Paolo Taviani - film director

Half of a successful partnership with brother Vittorio

Paolo Taviani has been active in Italian
cinema for more than 60 years 

The film director Paolo Taviani, the younger of the two Taviani brothers, whose work together won great acclaim and brought them considerable success in the 1970s and 80s in particular, was born on this day in 1931 in San Miniato, Tuscany.

With his brother Vittorio, who was two years his senior and died in April of this year, he wrote and directed more than 20 films.

Among their triumphs were Padre Padrone (1977), which won the Palme d’Or and the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) prize at the Cannes Film Festival, La notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982), which won the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes, and Caesar Must Die (2012), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.

The brothers famously would work in partnership, directing alternate scenes, one seldom criticising the other, if ever. The actor Marcello Mastroianni, who starred in their 1974 drama Allonsanfàn, is said to have addressed the brothers as “Paolovittorio.”

They were both born and raised in San Miniato by liberal, anti-Fascist parents who introduced them to art and culture. Their father Ermanno, a lawyer, would take them to watch opera as a reward for getting good grades at school.

Paolo Taviani (right) with his brother Vittorio. They
worked as a partnership until the latter's death in 2018

After the Second World War, in which San Miniato suffered badly at the hands of the occupying Germans, they both attended university in Pisa, where Paolo studied liberal arts and Vittorio read law.

While there, they saw Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist picture Paisan, about the Allied liberation of Italy. Its portrayal of what they described as their “own tragedy” had such a profound effect on them that they vowed to be making their own films within a decade.

Indeed, their first work, a short documentary film made in 1954 entitled San Miniato, July 1944, produced with the help of one of neorealism’s most famous scriptwriters, Cesare Zavattini, was the true story of a massacre carried out by the Nazis inside the town’s cathedral in revenge for the death of a German soldier.

They worked with the Dutch director Joris Ivens on another documentary, L'Italia non è un paese povero (Italy is Not a Poor Country), before teaming up with Valentino Orsini on two feature films, Un uomo da bruciare (A Man for Burning, 1962) and I fuorilegge del matrimonio (Outlaws of Love, 1963).

Padre Padrone (1977) was one of the
brothers' most successful films

Their first film in their own right was I sovversivi (The Subversives, 1967), a story of four members of the Italian Communist Party which anticipated the unrest of 1968. They hired Gian Maria Volontè, who had starred in Un uomo da bruciare, for the lead role in Sotto il segno dello scorpione (Under the Sign of Scorpio, 1969), which had the critics comparing their work with Bertolt Brecht, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean-Luc Godard.

They won praise for their literary adaptations, including in San Michele aveva un gallo (St Michael Had a Rooster, 1972), adapted from Tolstoy’s Divine and Human, and also Kaos (1984) and Tu ridi (You Laugh, 1998), both based on stories by Luigi Pirandello. 

After Padre Padrone, their career reached another big moment with La notte di San Lorenzo, a wartime drama based in part on their own early lives and drawing on their own documentary, set in 1944 in a Tuscan village poised to be snatched away from the Germans by approaching US troops.

Some of their later work was less well received by they scored another major success with Caesar Must Die, an unorthodox adaptation of Julius Caesar shot inside Rebibbia prison in Rome and performed by hardened lifers, many of them former mafia and Camorra hitmen. The film won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2012 and was selected as the Italian entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 85th Academy Awards, although it did not make the final.

Their last work as a partnership, Una questione privata (Rainbow: A Private Affair, 2017), won an Italian Golden Globes as Best Actor for Luca Marinelli.

Still active in Italian cinema, Paolo Taviani presented a lifetime achievement award to his fellow director Martin Scorsese - at 75 some 11 years his junior - at the Rome Film Festival last month.

Crowds at San Miniato's white truffle
festival, guarded by the Tower of Federico 

Travel tip:

San Miniato, where Taviani was born, is a charming town perched on a hill halfway between Florence and Pisa. Both cities fought to control it for two centuries. With a picturesque medieval centre built around the Fortress of Federico II and views over the Arno valley, it attracts visitors all year round but one of its busiest times is November, when the annual white truffle festival fills the streets with parades, concerts and artisan vendors. The Diocesan Museum, next to the cathedral, contains works by Filippo Lippi, Jacopo Chimenti, Neri di Bicci, Fra Bartolomeo, Frederico Cardi (known as Cigoli) and Verrocchio.  The church of San Domenico has terracotta works by Luca della Robbia, a fresco attributed to Masolino da Panicale and a burial monument sculpted by Donatello.

The Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa

Travel tip:

Pisa, once a major maritime power, is now a university city renowned for its art and architectural treasures and with a 10.5km (7 miles) circuit of 12th century walls. The Campo dei Miracoli, formerly known as Piazza del Duomo, located at the northwestern end of the city, contains the cathedral (Duomo), baptistery and famously the tilting campanile known as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, all built in black and white marble between the 11th and 14th centuries. The Scuola Normale Superiore is one of three universities in Pisa, the others being the University of Pisa and the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna.

More reading:

Roberto Rossellini - the father of neorealism

Marcello Mastroianni - the star who immortalised the Trevi Fountain

How actress Laura Betti became Pier Paolo Pasolini's muse

Also on this day:

1830: The death of Francis I of the Two Sicilies

1936: The birth of acress Virna Lisi

1982: The birth of golfer Francesco Molinari


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Gaspare Tagliacozzi - surgeon

Professor invented rhinoplasty procedure

Gaspare Tagliacozzi perfected a way of
forming a new nose using skin from the arm

Pioneering plastic surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi died on this day in 1599 in Bologna.

During his career, Tagliacozzi had developed what became known as ‘the Italian method’ for nasal reconstruction.

He improved on the procedure that had been carried out by the 15th century Sicilian surgeons, Gustavo Branca, and his son, Antonio.

Tagliacozzi wrote a book, De Curtorum Chirugia per Insitionem - On the Surgery of Mutilation by Grafting - which described in great detail the procedures carried out in the past to repair noses amputated during battle.

Surgeons who came after him credit him with single-handedly revolutionising the procedure and inventing what is today referred to as a rhinoplasty procedure.

Tagliacozzi was born in Bologna in 1545. He studied medicine, natural sciences and anatomy at the University of Bologna, gaining a degree in philosophy and medicine by the age of 24.

After he was appointed professor of surgery and professor of anatomy at the University he taught at the Archiginnasio, famous for its anatomical theatre, where he procured the bodies of executed prisoners to use in dissections.

An illustration of a patient with arm
strapped in place across the nose

The operation for nasal reconstruction had been developed in Italy as early as the 15th century because of injuries sustained in battle, or when duelling using rapiers.

Tagliacozzi improved the reconstructive surgery method by taking skin from the arm using specially designed instruments to make the correct shape.

The flap of skin from the arm was attached to the nose and the patient’s arm was bandaged in the raised position for about 20 days, or until the skin of the arm had attached itself to the nose. The pedicle was then severed from the arm and after 14 days the attached skin was shaped so that it resembled a nose.

In his book explaining the procedure he writes: ‘We restore, rebuild and make whole those parts which nature hath given, but which fortune has taken away. Not so much that it may delight the eye, but that it might buoy up the spirit, and help the mind of the afflicted.’

Tagliacozzi died in Bologna on 7 November 1599 and was buried in the church of San Giovanni Battista de’ Celestini, as he had stipulated in his will. A solemn mass attended by doctors and colleagues was held in his honour later that month in the same church.

However, his body was later exhumed on the orders of the Catholic Church and reburied on unconsecrated ground, the church hierarchy having deemed that his surgery interfered with the handiwork of God.

After Tagliacozzi’s death, ‘the Italian method’ was not used again until the 19th century when a German plastic surgeon performed the procedure again.

Tagliacozzi also wrote a book about reconstructive surgery procedures for lips and ears.

The statue of Tagliacozzi in the
anatomical theatre of the Archiginnasio

Travel tip:

The world’s first university was established in Bologna in 1088 and attracted popes and kings as well as students of the calibre of Dante, Copernicus and Boccaccio. You can visit the university’s former anatomy theatre, where Tagliacozzi worked, in the oldest university building, the Archiginnasio, which is open to the public Monday to Saturday from 9 am to 1 pm, admission free. There is a wooden statue of Tagliacozzi holding a nose in his right hand, set in a niche in the wall of the anatomy theatre.

The church of San Giovanni Battista de'
Celestina in the centre of Bologna

Travel tip:

The church of San Giovanni Battista de’ Celestini in Bologna is a Renaissance-style Roman Catholic church located on Via D'Azeglio, where the Celestine order had built a monastery and church in the 14th century. In 1482, the church had become the home of the parish.It was rebuilt in 1535 on the site of a 13th century building in Piazza de’ Celestini.

More reading:

The 17th century anatomist whose work still benefits astronauts today

How Gabriele Falloppio made key discoveries about human reproduction

Italy's 18th century cataract surgeon

Also on this day:

The feast day of Ercolano, patron saint of Perugia

1512: Niccolò Machiavelli dismissed from office

1944: The birth of football legend Luigi Riva


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Giovanni Buitoni - entrepreneur

Turned family business into multinational company

Giovanni Buitoni took over the running of
the family business when he was just 18 

Giovanni Buitoni, the entrepreneur who turned Buitoni pasta and Perugina chocolates into the international brands they are today, was born on this day in 1891 in Perugia.

The Buitoni family had been making pasta since 1827, when Giovanni’s great grandmother, Giulia, opened a small shop in the Tuscan town of Sansepolcro, in order to support the family after her husband, Giovan Battista Buitoni, had become ill.  She had her own recipe for pasta that used only high quality durum wheat.

Giulia had pawned her wedding jewellery in order to set up the shop but the business did so well that in 1856 two of the couple’s nine children, Giuseppe and Giovanni, opened a factory in Città di Castello, just over the border in northern Umbria, to manufacture pasta using a hard durum wheat they sourced in Puglia.

Giovanni’s sons, Antonio and Francesco, continued the company’s expansion, founding manufacturing plants in other towns, including Perugia.

It was in Perugia in 1907 that Francesco, noting the increasing popularity of chocolate, joined with several partners in launching the Perugina confectionary company.

Baci chocolates have been one of the most famous
lines made by the Perugina chocolate company

Giovanni junior’s destiny was probably always to have a role in the family business, although it came rather sooner than he expected.  After studying law he had gone to Germany in 1909 to learn the language and to observe the way German industries operated, their practises being somewhat advanced compared with Italy’s.

He curtailed his trip on receiving news that his father’s Perugina chocolate company was on the brink of bankruptcy. Already bursting with ideas for improving business, he persuaded his father to let him take over general management of the company at just 18 years old and succeeded in turning it into a profit-making concern.

Within only a short time, Perugina had expanded from a small basement operation to large factory with hundreds of workers. He installed modern machinery in the plant and introducing new products, among them the famous Baci -‘kisses' - chocolates still produced today, each containing a love note, which were the idea of Luisa Spagnoli, one of his father’s partners - and Giovanni's clandestine lover at the time - who went on to become famous in the fashion industry.

The Buitoni name has been visible in Italian shops since
1827, when the first Buitoni store opened in Sansepolcro

Giovanni even managed to combine running the company with a brief stint in the Italian Army in the First World War and later completing his doctor of law degree at the University of Perugia.

Always an innovator, he increased sales of Buitoni pasta products even in the Great Depression of 1930s by putting picture cards inside each packet for customers to collect. Customers who collected complete sets of the cards were eligible to take part in a radio contest and win prizes, including a FIAT automobile.

Giovanni Buitoni was by now an individual of some stature in Perugia, whose citizens he served as Podesta - mayor - from 1930 to 1935. In 1936, he married the opera singer, Letizia Cairone.

Letizia Cairone married
Buitoni in 1936

Buitoni’s expansion into production outside Italy came almost through a twist of fate.

In 1939, Giovanni and his wife were invited by the Hershey Chocolate Company, who were holding a 30th anniversary celebration at their headquarters in Pennsylvania, to visit the United States.

They also attended the 1939 World’s Fair to New York City to promote their own products. With his typical entrepreneurial vision, having noted how much visitors were being asked to pay for food, Giovanni opened a pop-up spaghetti café on the site, selling plates of pasta dressed in simple sauces at 25 cents each.  He and Letizia cooked about 15,000 portions over the course of the event.

They found the American lifestyle to their liking and stayed on for a while afterwards. Unfortunately, before they could return to Italy the Second World War broke out, and once Italy had declared war on the side of the Germans, Giovanni and Letizia were unable to travel or access their money.

With no option but to stay and fend for themselves, Letizia followed the lead of Giovanni’s great grandmother and pawned her jewellery, enabling Giovanni to find a small premises in which to open a pasta factory in New Jersey.

Thanks in part to his vision in promoting the Buitoni name at the World’s Fair, the brand began to sell.  Within 15 years, the Buitoni Foods Corporation had a much bigger factory in South Hackensack, New Jersey and later another one in Brooklyn. A spaghetti restaurant in Times Square, New York City, followed, along with a Perugina shop on Fifth Avenue.

Carlo De Benedetti sold the Buitoni business to
Nestlé for $1.4 billion in 1987

Giovanni returned to Italy in 1953 to found the International Buitoni Organization to coordinate all the industrial activities of the family-controlled multinational, but he continued to spend long periods in the United States.

A gifted amateur basso profundo, he was able to realise one of his dreams during his stay in the United States, to sing opera at Carnegie Hall in New York. He invited family, friends and employees to make an audience and, with the help of professional singers Licia Albanese, a soprano, and the baritone Anselmo Colzani, sang arias from Don Giovanni, Rigoletto and Ernani.

Giovanni Buitoni retired from the operational management of the Buitoni group in 1966. He and Letizia had no children and his nephew, Marco Buitoni, succeeded him as president and chief operating officer. Giovanni died in Rome in January 1979.

The business was sold in 1985 to the industrialist Carlo De Benedetti, who owned Olivetti and the newspaper La Repubblica among other things. He in turn sold it for $1.4 billion to its current owner, Nestlé.

The Fontana Maggiore in Perugia's Piazza IV Novembre

Travel tip:

Perugia, the capital of the Umbria region, is an ancient city that sits on a high hilltop midway between Rome and Florence. In Etruscan times it was one of the most powerful cities of the period.  It is also a university town with a long history, the University of Perugia having been founded in 1308.  The presence of the University for Foreigners and a number of smaller colleges gives Perugia a student population of more than 40,000.  The centre of the city, Piazza IV Novembre, has a medieval fountain, the Fontana Maggiore, which was sculpted by Nicolo and Giovanni Pisano.

A view across the rooftops of 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 16th century. The centre of the town is the Piazza Torre di Berta, named after the 13th-century tower of the same name, off which can be found the impressive Palazzi Pichi and Giovagnoli and the 14th-century cathedral, dedicated to St John the Evangelist.  The city is famous as the place in which the brilliant early Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca was born and died.

More reading:

Michele Ferrero, the man who invented Nutella

Mario Pavesi, the biscuit-maker who gave Italy the Autogrill

Anselmo Colzani and his 16 seasons at The Met

Also on this day:

1835: The birth of pioneer criminologist Cesare Lombroso

2007: The death of author and journalist Enzo Biagi

Vino Novello - Italy's 'nouveau' - goes on sale


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Filippo Taglioni - dancer and choreographer

Father of star ballerina was pioneer of Romantic ballet

Filippo Taglioni's portrait, the original of
which is at Teatro alla Scala in Milan

The dancer and choreographer Filippo Taglioni, who choreographed the original version of the ballet classic La Sylphide for his ballerina daughter Marie Taglioni, was born on this day in 1777 in Milan.

La Sylphide was one of the earliest works to represent a new ballet genre, which became known as Romantic ballet, that gained popularity in the 19th century as an alternative to traditional classical ballet.  Romantic ballet was different in that the characters were recognisable as real people rather than the gods and goddesses and strange creatures from Roman and Greek mythology that populated classical ballet.

The work, which premiered at the Salle Le Peletier of the Paris Opéra in 1832, cemented Marie Taglioni’s status as a star, the prima ballerina of the Romantic movement, although the version performed today - the only version to have survived - was choreographed by the Danish ballet master August Bournonville in 1836.

Filippo was part of an Italian dancing dynasty of the 18th and 19th centuries. His father and mother, Carlo Taglioni and Maria Petracchi, were both dancers. Carlo, who was born in Turin, worked in Venice, Rome, Siena and Udine.

Taglioni's daughter, Marie, pictured in a
performance of La Sylphide

As well as Marie, Filippo had a son, Paul Taglioni, who was a successful choreographer and the father of another dancer, Marie Taglioni the younger. Filippo’s brother, Salvatore Taglioni, was father of Luisa Taglioni, who was a ballerina of the Paris Opéra, and Fernando Taglioni, who became a respected composer.

Trained for the most part by the Neapolitan dancer Carlo Blasis and Jean-François Coulon, Filippo made his debut at 17 in Pisa, playing female roles, and after appearing in other Italian cities joined the Paris Opéra at the age of 22, before moving to Stockholm to be principal dancer and ballet master for the Royal Swedish Ballet.

It was while he was living in Stockholm that he married the dancer Sophie Karsten, daughter of a famous Swedish opera singer Christoffer Christian Karsten and a Polish actress, Sophie Stebnowska.

Their two children were born early in the marriage and after living for a number of years in Vienna and Germany they moved to Paris to escape the the Napoleonic wars.  Filippo danced and choreographed in different parts of Europe before accepting a permanent position in Vienna.

Filippo Taglioni made his daughter, Marie,
practise six hours a day for six months

Filippo had left his daughter, Marie, to study ballet in Paris but in time summoned her to join him in Vienna, where he began training her himself, making her practice six hours a day for six months until she mastered her jumps and pointe work. When he judged her to be ready he took her back to Paris.

Marie soon became popular and Filippo was able to negotiate a six-year contract for the two of them. He unveiled La Sylphide to huge acclaim and its success established Marie as the pre-eminent prima ballerina of the Romantic period, as well as making him its most renowned choreographer.

The two toured Europe and Russia and were well rewarded, although Filippo lost a good deal of his daughter’s fortune in through unwise and speculative investments.

His legacy, though, was to have changed the nature of ballet. Although the Romantic movement began to decline at the start of the 20th century, it produced works of lasting popularity such as Delibes’s Coppélia (1870) and Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake (1876) and The Nutcracker (1892).

Filippo Taglioni died in Como in 1871, at the age of 93.

The Teatro Verdi in Pisa was opened in November 1867

Travel tip:

The principal venue for ballet and opera in Pisa is the Teatro Verdi in Via Palestro, built in the mid-19th century in the style of classic theatre architecture to designs by the Venetian architect Andrea Scala, who won a competition organised by the architect and politician Ranieri Simonelli, a prominent Pisan citizen of the day. Completed in 1867, it was inaugurated on November 12 of that year with a performance of Gioachino Rossini’s opera William Tell. It began to stage ballet as well as opera in the latter part of the 19th century.  Taglioni is likely to have performed at the Regia Teatro Nuovo, which the Teatro Verdi replaced.

The beautiful Villa Olmo on Lake Como

Travel tip:

Como, where Taglioni died, is a city at the southern end of Lake Como. It has become a popular tourist destination because it is close to the lake and has many attractive churches, gardens, museums, theatres, parks and palaces to visit. The Villa Olmo, built in neoclassical style there in 1797 by an aristocratic family, has hosted Napoleon, Ugo Foscolo, Prince Metternich, Archduke Franz Ferdinand I and Giuseppe Garibaldi, to name but a few of the eminent people who have stayed there.

More reading:

Fanny Cerrito - the Neapolitan ballerina who wowed Europe

Pierina Legnani - the Italian who conquered St Petersburg

How Strictly Come Dancing judge Bruno Tonioli dealt with playground bullies

Also on this day:

1702: The birth of Venetian painter Pietro Longhi

1754: The birth of explorer Alessandro Malaspina

1898: The birth of Francesco Chiarello, soldier who survived two World Wars


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