Alessandro Malaspina - explorer

Mapped Pacific on four-year epic journey

Alessandro Malaspina spent much of his
life in the employ of the Spanish navy

Alessandro Malaspina, an explorer not so well known as his compatriots, Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Colombus, but whose contribution to mankind’s knowledge of the globe was no less important, was born on this day in 1754 in Mulazzo, a village now in the province of Massa-Carrara, about 120km (75 miles) northwest of Florence.

Like Vespucci and Columbus, Malaspina sailed under the flag of Spain, whose king, Charles III, was an enthusiastic supporter of scientific research and exploration.

He spent much of his life as an officer in the Spanish navy, and it was after completing an 18-month circumnavigation of the world on behalf of the Royal Philippines Company between September 1786 and May 1788 that he proposed to the Spanish government that he make an expedition to the Pacific similar to those undertaken by the British explorer James Cook and the Frenchman Comte de la Pèrouse.

His proposal was accepted in part after word reached Spain that a Russian expedition was being prepared with the objective of claiming territory on the northwest coast of North America that had already been claimed by Spain.

After two years of preparation, the Malaspina Expedition, made up of two frigates - one named Descubierta in honour of Cook's Discovery - that he had built specially for the expedition, set sail from Cadiz on July 30, 1789, bound for South America. They rounded Cape Horn and sailed up the Pacific coast to Mexico.

The route followed by Malaspina's party

At this point, Malaspina received word that King Charles IV, who had inherited the throne following the death of Charles III in 1788, wanted him to detour to Alaska and survey the coastline to find out whether a rumoured northwest passage from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic existed.

Malaspina’s vessels anchored off Alaska for a month, studying local tribespeople and collecting and recording numerous plants. Today, a glacier between Yakutat Bay and Icy Bay is known as the Malaspina Glacier.

Malaspina knew that Cook had surveyed the west coast of Prince William Sound about 15 years earlier had not found a northwest passage. He was not convinced it did exist and, rather than spend more time looking after failing to find evidence of it, the Italian set sail for the Spanish outpost at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, established two years earlier.

His men surveyed and mapped the area around Nootka Sound more accurately than had previously been achieved, and made more botanical studies. He moved south again to explore the mouth of the Columbia River, near where Seattle is now.

Malaspina's two frigates, drawn by Fernando Brambilla, one
of a number of artists who accompanied the expedition

Eventually, he headed back along the coast to Acapulco in Mexico, before crossing the ocean to explore the Philippines, New Zealand and Australia, before returning to Spain, arriving in arriving in Cadiz in September 1793, to be greeted with great acclaim.

Malaspina was elevated to fleet-brigadier in the Spanish navy but his status as a national hero collapsed, however, over the next few years as the political climate in Spain changed following the French Revolution. He became involved with a plot to overthrow the prime minister and was arrested.

He was stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released after eight years when Napoleon Bonaparte, who had taken control of the territory around his home town in Italy, intervened on his behalf. But the years in jail, often in solitary confinement, had destroyed his health.

Malaspina’s documentation from the expedition was taken from him during his incarceration and his proposed seven-volume account of the journey was left unpublished.

He returned to Italy, settling in Pontremoli in the area of northern Tuscany at that time known as the Kingdom of Etruria, where he died in 1810 at the age of 55.  Although some of his journals had by then been published, it was not until 1987 – 177 years after his death - that the first volume of his full account was published by the Spanish Naval Museum.

The last of the seven was published in 1999 and the full extent of Malaspina’s achievement could finally be appreciated, so that he could take his place alongside Columbus and Vespucci as one of history’s great explorers.

Mulazzo has a monument to the poet Dante Alighieri

Travel tip:

Mulazzo is a village in the part of northwestern Tuscany known as Lunigiana, an area of great beauty that was a favourite of the poet Dante Alighieri.  Although he would often retreat to the Monastery of Santa Croce Corvo on the coast near Marina di Carrara, he also enjoyed the peace and solitude of the mountain regions inland and visited Mulazzo, which stages a Dante celebration every year.  Mulazzo also has a study centre dedicated to the career of Alessandro Malaspina.

Pontremoli sits alongside the Magra river

Travel tip:

Pontremoli has the status of city even though its population is fewer than 8,000.  Built on the site of a settlement first noted in 1,000 BC, its position and fertile landscape in the Magra valley made it a strategically important location and consequently it changed hands many times, owned by a succession of powerful families until 1508, when it became part of an area controlled by the French.  Subsequently it was taken over by the Holy Roman Empire, the Spanish, the Republic of Genoa, the Medici Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the French again before becoming part of the unified Italy.  Malaspina had a palace there.

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Sandrone Dazieri – crime writer

Best-selling novelist in Italy now has first title in English

Sandrone Dazieri has written more than a dozen crime
thrillers and has a big following in Italy 

Sandrone Dazieri, an Italian author and screenwriter whose first novel published in English received enthusiastic reviews, was born in Cremona on this day in 1964.

A former chef, Dazieri became a best-selling novelist in his mid-30s with Attenti al Gorilla (Beware of the Gorilla), which introduced a complex character, based on himself and even named Sandrone, who suffers from a personality disorder that makes his behaviour unpredictable yet who solves crimes and tackles injustices.

The book spawned a series featuring the same character that not only gained Dazieri enormous popularity among Italian readers but helped him get work as a screenwriter, especially in the area of TV crime dramas.

He is the main writer on the hugely popular Canale 5 series Squadra Antimafia, to which he contributed for seven seasons.

Now, for the first time, with the help of an American translator, Dazieri has moved into the English language market with Kill the Father, published by Simon & Schuster in London in January 2017.

Already a top-selling title in Italy, the dark crime thriller received such good reviews in the literary sections of English newspapers and magazines that it made the Sunday Times best-sellers list.

The novel features new characters in Colomba Caselli, the chief of the Rome police’s major crimes unit, and Dante Torre, a man who spent 10 years of his childhood imprisoned by a masked kidnapper and is called in to help Caselli solve a crime with all the hallmarks of the one committed by his own captor.

A second title in a planned series featuring the same lead characters, entitled Kill the Angel, is due to be published in English next year.

Although he was always an enthusiastic reader of gialli – the word Italians use for crime novels, based on the tradition of publishing them with yellow covers – and a fan of crime shows on TV, Dazieri’s education after high school pointed him in the direction of a career in catering.  After graduating from hotel management school at San Pellegrino Terme, in Lombardy, he spent the next 10 years working as a chef, at locations all around Italy.

Ultimately, he decided to move to Milan in the hope of finding work in publishing or journalism and eventually succeeded, getting a job as a proof reader and writing pieces for the left-wing newspaper, Il Manifesto, about culture and literature, largely about the crime, thriller and espionage genres. He enrolled to study political science at college.

Dazieri's novel Kill the Father features high-ranking Rome
policeman Colomba Caselli

When he began writing his own novels, Dazieri drew heavily on his own life experiences.  For a while after arriving in Milan, he had so little money he could not afford proper accommodation and often resorted to sleeping in empty train carriages at Milano Centrale railway station, or squatting in unoccupied houses. His main characters share many of his own characteristics, too.

He also became politically active, particular campaigning against the expansion of nuclear power stations.

Since his success as a writer, with several screenplays to his name as well as a dozen or so novels, Dazieri has become a more mainstream figure in the publishing world.

Along with Italian film director Gabriele Salvatores and producer Maurizio Totti, he set up the Colorado Noir publishing house in 2004 and after four years as chief editor of the Gialli Mondadori crime series, he now works for the Mondadori company as a literary consultant.

The facade of Cremona's Romanesque cathedral

Travel tip:

Cremona, a city at the heart of the Po Valley in Lombardy, has an outstanding Romanesque-Gothic cathedral, its façade and the adjoining baptistry regarded as among the finest examples of Romanesque architecture in Italy. Inside there are a number of notable paintings, including fresco decorations on the side walls of the nave by Giovanni Antonio de’ Sacchis, who painted under the name of Il Pordenone.  Cremona is also famous for its tradition for violin making, being the home of Giuseppe Guarneri, Antonio Stradivari and several members of the Amati family.

The majestic Art Nouveau Grand Hotel at San Pellegrino  

Travel tip:

San Pellegrino Terme, which can be found in Val Brembana in the province of Bergamo, is well known as the birthplace of the mineral waters bearing the name of the town. San Pellegrino water is to be found in supermarkets and on restaurant tables all over the world.  The water was always held to have health-enhancing properties and its reputation helped San Pellegrino became a fashionable spa town in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, a favourite haunt with wealthy industrialists from Bergamo.  Some wonderful Art Nouveau architecture remains as a legacy, in the shape of the San Pellegrino Thermal Baths, the Casino and the Grand Hotel.  The resort’s popularity declined somewhat in the mid-20^th century and these fine buildings were closed, but efforts have been made recently to restore them and allow the public back inside for a glimpse of the opulence of the town in its heyday.

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Annibale Carracci – painter

Bolognese master produced his most influential work in Rome

A self-portrait of Annibale Carracci

The Baroque painter Annibale Carracci was born on this day in 1560 in Bologna.

Annibale and his followers were to become highly influential in the development of Roman painting, bringing back the classical tradition of the High Renaissance.

He was probably apprenticed as a painter with members of his own family in Bologna. But his talents began to develop during a tour of northern Italy in the 1580s. He lodged in Venice with the painter Jacopo Bassano, whose style of painting influenced him for a time.

Annibale has been credited with rediscovering the early 16th century painter Correggio, who had almost been forgotten outside Parma. Annibale’s Baptism of Christ, painted in 1585 for the Church of San Gregorio in Bologna, is a brilliant tribute to him.

In 1582 Annibale opened a studio in Bologna with his brother, Agostino Carraci, and his older cousin, Ludovico Carracci. While working there, Annibale painted The Enthroned Madonna with St Matthew in 1588 for the Church of San Prospero in Reggio.

By the time Annibale collaborated with the other two Carracci on frescoes in the Palazzo Magnani (now the Palazzo Salem) and two other noble houses in Bologna, he had become the leading master among them.

Carracci's Madonna Enthroned with St
Matthew hangs in a gallery in Dresden

In 1595 Annibale went to Rome to work for the rich, young cardinal Odoardo Farnese, who wanted the principal floor of his palace decorated with frescoes.

In Rome, Annibale studied Michelangelo, Raphael and ancient Greek and Roman art in order to adapt his style to his new surroundings.

After decorating the study in Palazzo Farnese, he was joined by his older brother, Agostino, in the chief enterprise of his career, painting the frescoes of the coved ceiling of the Galleria with love fables from Ovid.

These decorations were considered to be a triumph of classicism tempered with humanity. The powerfully modelled figures in these frescoes have been seen as an imaginative response to Michelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The Galleria Farnese became an invaluable place for young painters to study until well into the 18th century and proved a rich feeding ground for Gian Lorenzo Bernini among others.

Annibale was underpaid for his long and intense labours in the Palazzo Farnese and he gave up working on it altogether in 1605.

Annibale's Baptism of Christ

He subsequently produced some of his finest religious paintings, including landscapes for the Palazzo Aldobrandini in Frascati that were to influence the work of Domenichino and Nicolas Poussin in Rome.

Annibale died at the age of 48 in 1609 in Rome after a few years of illness. He was buried according to his wish near Raphael in the Pantheon. Many of his assistants and pupils, such as Domenichino and Guido Reni, were later to become the pre-eminent artists for the next few decades.

Part of the ceiling at the Palazzo Fernese in Rome

Travel tip:

Palazzo Farnese, where Annibale Carracci did some of his best work in the Galleria, is one of the most important High Renaissance palaces in Rome. Owned by the Italian republic, the palazzo in Piazza Farnese was given to the French Government in 1936 for a period of 99 years and currently serves as the French embassy in Italy. One of the scenes in Puccini’s opera Tosca is set in Palazzo Farnese.

Carracci is buried alongside Raphael at The Pantheon in
Piazza della Rotonda in the heart of Rome

Travel tip:

The Pantheon in Piazza della Rotonda, is one of the best preserved ancient buildings in Rome. It was built as a temple but was converted into a Christian church in the seventh century. The Pantheon now contains the tombs of painters and kings. Along with Annibale Carracci, King Umberto I of Italy, King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy and Raphael are buried there.

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Luchino Visconti – director and writer

The aristocrat of Italian cinema

Luchino Visconti came from a family
that once ruled Milan

Luchino Visconti, who most aficionados of Italian cinema would place among the top five directors of all time, was born in Milan on this day in 1906.

Visconti’s movies include Ossessione, Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard, Death in Venice and The Innocent.

One of the pioneers of neorealism – arguably the first to make a movie that could be so defined – Visconti was also known as the aristocrat of Italian cinema, figuratively but also literally. 

He was born Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone, the seventh child of a family descendant from a branch of the House of Visconti, the family that ruled Milan from the late 13^th century until the early Renaissance.

Paradoxically, although he maintained a lavish lifestyle, Visconti’s politics were of the left. During the First World War he joined the Italian Communist Party, and many of his films reflected his political leanings, featuring poor or working class people struggling for their rights.

He enraged Mussolini with his grim portrayal of Italy's poverty in Ossessione (1943), based on James M Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. His first movie as a director, and the film that spawned the neorealist genre that would be the hallmark of post-War Italian cinema, depicted Fascist Italy as a destitute, windblown country, robbed of its dignity. Visconti found himself for several months hounded by the Fascist regime.

The movie poster for the Visconti classic
Rocco and His Brothers

Visconti, who had not helped himself by allowing Communist agitators to hold clandestine meetings in the family palazzo in Milan, was arrested more than once and believed he would have been executed as a subversive had the Allied invasion not driven Mussolini from power.

He continued to explore neorealism in his 1948 movie La Terra Trema – The Earth Trembles – set in the post-War poverty of Sicily, and to an extent in Rocco and His Brothers (1960), a story of the brutal life of Southern Italians trying to better themselves in Milan, said to have influenced Martin Scorsese in his making of Mean Streets and Raging Bull and Francis Ford Coppola’s interpretation of Mario Puzo’s narrative in The Godfather.

Other Visconti films looked at social change as it affected the wealthy, but with a sense of empathy. The Leopard (1963), based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel of the same name, was about the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy at the time of the Renaissance, while The Damned (1969) focussed on a wealthy German industrialist, whose lavish and decadent lifestyle collapses as the Nazis consolidate their grip on power in the 1930s.

Death in Venice (1971), the film for which he is most well known along with as Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard, was largely concerned with the homosexual obsession of Dirk Bogarde’s character with a teenage boy, played by Bjorn Andresen.

Visconti with the actors Sergio Garfagnoli and Bjorn
Andresen (right) on the set of Death in Venice

Visconti himself was openly gay and had relationships with the Austrian actor Helmut Berger, who appeared in a number of his films, and his fellow Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, who worked with Visconti in the theatre.

Away from the big screen, Visconti was a huge fan of opera and directed productions at La Scala in Milan, several of which featured the great soprano Maria Callas, the Royal Opera House in London and the Vienna State Opera.

A heavy smoker, said to have worked his way through up to 120 cigarettes a day, he suffered a stroke in 1972 but continued to smoke and died in Rome from complications following another stroke on 1976.

From the 1950s, Visconti would frequently retreat to his villa on the island of Ischia, La Colombaia, built to have the look of a French medieval castle, which he had purchased from a baron and renovated to an impeccably high standard.

The villa now houses a foundation in his name and a museum dedicated to his life.

Visconti's villa on the island of Ischia

Travel tip:

Ischia is a volcanic island in the Bay of Naples, less famous than its neighbour, Capri, but some would argue to be more beautiful. Famous for its thermal springs and its mineral-rich mud, Ischia has been used as the backdrop for many films.  It has an impressive Aragonese castle, built on a rock near the island in 474 and accessed by a stone bridge.

The Visconti palace in Via Cina del Duca in Milan

Travel tip:

Visconti grew up in the Palazzo Visconti di Modrone, a 16^th century palace that can be found in Via Cino del Duca, about one kilometre from the centre of Milan.  It came into the possession of the modern Visconti family in the 19^th century, when it changed hands for 750,000 lire Milanese.  The building, spread over three floors, is one of the richest examples of Milanese rococo.

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Sistine Chapel ceiling revealed

All Saints’ Day chosen to show off Michelangelo’s work

The Creation of Adam, centrepiece of Michelangelo's Sistine
Chapel ceiling, is among the most famous images in the world 

Michelangelo’s ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel were unveiled for public viewing for the first time on this day in 1512.

The date of All Saints’ Day was chosen by Pope Julius II, who had commissioned Michelangelo, because he felt it appropriate to show off the frescoes on a significant festival in the Catholic Church year.

The frescoes, the central nine panels of which depict stories from the Book of Genesis, has become one of the most famous works of art in the world, the image of The Creation of Adam rivalled only perhaps by Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa for iconic status.

Yet Michelangelo was reluctant initially to take on the project, which was first mooted in 1506 as part of a general programme of rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica being undertaken by Julius II, who felt that the Sistine Chapel, which had restored by his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV, ought to have a ceiling that carried more meaningful decoration than the gold stars on a blue background of his uncle’s design.

The ceiling in all its glory

Michelangelo, only 31 or 32 at the time, regarded himself as a sculptor rather than a painter. Already famous for his Pietà in St Peter’s Basilica and for his David in Florence, he was busy working on Julius II’s marble tomb, which would include a third great sculptured figure, that of Moses. 

When Julius became distracted by a war against the French, Michelangelo took the opportunity to make himself scarce, taking refuge away from Rome in the hope that the pope would somehow forget his ideas for the chapel and allow him to continue uninterrupted on the tomb.

However, in 1508 Julius summoned Michelangelo to begin work on the ceiling as discussed.  Feeling he had little choice, he signed the contract, although only on condition that he had a free hand over the content of his frescoes, rather than follow the pope’s idea for depictions of the Twelve Apostles, which Michelangelo felt lacked imagination.

For four years, Michelangelo and his assistants were engaged on the project, working from a unique system of platforms, balanced on a wooden scaffold and attached to the walls by brackets.  Contrary to the idea that was suggested in a movie made about his life in which Charlton Heston took the part of the artist, Michelangelo did not paint lying on his back but standing up, although craning his neck to paint above his head took its toll on his physical health.

He felt the damage to his spine turned him into an old man prematurely and that he had paid a high price but the end result was an extraordinary work, including more than 300 figures in a story in which he set out to depict the Creation, the Fall of Man, the promise of salvation through the prophets and the geneology of Christ.

The Fall and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden - another
section of Michelangelo's ceiling frescoes

The famous Creation of Adam, in which the index finger of God’s outstretched right arm is almost touching the left index finger of a languid, reclining Adam, is generally thought to depict Genesis 1:27, which contains the words: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him.”

The picture shows a totally naked Adam and portrays God, who is clothed, as a muscular figure with human form, with long, white hair and a white beard.  It was the first time a painter had represented God as such a dynamic figure; in other works, God was often depicted as a hand reaching down through clouds.

The other interesting feature is that behind God and the figures surrounding him is what looks like a swirling cloak that forms an anatomically accurate outline of the human brain, although others have hypothesised that it is meant to represent a human uterus and the scarf hanging from the cloak an umbilical cord, supporting the theory that the picture symbolises birth.

Michelangelo is said to have wanted more time to perfect the work but, under some pressure from Julius II, he revealed it on November 1, 1512 to general acclaim, before returning to work on Julius’s tomb, which can nowadays be found in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli.

Today, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, situated within the Apostolic Palace, which is the official residence of the popes, is visited by some five million people each year at a rate of about 25,000 every day.

The chapel is a significant building in the Vatican in that it is the place in which the cardinals meet in papal conclave to elect a new pope. For a while, because of the grime and dirt that had collected on its surface, the detail of the frescoes were almost invisible.  But, between 1980 and 1999, teams of experts successfully removed the soot deposits left behind by burning candles and restored the colours to their original vividness (although some critics said the colours were too bright).

Michelangelo is said to have been paid 3,000 ducats for his work on the project, the equivalent of about $78,000, or €67,000 today.

The rather plain exterior of the Cistine Chapel, deep
within the Vatican complex

Travel tip:

The Sistine Chapel is in the Apostolic Palace, where the Pope lives, in Vatican City. The chapel takes its name from Pope Sixtus IV, the uncle of Pope Julius II, who had it restored during his papacy. Michelangelo’s contribution also includes The Last Judgment, which is painted on the altar wall of the chapel and was not finished until 25 years after he completed work on the ceiling. The work was controversial for its depiction of nudity, some of which the Council of Trent, the ecumenical council that took place in Trento between 1545 and 1563, declared to be obscene and ordered Mannerist painted Daniele da Volterra to cover up.

Michelangelo's Moses, part of the tomb
of Pope Julius II

Travel tip:

The church of San Pietro in Vincoli, situated less than 1km from the Colosseum, is a minor basilica originally built during the fifth century to house the relics of the chains that bound St Peter when he was in prison in Jerusalem.  The church contains the mausoleum of Pope Julius II, made up by Michelangelo’s striking statue of Moses, which was completed by 1515 after 10 years. The mausoleum today is dimly lit until one of the visitors makes a donation and it lights up.

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Bud Spencer – swimmer-turned-actor

Competed at two Olympics before turning to screen career

Bud Spencer (right) with Terence Hill in the 1974
comedy Watch Out, We're Mad!

The actor known as Bud Spencer was born Carlo Pedersoli on this day in 1929 in Naples.

He was best known for the series of so-called Spaghetti Westerns and comedies he made with another Italian-born actor, Terence Hill.

Hill was from Venice and his real name was Mario Girotti.  They began their partnership in 1967 in a Spaghetti Western directed by Giuseppe Colizzi called God Forgives…I Don’t! and were asked to change their names so that they would sound more American.

Pedersoli came up with Bud Spencer because his movie idol was Spencer Tracy and his favourite American beer was Budweiser.   The two would go on to make 18 movies together, with westerns such as Ace High (1968) and They Call Me Trinity (1970) winning them box office success.

As Carlo Pedersoli, he had already achieved a measure of fame as a swimmer, the first Italian to swim the 100m freestyle in less than one minute.  He represented Italy at the Olympics in Helsinki in 1952 and Melbourne four years later, on each occasion reaching the semi-final in the 100m freestyle.

He also played professional water polo, winning an Italian championship with SS Lazio and a gold medal at the 1955 Mediterranean Games in Barcelona.

Bud Spencer in 2015

In a rich and varied life, Pedersoli also learned how to fly jets and helicopters, ran his own airline and, at the personal invitation of Silvio Berlusconi, stood as a Forza Italia candidate in regional elections in Lazio in 2005, although he was not elected.

Born in the Santa Lucia area of Naples, Pedersoli showed an aptitude for swimming from an early age.  His family moved to Rome when he was 10 and he began to swim competitively while attending high school.  He attended Rome’s Sapienza University from the age of 17, studying chemistry, but was forced to give up his course when his family moved again, this time to South America.

For two years, he worked at the Italian consulate in Recife, Brazil, and became fluent in Portuguse.

Back in Rome, he made his debut in international swimming competition in 1949 and, after his 59.5 sec 100m freestyle in 1950 he swam for Italy in the European championships in Vienna.  After a silver medal at the 1951 Mediterranean Games in Alexandria (Egypt), he was called up for the Italian Olympic squad.

At the same time, Pedersoli was studying law and taking his first tentative steps in the movie business, landing a part as a Praetorian Guard in in the 1951 MGM epic Quo Vadis, filmed in Italy.

There was no overnight rise to fame.  He married Maria Amato, daughter of the Italian film producer Giuseppe Amato, in 1961, but his career did not take off until that Spaghetti Western offer in 1967.  A distinctive figure, heavily built and with a thick black beard, he quickly became a favourite, particularly for the way his character would end on-screen fights by slamming his fist down on the head of his opponent.

Before he found fame as Bud Spencer the movie star,
Carlo Pedersoli was a Olympic swimmer

He decided he would learn to fly after appearing with Terence Hill in a 1973 adventure comedy called All The Way Boys, in which Colizzi took his two Spaghetti Western characters and placed them in a modern context, as bush pilots in South America, where they made money by faking aircraft crashes for insurance scams.

By 1984, with a licence to fly jets and helicopters, Spencer had set up Mistral Air, an air-mail handler which also flew Catholic pilgrims to sacred religious sites.  He later sold the airline to Poste Italiane, who also operate commercial passenger flights.

Spencer had a number of starring roles on television in the 1990s and continued to make films until well into his 70s.  He died in Rome in 2016, aged 86.  His movies with Terence Hill are still regularly shown on television and he retains an enthusiastic following in several countries around Europe, notably Germany and Hungary.

Via Santa Lucia leads from the Royal Palace
to the waterfront at Castel dell'Ovo

Travel tip:

Santa Lucia is the area of central Naples that can be found between the Royal Palace and Borgo Marinari, the small island on which stands Castel dell’Ovo.  The first settlement there was established by the Greeks and the Roman general Lucullus was so taken with the views across the bay that he built a sumptuous fortified villa, Castellum Lucullanum, that would eventually become the home in exile of the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus.  Nowadays, the area is a mix of grand hotels, sailing clubs and many fine fish restaurants.

Castel dell'Ovo with the yachts and harbourside restaurants
of Borgo Marinari in the foreground

Travel tip:

Castel dell’Ovo was built on the site of the Castellum Lucullanum, which was demolished in the 9^th century. The castle was built by the Normans in the 12^th century and remains the oldest fortified structure in Naples.  It took its name from a legend about the Roman poet Virgil, who in medieval times was thought to have mystical powers.  The legend had it that Virgil placed a magical egg – ouvo in Italian – in the foundations, and that had the egg ever broken then the castle would be destroyed that Naples would suffer a series of catastrophes.

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Antonino Votto – conductor

Outstanding operatic conductor made recordings with Callas

Antonino Votto was regarded as one of the finest
conductors of his era

Operatic conductor Antonino Votto was born on this day in 1896 in Piacenza in Emilia-Romagna.

He became famous in the 1950s because he conducted the orchestra for the acclaimed recordings made by soprano Maria Callas for EMI.

Votto was also considered one of the leading operatic conductors of his time on account of his performances at La Scala in Milan, where he worked regularly for nearly 20 years.

After Votto had attended the Naples conservatory for his music studies he went to work at La Scala, where he became an assistant conductor to Arturo Toscanini.

He made his official debut there in 1923, leading a performance of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut.

Votto went on to build a reputation as one of the most outstanding conductors of Italian opera, appearing at many other operatic venues in Italy and abroad.

Votto taught at the Giuseppe Verdi
conservatory in Milan

In 1941 he began teaching at the Giuseppe Verdi conservatory in Milan as the war limited operatic activity in Italy and in most parts of Europe.

One of his students was the present day Italian orchestra conductor, Riccardo Muti.

Recordings of Votto conducting opera live in the theatre were a great success. He conducted Bellini’s Norma in 1955 with Callas at La Scala and La Sonnambula in 1957 with Callas in Cologne. These are both considered to be great performances.

Votto also made a series of highly successful studio recordings in the 1950s with Callas, based on productions that had been staged at La Scala. Their collaborations for EMI on Puccini’s La Bohème and Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera in 1956 and Bellini’s La Sonnambula in 1957 were enthusiastically received by both the critics and the public.

Votto made his debut at Covent Garden in 1924 with performances of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci.

His American debut came in 1960 when he appeared at the Chicago Opera House conducting Verdi’s Aida and Don Carlo.

Votto continued conducting at La Scala until 1967 and died in Milan in 1985.

The bronze statue of Ranuccio II Farnese by Francesco
Mochi is a feature of Piazza Cavalli in Piacenza

Travel tip:

Piacenza, where Votto was born, is a city in the Emilia Romagna region of northern Italy. The main square is named Piazza Cavalli because of its two bronze equestrian monuments featuring Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma and his son Ranuccio II Farnese, Duke of Parma, who succeeded him. The statues are masterpieces by the sculptor Francesco Mochi.

Teatro alla Scala is Italy's most prestigious opera house

Travel tip:

Teatro alla Scala, where Votto conducted for 20 years, is in Piazza della Scala in the centre of Milan across the road from the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, an elegant arcade lined with cafes, shops and restaurants. It was built to link Piazza della Scala with Piazza del Duomo, Milan’s cathedral square. La Scala has a fascinating museum that displays costumes and memorabilia from the history of opera. The entrance is in Largo Ghiringhelli, just off Piazza della Scala. It is open every day except the Italian Bank Holidays and the days when it is closed in December. Opening hours are from 9.00 to 12.30 and 1.30 to 5.30 pm.

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