Carla Bruni - former First Lady of France

Ex-model and singer who married Nicolas Sarkozy

Carla Bruni had been one of the
world's leading models

Carla Bruni, the model and singer who became the wife of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, was born on this day in 1967 in Turin.

She and Sarkozy were married in February 2008, just three months after they met at a dinner party. Sarkozy, who was in office from May 2007 until May 2012, had recently divorced his second wife.

Previously, Bruni had spent 10 years as a model, treading the catwalk for some of the biggest designers and fashion houses in Europe and establishing herself as one of the top 20 earners in the modelling world.

After retiring from the modelling world, she enjoyed considerable success as a songwriter and then a singer. Music remains a passion, her most recent album released only last year. To date, her record sales stand at more than five million.

Born Carla Gilberta Bruni Tedeschi, she is legally the daughter of Italian concert pianist Marisa Borini and industrialist and classical composer Alberto Bruni Tedeschi. 

Carla Bruni met Nicolas Sarkozy just
three months before they were married

However, she revealed in a magazine interview soon after she and Sarkozy were married at the presidential residence the Élysée Palace in Paris, that her her biological father is the Italian-born Brazilian businessman Maurizio Remmert, who was a classical guitarist when he met Marisa Borini at a concert in Turin. They embarked on an affair that lasted six years.

Even without her two successful careers, Bruni would have been a wealthy woman. Through her legal father, she is heiress to the fortune created by the Italian cable manufacturing company CEAT, founded in the 1920s by his father, Virginio Bruni Tedeschi, which subsequently moved into tyre production and is now based in India.

Carla Bruni has lived in France from the age of seven, the family having left Italy in 1975 over fears they would be a target for kidnap by the Red Brigades, the left-wing terrorist group who kidnapped many wealthy or politically important individuals in the 1970s and 80s.

She was educated initially at a boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, before returning to Paris to study art and architecture at the Sorbonne, although in the event she left school at the age of 19 to become a model.

Bruni signed with a prestigious agency in 1987, and after being selected for an advertising campaign for jeans manufactured by the American company Guess?, soon began to attract attention.

Sarkozy had been married twice
before he met Carla Bruni

Over the next few years she worked for designers and fashion houses including Christian Dior, Givenchy, Paco Rabanne, Yves Saint-Laurent, Chanel and Versace.

At her peak, with her image appearing on billboards and magazine covers constantly, she was earning up to $7.5 million (€5.44 million) a year, which put her among the 20 highest-paid fashion models in the world.

Bruni enjoyed a jet-set lifestyle and dated some of the world's most famous men, including veteran rockers Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton.

The love of music instilled in her as a child never left her, however, and in 1997, at the age of 30, she retired from modelling to focus on her music. She had always played the guitar and started singing lessons. She sent her lyrics to the French singer Julien Clerc in 1999, which he used as the basis for six tracks on his 2000 album Si j'étais elle.

Her own first album, Quelqu'un m'a dit (Someone Told Me) was released in 2003 and was a surprise hit, selling more than a million copies.  It spent 34 weeks in the top 10 of the French albums chart.  Several songs featured in movies or television commercials.

The cover of Carla Bruni's latest album

She has since released four more albums and written songs for other artists, including the rock guitarist Louis Bertignac.  In her second album, No Promises, she set to music poems by William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden and Dorothy Parker among others.

Although Sarkozy represents the centre-right Republican party, Bruni’s own political leanings were to the left before they were married, although her status as First Lady gave her no powers and generally she has was careful to avoid being drawn into political debate.

She has used her profile to support a number of charities, particularly those concerned with protecting mothers and children and fighting HIV. In 2009, launched the Fondation Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, to promote access to culture and knowledge.

Bruni has been more outspoken on matters related to her charitable work. She has been critical of the Catholic Church for continuing to oppose the use of condoms - a proven way of limiting the spread of AIDS - even though the church spends millions of dollars on caring for HIV/AIDS patients.

She and Sarkozy are the parents of a girl, Giulia, who was born in 2011. Bruni has a son, Aurélien, from a previous relationship with philosophy professor Raphaël Enthoven.

The castle at Moncalieri used to be the home of Italy's
King Victor Emmanuel II in the late 19th century

Travel tip:

Bruni’s father, Alberto Bruni Tedeschi, came from Moncalieri, a town of almost 58,000 inhabitants about 8km (5 miles) south of the centre of Turin and part of the greater metropolitan area. It is notable for a 12th century castle, enlarged in the 15th century, which was for a time a favoured residence of Maria Clotilde and King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy and now is listed among the World Heritage Site Residences of the Royal House of Savoy.  Since 1919 it has housed a school for training carabinieri officers.

Turin's colossal Mole Antonelliana is a
familiar landmark on the city's skyline

Travel tip:

The city of Turin, the traditional seat of the Savoy dynasty, is an elegant city with several royal palaces, a 15th-century cathedral that houses the Shroud of Turin and a city centre with 12 miles of arcaded streets, dotted with historic cafés an fine restaurants, many to be found around the Via Po, Turin’s famous promenade linking Piazza Vittorio Veneto with Piazza Castello, or nearby Piazza San Carlo, one of the city’s main squares. In the 19th century, the city’s cafès were popular with writers, artists, philosophers, musicians and politicians. One of the city’s major landmarks is the Mole Antonelliana, at 167.5 m (550 ft) the tallest unreinforced brick building in the world.  Originally built as a synagogue, the building is now home to a film industry museum, the Museo Nazionale del Cinema. Mole is an Italian word for a building of monumental proportions.



More reading:

The meteoric rise of Gianni Versace

Santo Versace - the business brain behind the empire

The Red Brigades and the kidnapping of Aldo Moro

Also on this day:

1896: The birth of writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

1916: The birth of film director Dino Risi

1956: The birth of racing driver Michele Alboreto


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Giovanni Bottesini - double bass virtuoso

Musician was also a composer and conductor

Giovanni Bottesini took up the double
bass so he could attend Milan Conservatory

The composer, conductor and double bassist Giovanni Bottesini was born on this day in 1821 in Crema, now a city in Lombardy although then part of the Austrian Empire.

He became such a brilliant and innovative performer on his chosen instrument that he became known as “the Paganini of the double bass” - a reference to the great violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini, whose career was ending just as his was beginning.

Bottesini was one of the first bassists to adopt the French-style bow grip, previously used solely by violinists, violists and cellists.

He was also a respected conductor, often called upon to direct performances at the leading theatres in Europe and elsewhere, and a prolific composer, particularly in the last couple of decades of his life.

A close friend of Giuseppe Verdi, he wrote a dozen operas himself, music for chamber and full orchestras, and a considerable catalogue of pieces for double bass, for accompaniment by piano or full orchestra, or duets.

When conducting opera, Bottesini would often bring his double bass on stage to play fantasies based on the evening's opera, of his own composition, during the intermission. His fantasies on Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Vincenzo Bellini’s I puritani and Beatrice di Tenda are outstanding pieces still played today by accomplished bassists.

Bottesini with the Testore bass that
served him well through his career

It was almost by accident that the double bass became Bottesini’s speciality.  Taught the basics of music by his father, Pietro, a clarinetist who played at Crema’s Teatro Sociale and the cathedral chapel, he began training for the violin from the age of five, working with a priest, Carlo Cogliati.

During his childhood, Giovanni is thought  to have played the kettle-drums in the orchestra of the Teatro Sociale as well as in theatre orchestras in Bergamo and Brescia. He also sang as boy soprano in the cathedral choir in Parma.

His father was keen for him to study at the Milan Conservatory, but the family were not wealthy and the only possibility of a place was to be granted a scholarship. As it happens, the only two positions available were for double bass and bassoon. Choosing the former, he had to learn to play the double bass to a respectable standard within days, yet did so and after an audition was granted a place.

In fact, he became so good so rapidly that only four years after starting his studies - much faster than with most students - Bottesini won a prize of 300 francs for solo playing. It was enough for him to buy an instrument made by the 18th century luthier Carlo Antonio Testore, and to launch his career.

He travelled abroad, spending time in the United States and in Cuba - then still part of Spain’s empire in South America - where he was the principal double-bass in the Italian opera at Havana, of which he later became director. His first opera, Cristoforo Colombo, was produced there in 1847.

Giuseppe Verdi recommended Bottesini
as director of Parma Conservatory

In 1849 he travelled for the first time to England, where he would become a frequent visitor.

As a conductor, Bottesini worked at the Théâtre des Italiens in Paris from 1855 to 1857. Between 1861 and 1862 he conducted in Palermo, and in 1863 went to Barcelona. In 1871 he conducted a season of Italian opera at the Lyceum theatre in London and he was chosen by Verdi to conduct the first performance of Aida, which took place in Cairo on December 27, 1871.

Bottesini's bass, which was noted for the purity of the sound he was able to produce with it, was built by Testore in 1716. The instrument was owned previously by several unknown bass players before Bottesini paid 900 lire for it in 1838. It is now owned by a private collector in Japan.

In 1888, Bottesini was appointed director of Parma Conservatory on Verdi's recommendation. The following year, he died in Parma at the age of 67.

The Duomo at Crema, a short distance from
the street in which Bottesini grew up

Travel tip:

Crema, a small city that sits on the banks of the Serio river about 50km (31 miles) east of Milan, has an attractive historic centre built around the Piazza del Duomo.  Apart from the cathedral itself, built in Lombard Gothic style in the 14th century with a tall bell tower completed in 1604, the Palazzo Pretorio and the Palazzo Comunale can also be found off the square. The Teatro Sociale, the only surviving part of which stands in Piazza Guglielmo Marconi, a short distance from the Duomo, was destroyed in a fire in 1937. Bottesini grew up in a house in Via Carrera, within a short walk of both the theatre and the cathedral. The city’s other attractions include the circular 16th century Basilica of Santa Maria della Croce.

The Conservatorio Arrigo Boito in
Parma, where Bottesini was director

Travel tip:

Parma, where Bottesini spent his last months, is an historic city in the Emilia-Romagna region, famous for its Prosciutto di Parma ham and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, the true ‘parmesan’. In 1545 the city was given as a duchy to the illegitimate son of Pope Paul III, whose descendants ruled Parma till 1731. The composer, Verdi, was born near Parma at Bussetto and the city has a prestigious opera house, the Teatro Regio. The Conservatory, named in honour of Arrigo Boito, who wrote the libretti for many of Verdi’s operas, is on Strada Conservatorio.

Search TripAdvisor for hotels in Parma

More reading:

The Venetian who became the best double bass player in Europe

The jealous streak of composer Giovanni Paisello

The short but brilliant career of Vincenzo Bellini

Also on this day:

1858: The birth of the brilliant composer Giacomo Puccini

1908: The birth of sculptor Giacomo Manzù

1963: The birth of footballer Giuseppe Bergomi


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Moira Orfei - circus owner and actress

‘Queen of the Big Top’ became cultural icon

Moira Orfei rarely strayed from her trademark look, with
heavy make-up and a turban-style hairdo 

Moira Orfei, an entertainer regarded as the Queen of the Italian circus and an actress who starred in more than 40 films, was born on this day in 1931 in Codroipo, a town in Friuli-Venezia Giulia about 25km (16 miles) southwest of Udine.

She had a trademark look that became so recognisable that advertising posters for the Moira Orfei Circus, which she founded in 1961 with her new husband, the circus acrobat and animal trainer Walter Nones, carried simply her face and the name 'Moira'.

As a young woman, she was a strikingly glamorous Hollywood-style beauty but in later years she took to wearing heavy make-up, dark eye-liner and bright lipstick, topped off with her bouffant hair gathered up in a way that resembled a turban.  Her camped-up appearance made her an unlikely icon for Italy’s gay community.

Born Miranda Orfei, she spent her whole life in the circus. Her father, Riccardo, was a bareback horse rider and sometime clown; her mother, part of the Arata circus dynasty, gave birth to her in the family’s living trailer.  Growing up, she performed as a horse rider, acrobat and trapeze artist.

Posters for Circo Moira Orfei always
featured her face and first name

Her film career began the year before she was married, with minor roles in a couple of action movies based loosely on historical themes. Dino De Laurentiis, the producer of one of them, suggested she changed her name from Miranda to Moira, after which the director Mario Costa gave her a bigger part in a swashbuckling adventure movie, Queen of the Pirates.

The so-called sword-and-sandal genre, very popular in Italy at the time, remained her speciality until she was given parts in a couple of comedies written for the great Italian comic actor, Totò.

Thereafter, although the adventure epic remained her staple, her acting talent was recognised in several movies that fell into the commedia all’Italiana genre.

She was in a cast headed by Marcello Mastroianni and Virna Lisi in Mario Monicelli’s Casanova ‘70 (in which her cousin, Liana Orfei, appeared as a lion tamer), played alongside Virna Lisi again in Pietro Germi’s Signore e Signori, with Nino Manfredi and Ugo Tognazzi in Dino Risi’s Straziami ma di baci saziami (Torture Me But Kill Me with Kisses), and with Vittorio Gassman in the Dino Risi classic Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman).

Meanwhile, Circo Moira Orfei went from strength to strength. With Nones presenting obedient lions or tigers, she presented the circus’s performing elephants.

As a young actress, Orfei was a star of
many sword-and-sandal adventure movies

Her animal acts gained silver and gold awards at the International Circus Festival of Monte Carlo in 1987, 1989 and 2004 and she became known in the circus world as Moira of the Elephants.

In 1969, she and Nones launched Circo sul Ghiaccio - Circus on Ice - a monumental production which combined a circus ring and a skating rink. A highly elaborate show featured frequent set and costume changes and an international cast of circus and stars.

Circus on Ice toured in a huge big top, the largest seen in Italy. Moving from place to place involved 10 tractors, 34 articulated buses, two special trains and more than 100 caravans.

Orfei retired from performing in the late 1990s, although she continued to supervise every detail of the business.  She suffered some setbacks, including a serious car crash in 2000 that left her with a broken leg and five broken ribs, and a stroke in 2006, which happened during a show in Reggio Calabria and required her to take more than a year off in recuperation.

Subsequently, her active participation in shows was limited, although she would usually parade round the ring at the start, welcoming the audience. Her son and daughter, Stefano and Lara, followed in the family tradition and became part of the show, he becoming one of Europe's foremost animal trainers, she a talented equestrian.

Moira Orfei died in Brescia in 2015 a month ahead of what would have been her 84th birthday, passing away in her sleep in her trailer, having continued to follow the itinerant life of the circus to the end. Her funeral was held in San Donà di Piave - 40km (25 miles) from Venice and about 60km (37 miles) southwest of Codroipo.

A crowd put at around 5,000 watched the funeral cortege, with a hearse drawn by four white Lipizzaners - the breed closely associated with the Spanish Riding School of Vienna - carrying her coffin to the tune of a marching band playing circus music.

The Villa Manin in Codroipo, once home of Ludovico
Manin, the last Doge of the Venetian Republic

Travel tip:

Codroipo, which used to be part of the Venetian Republic, is best known for the Villa Manin, once the family home of Ludovico Manin, the last Doge of the Venitian Republic, who governed from 1789 until 1797, when Napoleon Bonaparte forced him to abdicate. It was at the villa in 1797 that the Treaty of Campoformio was signed, marking Napoleon's victory, the fall of the First Coalition (of European states opposed to Napoleon), and the cession of Friuli to Austria.

A typically elegant street in the town of San Donà di Piave

Travel tip:

Elegant San Donà di Piave is one of the historical main towns of the eastern Veneto, although it needed substantial reconstruction in the early 1920s after being heavily damaged during the First World War, when the drawn out Battle of Solstizio took place on the banks of the Piave river. The municipality of San Donà had been established in 1797 as the administrative centre of one of the 15 cantons of the Treviso district. It was part of the Lombard-Venetian Kingdom from 1815 and during the Austrian domination it kept its position of county seat of the district. In the first part of the 19th century, the centre of the city underwent some development, with the building of palaces, commercial buildings and a new cathedral, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Find a hotel in San Donà di Piave with TripAdvisor

More reading:

How Dino Risi helped launch the career of Sophia Loren

Why Mario Monicelli was one of the greats of Italian film

The former pasta salesman who helped put Italian cinema on the map

Also on this day:

69AD: Vespasian becomes emperor of Rome

1401: The birth of Renaissance artist Masaccio

1872: The birth of priest and composer Lorenzo Perosi


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San Leonardo da Porto Maurizio

Franciscan monk canonized in 1867

Leonardo survived a life-threatening
illness to devote his life to preaching

San Leonardo da Porto Maurizio, whose feast day is celebrated on November 27 each year, was born Paolo Gerolamo Casanova on this day in 1676 in Porto Maurizio, which is now part of the port city of Imperia in Liguria.

Leonardo recovered from a serious illness developed soon after he became a priest and devoted the remaining 43 years of his life to preaching retreats and parish missions throughout Italy.

He was one of the main propagators of the Catholic rite of Via Crucis - the Way of the Cross - and established Stations of the Cross - reconstructions in paintings or sculpture of Christ’s journey to the cross - at more than 500 locations. He also set up numerous ritiri - houses of recollection.

Leonardo was a charismatic preacher who found favour with Popes Clement XII and Benedict XIV, who helped him spread his missions, which began in Tuscany, into central and southern Italy, inspiring religious fervour among the population.

The son of a ship’s captain from Porto Maurizio, the young Paolo was sent to Rome at the age of 13 to live with a wealthy uncle and study at the Jesuit Roman College.

He studied the humanities, rhetoric and philosophy at the Gregorian University and intended to follow a career in medicine. However, while studying he met some Observant Franciscans who lived at the Convent of San Bonaventura al Palatino - known also as the Riformella - and decided to join them.

Leonardo was a charismatic personality whose preaching
persuaded many Italians to devote their lives to faith

His uncle was not happy, but his father approved and, at 21, Paolo entered the novitiate at Ponticelli Sabino in the Sabine Hills, north of Rome, taking the name of Fra Leonardo - Brother Leonard.

Leonardo completed his studies at San Bonaventura and, after his ordination, he remained there as a professor. It was at that stage that he fell ill, with what has been described as a bleeding ulcer. He was sent back to his home town on the basis that the Ligurian climate might give him a better chance of recovery. Eventually, after being cared for at a monastery of the Franciscan Observants, he was restored to health, although it took four years.

He began to preach in Porto Maurizio and the vicinity before being sent to the monastery of San Miniato near Florence, called Monte alle Croci, shortly after Cosimo III de' Medici had handed it over to the members of the Riformella.

His missions to the people in Tuscany produced startling results, with a large number of conversions, and it was as a means of keeping alive the religious fervour he had awakened that he promoted the Stations of the Cross.

The Convent of San Bonaventura al Palatino, where Leonardo
died, had been a constant in his life

In 1710 he founded the Convento dell’Icontro - the first of his ritiri - on a peak in the mountains about 7km (4 miles) outside Florence, where he and his assistants could retire from time to time after missions, and devote themselves to spiritual renewal.

By 1720, he was taking his celebrated missions into Central and Southern Italy, after which Clement XII and later Benedict XIV asked him to work in Rome.

Benedict XIV, in fact, gave him several difficult diplomatic assignments, in volatile Genoa and Corsica - then part of the Republic of Genoa - Lucca and Spoleto. In all cases, citizens expecting a rich cardinal as the papal emissary were taken aback that a humble, shoeless friar should be the man sent to help resolve their differences.

Leonardo was also at times employed as spiritual director by Maria Clementina Sobieska of Poland, the wife of James Stuart, the Old Pretender.

Amid rumours of his failing health, in November 1751 Benedict XIV recalled Leonardo from Bologna, where he was preaching, to return to Rome. He arrived at the monastery of San Bonaventura al Palatino on the evening of November 26 and died a few hours later.

His remains lie under the high altar there. Pope Pius VI beatified him in 1796 and Pope Pius IX canonised him in 1867. Nowadays, he is the patron saint of those who preach parish missions.

In 1873, one of the first Catholic churches in the United States to be built by Italian immigrants, in Boston, Massachusetts, was named in his honour.

Mist filling the valleys around Collevecchio, one of many
beautiful towns in the Sabine Hills in Lazio

Travel tip:

The Sabine Hills around the city of Rieti, about 80km (50 miles) north of Rome, remains generally an unspoiled rural area, with characteristic rolling hills covered by olive groves and fruit orchards and dotted with medieval hilltop villages and castles.  Among the most beautiful of those medieval villages, all of which have impressive defensive walls, ornately decorated renaissance palaces and churches and picturesque piazzas are Toffia, Fara Sabina, Farfa, Bocchignano and Montopoli.  The area is famous for its extra virgin olive oil, the first in Italy to receive the DOP denomination (Protected Designation of Origin).

The shoreline of Porto Maurizio in Liguria, where Leonardo
was born Paolo Casanova in 1676

Travel tip:

Porto Maurizio, where San Leonardo was born, lost its identity somewhat in 1923 when Mussolini created the city of Imperia by combining Porto Maurizio and Oneglia, towns on the Riviera Poniente separated by the Impero river, with several surrounding villages.  Imperia’s economy is mainly based on tourism and the food industry, as a producer of olive oil and pasta. Porto Maurizio was originally a Roman settlement, Portus Maurici. Napoleon Bonaparte stopped for a night in Porto Maurizio during the Napoleonic Wars.  The town has a classical cathedral, dedicated to San Maurizio, which was built by Gaetano Cantoni and completed in the early 19th century. The Convent of Santa Chiara was first established in 1365.


More reading:

Pope Clement XII and the competition that resulted in the Trevi Fountain

Bendict XIV - the intellectual pope

Luigi Guido Grandi - monk and mathematician

Also on this day:

1856: The death of Sicilian patriot Francesco Bentivegna

1947: The birth of singer Gigliola Cinquetti

1948: The birth of Giuliana Sgrena, war reporter


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