Domenico Ghirardelli – chocolatier

Built famous US business with skills learned in Genoa

The chocolatier Domenico Ghirardelli, founder of the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company in San Francisco, was born on this day in 1817 in a village just outside Rapallo in Liguria.

The Ghirardelli Chocolate Shop in Ghirardelli Square
on San Francisco's northern waterfront

Also known as Domingo, Ghirardelli arrived in San Francisco in 1849 during the rapid expansion years of the Gold Rush, having spent the previous 10 years or so in Peru, where he had run a successful confectionery business.

After making money as a merchant, initially ferrying supplies to prospectors in the gold fields, he set up his first chocolate factory in 1852, drawing on the skills he acquired as an apprentice in Genoa.

By the end of the century, the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company was one of the city’s most successful businesses, with a prestige headquarters on North Point Street, a short distance from Fisherman’s Wharf, in a group of buildings that became known as Ghirardelli Square.

The son of a spice importer, Ghirardelli was born in the village of Santa Anna, just outside Rapallo, about 25km (16 miles) along the Ligurian coast from Genoa, in the direction of La Spezia to the southeast.

His father wanted him to have a trade and once he had reached his teens sent him to be an apprentice at Romanengo’s, an important confectioner in Genoa, with a view to setting himself up in business.

Domenico Ghirardelli arrived in San
Francisco from Peru in 1849

However, having been forced to give up its status as an independent republic and become part of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia as part of the settlement following the Napoleonic Wars, Genoa was a volatile city prone to riots and to brutal repression by the military and in 1837 Ghirardelli decided, in common with many Italians, to leave in search of a better life in the New World.

At the age of only 20 and newly married, he arrived first in Montevideo in Uruguay, moving on a year later to Lima in Peru, a prosperous city where there was already an established Italian community.

He set up a confectionery shop on Calle de los Mercaderes, the city’s main shopping street, which he modelled on Romanengo’s store in Genoa.  After the death of his wife, he married for a second time, to a Peruvian widow, and would have stayed in Lima had his former neighbour, an American from Pennsylvania who had moved to San Francisco, not written to him urging him to follow.

The neighbour, James Lick, who would go on to become the richest man in California, had set himself up on the proceeds of 600lb (272kg) of chocolate Ghirardelli had given him to sell. With San Francisco on the brink of an economic boom after the discovery of gold in 1848, it was too good an opportunity to miss.

Trading first in general merchandise, Ghirardelli rapidly expanded from running a delivery service to owning grocery stores in San Francisco and Stockton, plus a soda fountain, a coffee house and a part-interest in a hotel.  Within two years, he had amassed wealth of $25,000, which then had the buying power of around $750,000 (€610,000) today.

The Ghirardelli factory was established just back from
the San Francisco waterfront

He opened his first chocolate factory in 1852 in the Verandah Building on Portsmouth Square, living above the premises, before moving to Jackson Street, building a separate family home in Oakland.  The business grew even more after the accidental discovery of cocoa powder, the result of some bags of chocolate paste being left unattended in a warm room.

The butterfat in the paste melted, dripping out on to the floor, leaving behind in the bags a greaseless residue that could be ground into a powder, which Ghirardelli patented and sold under the name of Broma, to be used as a cake ingredient or for making a hot cocoa drink.

The recession of the 1870s brought a massive scaling back, with many of the company’s assets, including the house in Oakland and several stores, being auctioned off to keep the factory going.

Yet, despite competition from others keen to exploit chocolate’s continuing popularity, the business recovered, with Ghirardelli’s sons increasingly involved.  Broma, rebranded as Ghirardelli’s Chocolate Powder, continued to be a big seller.  By the late 1880s, the company was producing and selling one million pounds (453,000kg) of the powder each year.

Ghirardelli retired in 1889, handing control to his sons.  In 1892, needing to expand, the company acquired a large woollen mill near the city’s northern waterfront at what his now Ghirardelli Square.

He died in 1894, contracting influenza during an extended visit to Rapallo, where he had gone in order to rediscover his roots. His body was returned to San Francisco, to be buried in the family mausoleum in Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery.

Production continued at Ghirardelli Square until the 1960s, when the business was sold and the manufacturing operation moved to San Leandro.  Today, while still trading under the family name as the third oldest chocolate manufacturer in the United States, the business is a subsidiary of the Swiss company, Lindt and Sprüngli. There is still a Ghirardelli shop in the Ghirardelli Square shopping and restaurant complex

A quaint 16th century castle guards Rapallo's harbour

Travel tip:

Rapallo, larger and a little cheaper than its exclusive neighbour Portofino, is an attractive seaside town of the eastern Italian Riviera, known as the Riviera di Levante. The town developed around a harbour guarded by a small castle – Il Castello sul Mare – built in 1551, which sits right on the water’s edge.  Behind the harbour is a network of narrow streets. There are boat service to Portofino, as well as Santa Margherita Ligure and Camogli, while the main Genoa to Pisa railway line passes through the town.

The ornate interior of the Romanengo store in Genoa

Travel tip:

Romanengo’s confectionery store in Via Soziglia in Genoa has become a tourist attraction in itself, a wonderfully ornate emporium barely changed since it was refurbished lavishly in the mid-19^th century, having opened for business for the first time in 1814.  Modelled on Parisian confectioners’ shops, it has a marble floor, a frescoed ceiling, elegant chandeliers and beautiful inlaid rosewood shelving and counters, with endless dishes of brightly coloured confectionery in glass cases. The company logo of a dove carrying an olive branch symbolised peace at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.


More reading:

Michele Ferrero - the man who invented Nutella

Humble beginnings of chocolate giant Ferrero

The entrepreneur behind Perugina chocolates

Also on this day:

1513: Death of Pope Julius II

1609: The birth of military leader Raimondo Montecuccoli

1868: Death of painter and revolutionary Giuseppe Abbati

(Picture credits: Ghirardelli store by PictorialEvidence; San Francisco waterfront by Saopaulo1; Rapallo Castle by RegentsPark; all via Wikimedia Commons; Romanengo store from www.romanengo.com) 

Home

The Barber of Seville premieres in Rome

Rival fans wreck debut of Rossini’s most famous opera

A typical costume for the main
character, the barber Figaro

The Barber of Seville, the work that would come to be seen as Gioachino Rossini’s masterpiece of comic opera, was performed for the first time on this day in 1816 at the Teatro Argentina in Rome.

Commissioned by the theatre’s owner, Duke Francesco Sforza-Cesarini, it had a libretto by Cesare Sterbini based on the French comedy play Le Barbier de Séville and was originally entitled Almaviva or The Useless Precaution, out of deference to Giovanni Paisiello, the most popular composer in Italy in the 18^th century, whose own version of Il barbiere di Siviglia had been very successful.

The second part of the same text, by Pierre Beaumarchais, was behind Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro, which premiered four years after Paisiello’s.

Nonetheless, Paisiello’s loyal fans saw Rossini’s opera as an attempt to steal their favourite’s thunder, whatever name he gave it, and organised what was nothing short of an act of sabotage, packing the theatre on opening night and proceeding to jeer, shout and catcall throughout the whole performance, unsettling the cast and leading to a number of mishaps on stage.

Rossini, who had conducted the opening performance, was so outraged and embarrassed he stayed away the following night, handing the baton to a deputy.

Rossini wrote the part of Figaro specifically
for his friend, the baritone Luigi Zamboni

Yet, having already made his mark with hits such as Tancredi, L’Italiana in Algeri and Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, Rossini had a following of his own and the audience for the second night, on hearing the now unmistakable arias for the first time, declared the opera a resounding success, their enthusiasm such that a crowd gathered outside his residence later in the evening to voice their approval.

Luigi Zamboni, the bass-baritone Rossini had in mind when he wrote the score – in the space of just 12 days, he later claimed – gave a bravura performance as Figaro, the barber of the title and something of a Mr Fixit, as in “Largo al factotum” – “Make way for the factotum” – the resounding aria that marks his entry on to the stage in the first act.

Count Almaviva, the Spanish nobleman who enlists Figaro’s help in wooing the rich ward of an elderly physician, was sung by the tenor, Manuel Garcia, who had worked with Rossini before, with the role of Rosina, the object of his affections, played by the contralto Geltrude Righetti-Giorgi. The bass Bartolomeo Botticelli was cast as her guardian, Dr Bartolo, whose motive for wishing to keep Rosina from running off with a handsome young suitor was that he wished to marry her himself when she came of age.

It was not long before the opera was being performed in cities across Europe, becoming known so generally as The Barber of Seville that the original title was, in time, discarded.

It made its London debut at the King’s Theatre in March 1818, followed by a version in English at Covent Garden in October of the same year.  The same translation, by John Fawcett and Daniel Terry, was performed at the Park Theatre in New York in 1819, becoming the first Italian opera staged in America to be sung in the original language when it returned to the Park Theatre in 1825, with Garcia again in the role of Almaviva.

More than 200 years later, according to Operabase, the respected collator of opera statistics, The Barber of Seville is the seventh most performed opera in the world, just ahead of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. On performance numbers, Verdi’s La Traviata is the world’s favourite.

The  Teatro Argentina, where The Barber of Seville was
performed for the first time,  is one of  Rome's oldest theatres

Travel tip:

The Teatro Argentina opera house in Rome is one of the oldest theatres in the city, constructed in 1731 to designs by Gerolamo Theodoli, on behalf of the Sforza-Cesarini family. It takes its name from its location on the Largo di Torre Argentina, a square that was named not after the South American country but by a Papal Master of Ceremonies who hailed from Strasbourg, the Latin name for which was Argentoratum. The theatre stands on the site of the Curia Pompeia, the meeting hall in which Julius Caesar was murdered in 44BC.

Find a hotel in Rome with Booking.com

The Palazzo Ducale is a typical palace in Pesaro

Travel tip:

Gioachino Rossini was born in Pesaro, now a seaside resort in the northern part of Marche, about 40km (25 miles) south of the much better known resort of Rimini, in Emilia-Romagna.  Like many Italian Adriatic resorts, it has an old town distinctly different from the hotel-lined avenues close to the sea, in Pesaro’s case built on the site of an old Roman settlement that changed hands many times over the centuries until it became capital of the duchy of the Della Rovere family, who built many of the palaces that survive in the old town. It was still part of the Papal States when Rossini was born in 1792.

Trust Booking.com with your Pesaro accommodation plans

More reading:

Giovanni Paisiello - the audience favourite with a jealous streak

How Rossini turned his talent into great wealth

The opera singer famous for her interpretations of Rossini

Also on this day:

1339: Visconti v Visconti in the Battle of Parabiago

1549: The birth of  Francesco Maria II della Rovere, the last Duke of Urbino

1778: The death of physicist Laura Bassi, ground-breaker for women in academia

1993: The death of performance car maker Ferruccio Lamborghini

(Picture credits: Teatro Argentina by Lalupa; Palazzo Ducale, Pesaro by Italtrucker; via Wikimedia Commons)

Home

Massimo Troisi – actor, writer and director

Tragic star died hours after completing finest work

Troisi was only 41 when he died in 1994,
hours after finishing Il Postino

Massimo Troisi, the comic actor, writer and director who suffered a fatal heart attack in 1994 only 12 hours after shooting finished on his greatest movie, was born on this day in 1953 in a suburb of Naples.

Troisi co-directed and starred in Il Postino, which won an Oscar for best soundtrack after being nominated in five categories, the most nominations in Academy Award history for an Italian film.

He also wrote much of the screenplay for the movie, based on a novel, Burning Patience, by the Chilean author Antonio Skármeta, which tells the story of a Chilean poet exiled on an Italian island and his friendship with a postman whose round consists only of the poet’s isolated house.

Plagued by heart problems for much of his life, the result of several bouts of rheumatic fever when he was a child, Troisi was told just before shooting was due to begin that he needed an urgent transplant operation.

However, he was so committed to the project, a joint enterprise with his friend, the British director Michael Radford, he decided to postpone his surgery.  He was so ill that he collapsed on set on the third day but recovered to continue, shooting many of his location scenes in one take, with a body double used for any shots that required physical activity, and invariably unable to last for more than an hour before succumbing to exhaustion.

Yet he completed the movie, for which the location shots were shared between the islands of Pantelleria and Salina – off Sicily - and Procida, in the Bay of Naples, and then travelled from Naples to his sister’s house in Ostia, outside Rome. He had tickets booked on a plane to London, where he was due to receive a new heart at the famous Harefield Hospital the following day.  Sadly, he had a cardiac arrest during the night and never woke from sleep.

Massimo Troisi (left) and Lello Arena in the staircase
scene from Troisi's second film, Scusate il ritardo

Troisi, who had a successful career as a comedian on radio and television before turning to film, wrote and directed six movies, in which he also starred, and acted in half a dozen others.

Born in San Giorgio a Cremano, a town in the foothills of Mount Vesuvius about 6km (3.75 miles) south of central Naples, he grew up in a large house in Via Cavalli di Bronzo, which his mother and father, a railway engineer, and their six children shared with his mother’s parents and seven other members of the extended family.

He suffered his first brush with rheumatic fever, common among poor children in Naples at the time, when he was very young and had to travel to the United States for heart surgery when he was 23, by which time he was already well known on the Naples cabaret circuit as part of a comic trio he had formed with two childhood friends.

Their success led to their own radio show and then to regular appearances on prime television shows such as the popular Luna Park.  Troisi’s talent was compared to his boyhood idols from the tradition of Neapolitan comedy, Totò and Eduardo and Peppino DeFilippo.

Troisi is one of only seven actors to be
nominated posthumously for an Oscar

After the trio broke up in the late seventies, Troisi turned to film, winning critical appraisal and box office success with his first venture, Ricomincio da tre (I start again from three), in 1981.

Due to his fears that his second effort would not be as good as his first, it was two years before he made another movie, but Scusate il Ritardo (Sorry for the delay) was just as well received.  Like his first film, it focussed on the troublesome love life of the Neapolitan lead character, drawing on his own life experiences, told with sometimes surreal humour. 

It featured dialogues between Troisi’s character, Vincenzo, and his friend Tonino, played by his childhood friend Lello Arena, that were so memorable that the Via Mariconda stairs in the Chiaia district of Naples, where they were filmed, have recently been renamed the Scale Massimo Troisi in his honour.  Arena received a David di Donatello award for Best Supporting Actor.

Troisi had more success starring opposite Roberto Benigni in Non ci resta che piangere (Nothing to do but cry), about two friends accidentally transported in time to the 15^th century, where they meet Leonardo da Vinci and attempt to stop Christopher Columbus discovering America.

Troisi starred in several films directed by Ettore Scola before teaming up with Radford for Il Postino, which they wrote together in just three weeks in a hotel room in Santa Monica, outside Los Angeles.  It was his first American studio production and ensured he found fame outside Italy, as many thought his talent deserved, and he was nominated posthumously for Best Actor at the Academy Awards, one of only seven actors to be given that distinction.

The Villa Vannucchi at San Giorgio a Cremano
has extensive monumental gardens

Travel tip:

Now a densely populated suburb of the Naples metropolis, San Giorgio a Cremano enjoyed its heyday in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when as one of the five towns first encountered by travellers heading south from Naples, along with Portici, Ercolano, Torre del Greco and Torre Annunziata, it became a popular resort with wealthy and aristocratic families, whose sumptuous summer residences became known as the Ville Vesuviane (Vesuvian Villas).

Book your stay in Naples with Booking.com

The picturesque harbour and historic centre of Procida

Travel tip:

Procida is a small but heavily populated island between the Naples mainland and its much larger and better-known neighbour Ischia, characterised by its narrow streets and colourful harbourside houses. Its lack of tourists compared with Ischia and particularly Capri give it a much more authentic feel and Michael Radford is not the only movie director to appreciate its value as a location.  In 1999, Anthony Minghella brought members of a star-studded cast including Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law to the island to film several scenes from The Talented Mr Ripley.

Find accommodation in Procida with Booking.com

More reading: 

Roberto Benigni - Italy's first male Oscar winner

Why Totò is still regarded as Italy's greatest comedy genius

How Eduardo De Filippo captured the spirit of Naples

Also on this day:

1605: The death of church musician Orazio Vecchi

1461: The birth of Venetian cardinal and art collector Domenico Grimani

1743: The birth of composer and cellist Luigi Boccherini

1977: The birth of operatic tenor Vittorio Grigolo

(Picture credits: Troisi on bench by Gorup de Besanez; Villa Vannuchi by Tozzabancone; Procida harbour by Jamiethearcher; all via Wikimedia Commons)

Home 

Blessed Fra Angelico – painter

Talented Friar became patron of Catholic artists

A detail from a Luca Signorelli fresco in Orvieto
cathedral, thought to represent Fra Angelico

The early Renaissance painter who became known as Fra Angelico died on this day in 1455 in Rome.

Fra Angelico is regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 15th century, whose works reflected his serene religious attitude.

He painted many altarpieces and frescoes for the Church and Priory of San Marco in Florence where he lived for about nine years.

In 1982, more than 500 years after his death, Fra Angelico was beatified by Pope John Paul II in recognition of the holiness of his life. In 1984, Pope John Paul II declared him ‘patron of Catholic artists’.

The artist was born Guido di Pietro at Rupecanina near Fiesole, just outside Florence, towards the end of the 14th century.

The earliest recorded document concerning him dates from 1417 when he joined a religious confraternity at the Carmine Church and it reveals that he was already a painter.

The first record of him as a Friar is dated 1423 and shows him to have been a member of the Dominican order.

The San Marco altarpiece in Florence is one of Fra
Angelico's most famous works

It is believed his first paintings were an altarpiece and a painted screen for the Carthusian Monastery in Florence, but these no longer exist.

Between 1418 and 1436 he lived at the convent of Fiesole where he painted frescoes and an altarpiece. A predella - platform - of the altarpiece is now in the National Gallery in London.

In 1439, while living at the convent of San Marco in Florence, he completed one of his most famous works, the San Marco altarpiece, which was unusual for its time as it showed the saints grouped in a natural way as if they were able to talk to each other. Paintings such as this became known as Sacred Conversations and were later executed by many other artists, including Bellini, Perugino and Raphael.

In 1445 Fra Angelico was summoned to Rome to paint the frescoes of the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament at St Peter’s. He moved to Orvieto in 1447 to paint works for the Cathedral and then went back to Rome to design frescoes for Pope Nicholas V, which were probably later painted by his assistants.

Fra Angelico returned to live in his old convent in Fiesole in 1449, but must have eventually gone back to Rome to do more work for the Vatican. He died in a Dominican Convent there in 1455 and was buried in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

Piazza Giotto is the central square of Vicchio

Travel tip:

Rupecanina, where Fra Angelico was born, is a hamlet of Vicchio, a town about 25 km (16 miles) north east of Florence. Many other Italian painters came from the area, including Giotto, who was believed to have been born in Colle di Vespignano, another hamlet of Vicchio, in about 1270.

The Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome

Travel tip:

Fra Angelico’s tomb, which was the work of Isaia da Pisa, is in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome because the artist died in the adjoining convent. He had painted a fresco in the cloister there, which has not survived.  The important Dominican Church is in Piazza Minerva, close to the Pantheon, and was built directly over an ancient temple. The church was consecrated in 1370 and the façade was designed by Carlo Maderno.

Also on this day:

1564: The death of Michelangelo

1967: The birth of footballer Roberto Baggio

Home