Andrew Grima - royal jeweller

Rome-born craftsman favoured by the Queen of England

Andrew Grima was the Rome-born son of a Maltese
lace-maker and an Italian mother

The jewellery designer Andrew Grima, whose clients included the British Royal Family, was born on this day in 1921 in Rome.

Grima, whose flamboyant use of dramatically large, rough-cut stones and brilliant innovative designs revolutionised modern British jewellery, achieved an enviable status among his contemporaries.

After the Duke of Edinburgh had given the Queen a brooch of carved rubies and diamonds designed by Grima as a gift, he was awarded a Royal Warrant and rapidly became the jeweller of choice for London’s high society, as well as celebrities and film stars from around the world.

He won 13 De Beers Diamonds International Awards, which is more than any other jeweller, and examples of his work are kept by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths.

When a private collection of Grima pieces was sold at auction by Bonhams in London in September 2017, some 93 lots realised a total of more than £7.6 million (€8.6m), with one pear-shaped blue diamond alone making £2.685m (€3.034m).

Grima’s father, John Grima, was the Maltese owner of a large international lace-making business, designing his products as well as marketing them. His mother, Leopoldina Farnese, could trace her ancestry to the powerful Farnese family of the Renaissance, who left their mark on Roman art and architecture in several ways.

Three pictures showing Queen Elizabeth II wearing the ruby
and diamond Grima brooch give to her by Prince Philip

The family moved to London when Andrew, their first-born, was five. After going to school in southeast London, Grima studied mechanical engineering at Nottingham University, from which he joined the Royal Engineers, serving in Burma and India during the Second World War.

His move into the jewellery business came purely by chance.  His plans to attend art school after he was demobbed had to be put on hold because few art schools had reopened. Instead, he took a secretarial course and began going out with a classmate, Helène Haller, whose Viennese father owned a small jewellery workshop.

The relationship blossomed and they were married in 1947, after which Helène’s father gave Grima a job supervising his accounts. He was desperate for an opportunity to unleash his artistic talents.  It came, finally, when a pair of dealers arrived at the workshop one day with a suitcase of large stones imported from Brazil, including aquamarines, citrines, tourmalines and amethysts. 

Grima persuaded his father-in-law to buy them all and though he had no training he set about creating his own radical designs, experimenting with abstract shapes, different textural effects and making casts from nature, such as leaves, lichen and volcanic lava, to reproduce in gold.  The pieces he made were a great success.

Grima's created this unusual gold and diamond brooch
by making a cast from pencil shavings

In 1952, his father-in-law died and he inherited the business, which went from strength to strength.  After he was invited to exhibit at an exhibition of modern jewellery in London in 1961, he began to win awards, including the Duke of Edinburgh Award for Elegant Design, which was awarded to him in 1966 as the first jeweller to win the accolade.

The curator of the exhibition, Graham Hughes, introduced Grima to rich potential clients, although he made a smart move of his own when he invited Lord Snowdon to visit his workshop after reading a magazine interview in which Snowdon had complained about what he saw as a paucity of exciting jewellery available. In the event, Snowdon was so impressed he chose presents for his then wife Princess Margaret, the Queen’s sister.

It was not long afterwards that Grima received the Duke of Edinburgh award from Prince Philip in person, the Duke taking a brooch of carved rubies and diamonds from the winning collection as a gift for the Queen, who wore it on many different occasions in the years that followed, including her televised 2007 Christmas speech, coincidentally broadcast the day before Grima passed away at his home in Switzerland.

The Queen soon commissioned Grima to make state gifts and it was not long that he had the Royal Warrant and the Queen's Award for Industry as well as the Duke of Edinburgh's prize.

Snowdon, meanwhile, would some years later open Grima’s new shop at 80 Jermyn Street in London's St. James's, designed by his architect brothers, George and Godfrey, featuring an extraordinary and starkly eye-catching shopfront made from slabs of slate bolted to a steel framework, dotted with small, rectangular showcases, designed by sculptor Bryan Kneale.

Grima went on to open galleries in Zurich, New York, Tokyo and Sydney. As well as many of the British royals, Jacqueline Onassis was a fan of his pieces, as were many movie stars.

In 1977, Grima divorced Helène and married JoJo Maughan-Brown, the daughter of the diamond magnate, Sir Thomas Cullinan. After a planned business expansion failed, he decided to relinquish his royal warrant and in 1986 moved to Switzerland to work only on private commissions, living first in Lugano and then in Gstaad.  His daughter, Francesca, continued to design after his death.

The Palazzo Farnese in Rome is currently the home of
the French embassy in Italy

Travel tip:

The Farnese were among the great aristocratic families who turned Rome into a communal work of art from the 14th to the 17th centuries, along with the Barberini, the Colonna, the Chigi and the Borghese. Their most significant contributions was the Palazzo Farnese, the High Renaissance palace designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger in 1517, which is now owned by the Italian republic and currently serves as the French embassy. It can be found in Piazza Farnese, a short distance from the Tiber, which features two identical decorative fountains, on granite bases thought to have been brought from the Roman Baths of Caracalla.

The view across from the Janiculum Hill

Travel tip:

Another Farnese monument worth visiting is the Villa Aurelia, which sits on top of the Janiculum Hill, the highest point within Rome's ancient city walls. Built in the 17th century by a Farnese cardinal named Girolamo, because of its elevated position it was commandeered by Garibaldi as his headquarters when he came to Rome to defend the republic of 1849 from the invading French. It was severely damaged by French artillery but restored three decades later when it was bought by a Philadelphia heiress,  Clara Jessup Heyland.

Also on this day:

1594: The death of the great Renaissance artist Tintoretto

1914: The death of Angelo Moriondo, inventor of the world's first espresso machine

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Andrea Verga - anatomist and neurologist

Professor among founding fathers of Italian psychiatry

Andrea Verga was one of the first to see how criminal
behaviour could be driven by insanity

The anatomist and neurologist Andrea Verga, who was one of the first Italian doctors to carry out serious research into mental illness, was born on this day in 1811 in Treviglio in Lombardy.

Verga’s career was notable for his pioneering study of the criminally insane, for some of the first research into acrophobia - the fear of heights - which was a condition from which he suffered, and for the earliest known experiments in the therapeutic use of cannabis.

For a number of years, he held the post of Professor of Psychiatry at the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan. He also founded, in conjunction with another physician, Serafino Biffi, the Italian Archives for Nervous Disease and Mental Illness, a periodical in which research findings could be shared and discussed.

Verga also acquired an in-depth knowledge of the anatomy of the bone system and the nervous system, and was the first to identify an anomaly of the brain that occurs in only one in six people, which became known as ‘Verga’s ventricle’.

The son of a coachman, Verga was an enthusiastic student of classics whom his parents encouraged to pursue a career in the church, yet it was medicine that became his calling.  He went to the University of Pavia, graduating in 1832 and becoming assistant to Bartolomeo Panizza, whose previous students had included Italy’s first Nobel Prize winner, Camillo Golgi.

Verga was a driving force behind Milan's Provincial
Psychiatric Hospital at Mombello 

Verga spent much of his working life with sight in only one eye, the consequence, it might be said, of his failing to remember to take literally the biblical proverb ‘physician heal thyself’. During an outbreak of cholera, in which he attended many sick patients, he developed a serious eye infection, which he neglected to treat, and went blind in the affected eye.

Nonetheless, steering himself towards the field of psychiatry and mental illness, in 1843 he moved to Milan, where he worked at the private hospital of San Celso, which cared for mental patients from the city’s wealthier classes.

While working at San Celso, he is thought to have participated with other physicians in experiments on the therapeutic use of cannabis in mental health conditions. The plant had a history of medical use in a number of ancient civilisations.

In 1848, amid the chaos of the first Italian War of Independence, he became the director of the Pia Casa della Senavra, Milan’s first public mental hospital. For several years his movements came under the scrutiny of the occupying Austrians, yet in 1852 he was offered the chance to lead psychiatric research at the city’s Ospedale Maggiore.

Andrea Verga's tomb at the Monumental Cemetery in Milan

There he pushed for reforms that fundamentally improved the service of medicine and surgery in Milan. With Biffi he helped construct a more accurate definition of the symptoms of mental illness and the concept of insanity, and its recognition as grounds for a different interpretation, in some cases, of criminal behaviour.

Also, along with Biffi and Cesare Castiglioni, he argued the need for a more modern mental hospital in Milan. His arguments were rewarded when Senevra was closed and replaced, in 1878, by the Provincial Psychiatric Hospital of Milan at Mombello. 

Devoted to his work throughout his life, Verga never married. He did find time to become involved in local politics, however, as a councillor and in 1876 was appointed a Senator of the Kingdom of Italy.

He died in 1895 and was buried in the Monumental Cemetery in Milan.

The Basilica of San Martino in Treviglio

Travel tip:

The small city of Treviglio in Lombardy, where Verga was born, is about 20km (13 miles) south of Bergamo and 41km (26 miles) northeast of Milan. It developed from a fortified town in the early Middle Ages and, having been at times controlled by the French and the Spanish, became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1860.  Its most visited attraction is the Basilica of San Martino, originally built in 1008 and reconstructed in 1482, with a Baroque façade from 1740, which is in Piazza Luciano Manara. Opposite the basilica is the historic Caffè Milano, founded in 1896, which retains the original turn-of-the century furniture and a counter in Art Nouveau style.

The bust of Andrea Verga in Largo
Francesco Richini in Milan

Travel tip:

An enormous white marble bust, dedicated in 1903 to Andrea Verga, can be found in Largo Francesco Richini in the centre of Milan, opposite what was formerly the Ospedale Maggiore, which is now part of the campus of the University of Milan, created by the Milan sculptor Giulio Branca. The Ospedale Maggiore moved early in the 20th century to a vast new site not far away, opposite the university buildings on the other side, bordered by Via Francesco Sforza.

Also on this day:

1875: The birth of Giovanni Gentile, the so-called 'philosopher of Fascism' 

1924: The day tragic politician Giacomo Matteotti spoke out against Fascist thugs

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Michele Schirru - would-be assassin

Anarchist executed for plotting to kill Mussolini

The anarchist Michele Schirru returned from
the United States planning to kill Mussolini

The Sardinian-born anarchist Michele Schirru was executed by firing squad in Rome on this day in 1931.

Schirru, a former socialist revolutionary who had emigrated to the United States, had been arrested on suspicion of plotting to assassinate the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Seized at a hotel in Rome in February 1931, having arrived in the capital about three weeks earlier, he was tried by the Special Fascist Court and after he had loudly declared his hatred of both Fascism and communism was found guilty.

A death sentence was handed down at a further hearing on May 28 and the execution was carried out at first light the following day at the Casal Forte Braschi barracks on the western outskirts of Rome, where 24 Sardinian soldiers had answered the call to volunteer for the firing squad.

Schirru died screaming ‘long live anarchy, long live freedom, down with Fascism’, which bizarrely won posthumous praise from Mussolini, who made reference to Schirru’s distinguished service in Italy’s army during the First World War and applauded his bravery for declaring his unwavering conviction to his cause even as the riflemen were about to squeeze the trigger.

Born in Padria, Sardinia in 1899, Schirru was brought up by his mother in Poggio Maggiore in mountainous southern Piedmont after his father had emigrated to the United States. He attended the Maritime School in La Spezia, while at the same time taking part in demonstrations in Turin that twice saw him jailed.

Mussolini addressing a rally in Milan at around
the time Schirru was arriving in Italy

On his release following his second incarceration, he was called up for three years of compulsory military service, 14 months of which he spent on the front line in the First World War, which he hoped might turn into a war of liberation for the oppressed and the prelude to social revolution in Italy.

Demobbed in 1919, he returned to protesting on the streets of Turin, having by then embraced anarchy. He became increasingly disenchanted with the left in Italy, never more so than when the Italian Communist Party (PSI) decided to abandon a two-year programme of factory occupations and, he felt, allowed the bosses to regain control.

This prompted him to follow his father in emigrating to the United States, where he disembarked from an ocean liner filled with Italians seeking a new life on November 2, 1920.

Schirru settled in northern Manhattan and continued to be politically active, often becoming involved in street brawls between socialists and Fascist sympathisers within the Italian community.  He married an American woman, with whom he had two children, and after working for a while as a mechanic started a fruit business in the Bronx.

At the same time he was dismayed, watching from afar, at the Fascist grip on Italy and decided that the only way to release his homeland from Mussolini’s malevolent rule was to kill him.

Schirru considered carrying out his attack in Piazza Venezia,
through which Mussolini passed most days

He travelled to Paris, where his association with the anarchist weekly newspaper L'Adunata dei Refrattari opened doors to the kind of people who would support his assassination plan. He arrived in Rome on the evening of January 12, 1931, checking in at the Hotel Royal on Via XX Settembre, with two bombs in his luggage.

Over the next few days, Schirru familiarised himself with the route Mussolini took through Rome on government business on most days, through Villa Torlonia, Porta Pia, the Viminale, Via Nazionale and Piazza Venezia, looking for the best place to carry out an attack.

He was arrested on February 3 at another hotel, the Albergo Colonna, on Via dei Due Macelli, not far from the Spanish Steps, where he was found with Anna Lucovszky, a 24-year-old Hungarian-born dancer he had met not long after arriving in Rome.

Schirru attempted to commit suicide with a pistol but failed while being held at a police station, and it was while he was being treated for his wounds in hospital that bombs and incriminating correspondence were found in his hotel room.

In court he claimed he had abandoned his plan to assassinate Il Duce because of logistical concerns but admitted he had seen it as a way to provoke the collapse of “the dictatorial and bourgeois political order of society”.

The Colli Tortonesi is a wine-growing region in Piedmont.

Travel tip:

Poggio Maggiore, where Schirru was brought up by his mother, is a tiny village in the parish of Borghetto di Borbera in Piedmont, about about 110km (68 miles) southeast of Turin and about 35km (22 miles) southeast of Alessandria. There are a few ruined castles, including that at Torre Ratti, but the area is best known for wine production, being part of the Colli Tortonesi region. Look out for Timorasso, Cortese or Croatina wines, and for the area’s own historic cheese, called Montebore. The hills are also notable for fruits and vegetables as well as chestnuts, truffles, honey and salami.

Piazza di Spagna, with Via dei Due Macelli on the left

Travel tip:

Via dei Due Macelli, where Schirru was arrested at what was then the Albergo Colonna, is the street that connects Via del Tritone - the long thoroughfare that runs from the prime minister’s residence at Palazzo Chigi to the Piazza Barberini - with Piazza di Spagna. Right at the heart of the city on the edge of the elegant Colonna district, it takes its name from the two butchers’ premises that were once located on the street, where livestock was brought before the slaughterhouse at Porta del Popolo was built in 1825.

Also on this day:

1926: The birth in Florence of English TV and radio presenter Katie Boyle

2013: The death of actress and political activist Franca Rame, wife of Dario Fo

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Caravaggio and a death in Campo Marzio

Hot-tempered artist killed man in Rome in row over a woman

Caravaggio was a brilliant painter but had
a reputation for drunken violence

The brilliant late Renaissance artist Caravaggio committed the murder that would cause him to spend the remainder of his life on the run on this day in 1606.

Renowned for his fiery temperament and history of violent acts as well as for the extraordinary qualities of his paintings, Caravaggio is said to have killed Ranuccio Tomassoni, described in some history books as a ‘wealthy scoundrel’, in the Campo Marzio district of central Rome, not far from the Piazza Monte D'Oro.

The incident led to Caravaggio being condemned to death by order of the incumbent pope, Paul V, and then fleeing the city, first to Naples, eventually landing in Malta.

It was thought that the two had a row over a game of tennis, which was gaining popularity in Italy at the time, and that the dispute escalated into a brawl, which was not unusual for Caravaggio. The story was that Tomassoni wounded the painter in some way, at which Caravaggio drew a sword and lashed out at his rival, inflicting a gash in the thigh from which he bled to death.

This was accepted by historians as a plausible story for almost 400 years until evidence emerged to challenge the theory in 2002, when papers unearthed in a search of Vatican and Rome state archives suggested a different explanation.

According to the English art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon, who revealed the findings in a BBC television documentary, Caravaggio killed Tomassoni in a botched attempt to castrate him.

Caravaggio among the narrow crowded
streets of the Campo Marzio district

The evidence had been turned up by Monsignor Sandro Corradini, an Italian art historian with a particular interest in Caravaggio, who found a surgeon’s report written on the day of Tomassoni’s death.

Maurizio Marini, another historian, told Graham-Dixon in the documentary that the surgeon’s report described a fatal wound to Tomassini’s femoral artery and surmised that Caravaggio was probably trying to castrate him.

Such barbaric acts were relatively common in Rome at the time, part of a ‘code of honour’ that dictated that if a man was insulted by another man he would cut his face, but that if a man’s woman was insulted then the man delivering the insult could expect a different part of his anatomy to be under threat.

The woman at the heart of their row was said to be Fillide Melandroni, who had allegedly succumbed to Caravaggio’s charms after he was asked to paint her for an Italian nobleman. It is thought that she was a prostitute and that Tomassino was her pimp.

It is little wonder, after he had been found guilty of murder, that Caravaggio was not keen to hang around. The sentence was beheading. Worse still, from the artist’s point of view, the sentence allowed for any member of the public, on spotting Caravaggio, to carry out the sentence themselves, on the spot.

In the event, Caravaggio escaped, yet died only four years later in mysterious circumstances. Official records said that he fell victim to a fever at Porta Ercole, on the Tuscan coast, but no records exist of a funeral or a burial and it is suspected that he himself may have been murdered, either by relatives of Tomassino or representatives of the ancient order of the Knights of Malta, avenging the maiming of one of their members in another brawl involving the painter, in Malta.

Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath.
painted shortly before he died in 1610

Shortly before he died, while lying low in Naples with the intention of returning to Rome to seek clemency, he completed his David with the Head of Goliath, in which the severed head of the giant bears his own facial features, while David is given an expression of compassion for his victim.

Born Michelangelo Merisi in Milan in 1571, Caravaggio became known by the name of the town, in the province of Bergamo, where his family settled after leaving Milan to escape an outbreak of plague.

His work became famous for his realistic observation of the physical and emotional state of human beings and for his dramatic use of light and shade, known as chiaroscuro, which gave his paintings an almost three-dimensional quality. This was a formative influence for the baroque school of painting.

Some of his major works, such as The Calling of St Matthew, The Crucifixion of St Peter and Deposition, can be found in churches in Rome, but his work is also well represented in the Uffizi gallery in Florence.

The Sanctuary of the Madonna in Caravaggio

Travel tip:

In addition to its connection with the artist, another attraction of the town of Caravaggio is the Sanctuary of the Madonna di Caravaggio, which was built in the 16th century on the spot where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to a local peasant woman.  The Sanctuary was later rebuilt and completed in the 18th century and is now visited by pilgrims from all over the world.  The town did have a theatre named after Caravaggio that was held in high regard but it was destroyed during the Second World War.

The Piazza del Popolo is among the highlights of Campo Marzio

Travel tip:

Campo Marzio is Rome’s 4th rione - district - situated in the centre of Rome, comprising an area that includes Piazza di Spagna and the Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti - otherwise known as the Spanish Steps - and Piazza del Popolo, as well as the fashion district with the Via dei Condotti at its centre, overlooked by the Pincian Hill.  During the Middle Ages it was the most densely populated quarter of the city. It is bordered by the Tiber, the Quirinal hill in the north and the Capitoline Hill.

More reading:

The mysterious death of Caravaggio

Also on this day:

1987: The birth of Leandro Jayarajah, former member of the Italy national cricket team

1999: Da Vinci's The Last Supper goes back on display after 20-year restoration

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