany. Situated at the confluence of four valleys - Tiberina, Casentino, Valdarno and Valdichiana – its medieval centre suffered massive damage during the Second World War but still has enough monuments, churches and museums to be a worthwhile stopover on tourist itineraries. In addition to the Basilica di San Francesco and the Piero della Francesca cycle, sights to take in include central square Piazza Grande, with its sloping pavement in red brick, the Medici Fortress, the Cathedral of San Donato and a Roman amphitheatre.

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Pierre-Napoleon Bonaparte – adventurer

Colourful life of Italian-born prince

Pierre-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the Emperor

Prince Pierre-Napoleon Bonaparte, a nephew of the Emperor Napoleon, was born on this day in 1815 in Rome.

He was to become notorious for shooting dead a journalist after his family was criticised in a newspaper article.

Bonaparte was the son of Napoleon’s brother, Lucien, and his second wife, Alexandrine de Bleschamp. He grew up with his nine siblings on the family estate at Canino, about 40 kilometres north of Rome.

The young Bonaparte helped to keep bandits at bay, spending a lot of time with the local shepherds who were armed and had dogs to protect them.

He set out on a career of adventure, joining bands of insurgents in the Romagna region as a teenager.

In 1831 he spent time in prison for a minor offence and was banished from the Papal States.

He went to the United States to join his uncle, Joseph Bonaparte, in New Jersey. He spent some time in New York before going to serve in the army of the President of Columbia. At the age of 17 he became the President’s aide and was given the rank of Commander.

Bonaparte returned to the family estate at Canino where he enjoyed hunting with his brothers. One day they caught a well-known bandit and one of his brothers wounded him.

They delivered the bandit to the police, who instead of being grateful tried to arrest them. Bonaparte lashed out with his hunting knife and killed a young officer.

The ruins of the Bonaparte mansion at Luzipeo in Corsica

He was condemned to death, but after serving nine months in prison, he was released after an intervention by the Pope, on the condition that he left Canino.

He travelled to the US, Britain and Corfu, from where he sailed to Albania with friends. He was set upon by bandits and managed to fight them off but was then asked to leave Corfu.

After the revolution of 1848 he returned to France and was elected to the National Assembly as deputy for Corsica, declaring himself a republican.

But after his cousin Louis became Napoleon III, he accepted the title of Prince, losing the support of the Republicans.

In 1853 he married Justine Eleonore Ruffin, the daughter of a Parisian workman. They had two children, Prince Roland Napoleon Bonaparte in 1858 and Princess Jeannne Bonaparte in 1861.

Napoleon III, now on the throne of France, did not approve of the marriage and so the family went to live in Calinzana in Corsica.

Bonaparte shot and killed a journalist
but was acquitted of murder

They set up house at Grotta Niella near Calvi but then had a mansion built at Luzipeo. The ruins of it still stand on a hill overlooking the bay of Crovani. The last time it was occupied was during World War II by the Italian army.

In 1869 a dispute broke out between two Corsican newspapers, the radical La Revanche and the loyalist L’Avenir de la Corse.

After La Revanche criticised the Emperor Napoleon, L’Avenir published a letter by Prince Pierre Bonaparte calling the staff of La Revanche ‘cowards and traitors’.

Paschal Grousset, the editor of La Marsellaise, supported La Revanche and was offended by the Prince’s words.

The Prince wrote to the founder of the newspaper, Henri Rochefort, claiming he was upholding the good name of his family and giving him his address.

Grousset sent Victor Noir and Ulrich de Fonvielle as his seconds to fix the terms of a duel and present him with a letter.

The Prince said he would fight Rochefort, another nobleman, but not deal with his menials. According to Fonvielle, after Noir replied to him, the Prince slapped his face and shot him dead.

According to the Prince, Noir took umbrage at being called a menial and struck him first, whereupon he drew his revolver and shot the journalist. This version was accepted by the court.

Prince Pierre Bonaparte died in 1881 at Versailles and was interred in the Cimitière des Gonards there.

Canino sits on a hillside in the Province of Viterbo

Travel tip:

Canino, where Prince Pierre-Napoleon Bonaparte grew up, is to the north of Rome in the province of Viterbo and dates back to Etruscan times. Lucien Bonaparte, Pierre’s father, was made Prince of Canino by Pope Pius VII and there is a Palazzo Bonaparte in the town.

A square in the centre of Calinzana

Travel tip:

Corsica was part of the Republic of Genoa for centuries, until in 1768 it was ceded to the French. This was a year before the birth of Napoleon Bonaparte in the capital city of Ajaccio. Under French rule, the Corsican language, which is closely related to standard Italian, declined. But during the first half of the 19th century the people of Corsica still identified with Italian culture. Children were sent to Pisa to study, official acts were written in Italian and books were printed in Italian. Calinzana (known as Calenzana in French), where Prince Pierre Napoleon went to live, is on the northwest coast of the island. The ruins of his mansion can still be seen on a hill overlooking the coast. It is remembered that it was thanks to his generosity that the people of Calinzana could enjoy the benefits of freely available drinking water. There is a square named after him with a bust of the prince.

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Stefano Magaddino - mafioso

Longest-ruling Mafia boss in US history

Stefano Magaddino ran the Buffalo crime
family for more than half a century

Stefano Magaddino, the Sicilian mafioso who went on to enjoy the longest period of power enjoyed by any crime boss in the history of the American Mafia, was born on this day in 1891 in Castellammare del Golfo.

Known as ‘The Undertaker’ or ‘Don Stefano’, Magaddino controlled a crime empire radiating outwards from Buffalo, on the shores of Lake Erie in New York State.  Geographically, it was a vast area, stretching from the eastern fringe of  New York State to its western outposts in Ohio and extending north-east almost as far as Montreal in Canada, its tentacles reaching across the Canadian border from Buffalo even into Toronto.

One of the original members of The Commission, the committee of seven crime bosses set up in 1931 to control Mafia activity across the whole of the United States, Magaddino was head of the Buffalo Family for more than half a century.

He died in 1974 at the age of 82, having survived all the other Commission members, including the founder Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano and Chicago boss Al Capone, with the exception of his cousin from Castellammare, Joseph Bonanno, who along with Luciano, headed one of the Five Families of the New York underworld.

Magaddino never knew any life other than crime.  The third of eight children born to Giovanni and Giuseppa Ciaravino Magaddino, he was born in the midst of a feud between his family and their rivals in Castellammare, the Buccellato family.

He had strong links with the Bonanno family in Sicily, joining forces with Joe’s father, Salvatore, in 1899 after the latter’s brothers, Stefano and Giuseppe, were killed on an order given by Felice Buccellato.

New York boss Charles 'Lucky' Luciano
included Magaddino in The Commission

Bonanno and Magaddino took their revenge by ordering the killing of two members from the Buccellato family. A peace was brokered in 1905, before Salvatore Bonanno emigrated to the United States, to be followed, in 1909, by Magaddino. They settled in a Castellammarese colony in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

The feud followed Magaddino to New York, however, leading to the killing of his brother by Camillo Caiozzo, a member of the Buccellato clan, in an ambush outside a Brooklyn department store. Caiozzo was himself soon killed and in 1921 Magaddino was arrested in Avon, New Jersey on suspicion of his murder.

At the time Magaddino was an influential member of the increasingly powerful Castellammarese clan but when charges against him failed to stick he took the opportunity to relocate to the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area.

There he laid down the beginnings of his empire.  Behind the front of running a funeral home – the Magaddino Memorial Chapel – in Niagara Falls, he set up a profitable Prohibition era business bootlegging wines and spirits across the Niagara River to supply the proliferation of so-called speakeasies in Buffalo.

After Prohibition was ended, Magaddino and his associates moved into loan sharking, illegal gambling, narcotics, extortion, carjacking and labour racketeering, gaining control too of lucrative legitimate businesses such as taxi companies and the laundry and linen services essential to the area’s many hotels.

In the traditional manner of Sicilian Mafiosi, he gave the impression of living a relatively modest lifestyle, doing his utmost to stay in the background and draw as little attention as possible to his criminal activities.

Joseph Bonanno, with whom
Magaddino shared his roots

He was admired by other gang bosses for the success he had in controlling such a large area, while the remoteness of his territory enabled him to remain untouched by the periodic squabbles between the New York families. He was at times called on to an arbitrate in disputes.

He survived a number of attempts on his life.  In 1936, his sister was killed by a bomb intended for him but placed in the wrong house and in 1957 a grenade was thrown through his kitchen window but failed to explode.  The second of those episodes was linked to the so-called Apalachin Conference, a meeting of Mafia bosses at a small town in New York State.

The meeting had been arranged by Magaddino and when it was raided by FBI agents, resulting in the arrest of several mobsters, there were suspicions that he had tipped them off himself as a way of eliminating a few of his rivals.

Later, the respect he enjoyed among his peers diminished when he and his son, Peter, were hauled in by police on charges of illegal bookmaking after a 1968 raid on his son’s home in Niagara Falls, which found around $500,000 in a suitcase.

This aroused more disquiet among senior figures in the Buffalo Family, suspecting him of skimming off profits, and rival groups began to emerge.  Within a year, Magaddino had been ousted as boss, replaced first by Salvatore Pieri and ultimately by Samuel Frangiamore, who had been joint leaders of a breakaway faction.

Magaddino managed to avoid significant spells in jail throughout his rule.  The illegal bookmaking charges, based on a six-year long wire-tapping operation at the funeral home in Niagara, were dropped after a judge ruled the evidence had been obtained illegally.

He was named in Rome in 1967 as the head of a narcotics smuggling ring that had trafficked about $150 million worth of heroin between Europe and the United States between 1950 and 1960 but was never extradited.  He died in 1974 following a heart attack. 

Castellammare del Golfo enjoys a fine location on the
coast of northwest Sicily

Travel tip:

Castellammare del Golfo is a resort and fishing town situated on a large bay in the northwest corner of Sicily, midway between Trapani and Palermo.  It has an attractive setting, guarding over a broad sweep of water and with steep lanes of houses climbing the hillside from the harbour towards the elevated Piazza Petrolo.  A popular backdrop for TV dramas, including some episodes of the Inspector Montalbano series, it has the remains of a castle probably built at the time of the ninth-century Arab occupation of the town, and a good selection of bars and restaurants.

The Basilica of Maria SS Annunziata

Travel tip:

Trapani is a city of some 70,000 inhabitants on a coastal plain around 100km (62 miles) west of Palermo, at the very western tip of the island. Renowned for its seafood, it has a nearby airport but is not well known among overseas tourists, yet offers an attractive base for visitors, with the impressive Basilica-Sanctuary of Maria Santissima Annunziata and a 14^th-century cathedral among its attractions. The city is also famous for the Easter Processione dei Misteri di Trapani, a day-long celebration of the Passion.

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