26 November

Charles Forte - businessman and hotelier

Multi-billion pound empire started with a single café

Businessman Charles Forte - later Sir Charles and then Baron Forte of Ripley - was born Carmine Forte in the hamlet of Mortale in the Frosinone province of southern Lazio on this day in 1908.  Forte was most famous for his hotels empire, which once numbered more than 800 properties ranging from Travelodge motels to the high-end luxury of the Grosvenor House in London and the George V in Paris.  Starting with a single milk bar in London, opened in 1935, he grew a business that became so vast that, when it changed hands 61 years later, it was valued at £3.9 billion.  Charles Forte was brought up largely in Scotland, where his family emigrated in 1911 after his father, Rocco, decided to follow the lead of his brother by abandoning farming in his impoverished homeland to try his luck in the catering business abroad.   Rocco ran a café and ice cream parlour in Alloa, a town in central Scotland about an hour's drive north-east of Glasgow and a similar distance to the north-west of Edinburgh.  Charles went to school in Alloa and nearby Dumfries before completing his education at the Mamiani High School in Rome.  Read more…

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Amelita Galli-Curci - soprano

Singer’s beautiful voice lives on thanks to early recordings

Amelita Galli-Curci, one of the most popular Italian opera singers and recording artists of the early 20th century, died on this day in 1963.  Galli-Curci was a ‘coloratura’ soprano and her voice has been described as ‘florid, vibrant, agile and able to perform trills.’  Although she was largely self-taught her voice was much admired and it has been claimed she was encouraged to become an opera singer by composer Pietro Mascagni, who was a family friend.  She was born Amelita Galli in Milan in 1881 and studied the piano at the Milan Conservatory, which is in the centre of the city close to the Duomo. She made her stage debut as a soprano at Trani in 1906, singing Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto. She was widely acclaimed and her career took off from there.  In 1908 she married an Italian nobleman, the Marquese Luigi Curci and she subsequently attached his surname to hers. She remained known as Amelita Galli-Curci even after they divorced.  She sang in just two performances of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lamermoor with Enrico Caruso in Buenos Aires in 1915 but they went on to make wonderful recordings together.  Read more…

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Letizia Moratti – politician and businesswoman

First woman to be Mayor of Milan and head of RAI

Letizia Moratti, one of Europe’s best-known businesswomen and a successful politician, was born on this day in 1949 in Milan.  Married to the oil magnate Gianmarco Moratti, she was chair of the state television network RAI between 1994 and 1996, a minister in former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s second and third administrations, and Mayor of Milan between 2006 and 2011.  Born Letizia Maria Brichetto Arnaboldi, her antecedents are the Brichetto family from Genoa, who founded the first insurance brokerage company in Italy, and the noble Arnaboldi family from Milan.  Her grandmother, Mimona Brichetto Arnaboldi, was a society hostess in the 1930s and an outspoken opponent of Fascism.  Letizia attended a private school in Milan and had classical dance classes at the Carla Strauss Academy in the Brera district.  She attended the University of Milan and graduated in political science.  At around the same time, she met Gianmarco Moratti, an oil contractor whose brother, Massimo, a petrochemicals tycoon, is the former chairman of Internazionale.  With funding from the Moratti family, Letizia launched her first business at the age of 25.  Read more…

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Enrico Bombieri – Mathematician

Brilliant professor who won top award in his field at just 34

The mathematician Enrico Bombieri, one of the world’s leading authorities on number theory and analysis, which has practical application in the world of encryption and data transmission, was born on this day in 1940 in Milan.  Bombieri, who is also an accomplished painter, won the Fields Medal, an international award for outstanding discoveries in mathematics regarded in the field of mathematical sciences as equivalent to a Nobel Prize, when he was a 34-year-old professor at the University of Pisa in 1974.  As well as analytic number theory, he has become renowned for his expertise in other areas of highly advanced mathematics including algebraic geometry, univalent functions, theory of several complex variables, partial differential equations of minimal surfaces, and the theory of finite groups.  Mathematics textbooks now refer to several discoveries named after him in his own right or with fellow researchers, including the Bombieri-Lang conjecture, the Bombieri norm and the Bombieri–Vinogradov theorem.  He has been described as a "problem-oriented" scholar - one who tries to solve deep problems rather than to build theories.  Read more…

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25 November

NEW - Stefano Boeri - architect

Milan urban planner famous for Vertical Forest

The architect Stefano Boeri, a specialist in environmentally sustainable developments and best known for his Bosco Verticale - Vertical Forest - project in Milan, was born on this day in 1956 in Milan.  The Bosco Verticale consists of two residential tower blocks in the Isola neighbourhood in the north of the city, just beyond the Porta Garibaldi railway station.  The two towers, one of 111m (364 ft), the other of 76m (249 ft), incorporate 8,900 sqm (96,000 sq ft) of terraces that are home to approximately 800 trees, 5,000 shrubs and 11,000 perennial plants.  The vegetation - the equivalent of what might be found in three hectares of woodland but with a footprint of just 3,000 sqm - mitigates against urban pollution, absorbing dust and carbon dioxide while producing oxygen. The trees also provide natural climate control for the inhabitants, shading the interior from sun in the summer and blocking cold winds in the winter.  Boeri incorporated other features to make the building self-sufficient, generating energy from solar panels and using filtered waste water to irrigate the plants.  Construction of the towers began in late 2009 and the project was completed in 2014.  Read more…

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Rosanna Schiaffino – actress

Dramatic life of Italian sex goddess

Film star Rosanna Schiaffino, who for more than 20 years, between the 1950s and the 1970s, starred opposite the most famous actors of the period, was born on this day in 1939 in Genoa in Liguria.  Schiaffino worked for some of Italian cinema’s greatest directors, but in the 1980s turned her back on the cinema world to marry the playboy and steel industry heir, Giorgio Falck, entering a relationship that descended into acrimony after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.  Born into a wealthy family, Schiaffino was encouraged in her acting ambitions by her mother, who paid for her to go to a drama school.  She entered beauty contests and won the title of Miss Liguria when she was just 14.  She also took some modelling jobs and her photograph appeared in many magazines. She was spotted by the film producer Franco Cristaldi, who paired her with Marcello Mastroianni in Un ettaro di cielo (Piece of the Sky) in 1959.  Schiaffino made her name in her second film for Cristaldi, La Sfida (The Challenge), directed by Francesco Rosi, in which she gave a powerful, but sensitive performance as a Neapolitan girl, inspired by the real life character of Pupetta Maresca, a former beauty queen who became a famous Camorra figure.  Read more…

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Bruno Tonioli - dance show judge

Dancer and choreographer is star of Strictly Come Dancing

Dancer, choreographer and television dance show judge Bruno Tonioli was born on this day in 1955 in Ferrara in north-east Italy.  Tonioli is one of the judging panel of Strictly Come Dancing on British TV and on its US equivalent Dancing With the Stars, which requires him to divide his time between London and New York when seasons overlap.  He began his showbusiness career in the 1980s as a member of the Paris-based dance company La Grande Eugène before moving into the music industry as a choreographer.  Among the artists he has worked with are Tina Turner, Sting, Elton John, the Rolling Stones, Freddie Mercury, Sinitta, Boy George, Dead or Alive, and Duran Duran.  Tonioli has also worked on numerous films and television shows including Little Voice, The Gathering Storm, Dancin' thru the Dark and Enigma.  He also has a number of acting credits, including the role of Peppino, manservant to Michael Gambon's Oscar Wilde in the BBC production Oscar.  Tonioli appeared as himself in the movie version of the BBC comedy Absolutely Fabulous.  Renowned for his flamboyantly wild gestures and amusingly extravagant comments, Tonioli has been a member of the Strictly Come Dancing team since the show's launch in 2004.  Read more…

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Amalfi destroyed by tsunami

Quake beneath Tyrrhenian Sea sparked killer wave

The former maritime republic of Amalfi, which once had a population of 70,000 people, was effectively wiped out when a massive earthquake that occurred under the Tyrrhenian Sea on this day in 1343 sparked a devastating tsunami along the coast of southern Italy.  The tremor itself caused deaths but not on the scale of the tsunami that followed, as a stretch of coastline from north of Naples to south of the Cilento National Park bore the brunt of a huge killer wave.  The towns of Bussanto and Blanda, near the present-day resorts of Sapri and Maratea, were among communities that disappeared completely, while Amalfi and Minori on what we know now as the Amalfi Coast were decimated.  Amalfi’s harbour and all the boats in it were destroyed, while the lower town fell into the sea. Where there had once been a thriving city, only a village remained, the population of which has never grown much beyond about 6,000 people. Its days as a significant maritime power were over.  Salerno and Naples suffered considerable damage, although the death toll was never recorded, it can be assumed it ran into tens of thousands.  Read more…

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Giorgio Faletti – writer and entertainer

Comedian who became best-selling novelist

Giorgio Faletti, who became a best-selling thriller writer, was born on this day in 1950 in Asti in Piedmont.  He was a successful actor, comedian, and singer-songwriter before he turned his hand to writing fiction. His first thriller, I Kill (Io uccido), sold more than four million copies.  Faletti’s books have now been published in 25 languages throughout Europe, South America, China, Japan, Russia and the US.  Faletti graduated from law school but then began a career as a comedian at the Milanese Club ‘Derby’.  In 1983 he made his debut on local television before appearing alongside the popular hostess and former actress, Raffaella Carrà, on RAI’s daytime game show, Pronto, Raffaella? He was cast as a comedian in the popular variety show, Drive In, which was followed by other television successes.  He wrote the soundtrack for a TV series in which he was one of the main actors and then released an album of his songs.  In 1992 he took part in the San Remo Music Festival with Orietta Berti with the song Rumba di tango.  In 1994, performing his own song, Signor tenente, he came second at San Remo.  Read more…

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Pope John XXIII

Farmer’s son went on to become ‘the Good Pope’

Pope John XXIII was born on this day in 1881 at Sotto il Monte near Bergamo.  He was originally named Angelo Roncalli and was part of a large farming family but he went on to become a much loved Pope and respected world leader.  Angelo was tutored by a local priest before entering the Seminary in Bergamo at the age of 12. He went on to study theology in Rome and rose to become Cardinal Patriarch of Venice before being elected Pope in 1958.  His religious studies had been interrupted by a spell in the Italian army, but he was ordained in 1904. He served as secretary to the Bishop of Bergamo for nine years before becoming an army chaplain in World War One.  After the war he worked in Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece on behalf of the church helping to locate and repatriate prisoners of war.  In 1944 he was appointed nuncio to Paris to help with the post war effort in France. He became a Cardinal in 1953 and expected to spend his last years serving the church in Venice.  But when he was elected Pope by his fellow cardinals in the conclave of 20 October 1958, it was a turning point in the church’s history.  Read more…

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Stefano Boeri - architect

Milan urban planner famous for Vertical Forest

Stefano Boeri is a specialist in
sustainable development projects

The architect Stefano Boeri, a specialist in environmentally sustainable developments and best known for his Bosco Verticale - Vertical Forest - project in Milan, was born on this day in 1956 in Milan.

The Bosco Verticale consists of two residential tower blocks in the Isola neighbourhood in the north of the city, just beyond the Porta Garibaldi railway station.  The two towers, one of 111m (364 ft), the other of 76m (249 ft), incorporate 8,900 sqm (96,000 sq ft) of terraces that are home to approximately 800 trees, 5,000 shrubs and 11,000 perennial plants.

The vegetation - the equivalent of what might be found in three hectares of woodland but with a footprint of just 3,000 sqm - mitigates against urban pollution, absorbing dust and carbon dioxide while producing oxygen. The trees also provide natural climate control for the inhabitants, shading the interior from sun in the summer and blocking cold winds in the winter.

Boeri incorporated other features to make the building self-sufficient, generating energy from solar panels and using filtered waste water to irrigate the plants.

Construction of the towers began in late 2009 and the project was completed in 2014, since which time similar projects have been started in Lausanne in Switzerland, Eindhoven and Utrecht in the Netherlands and several cities in China.

Boeri studied architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan, where he earned a master's degree, before adding a PhD in architecture in 1989 from the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia.

Boeri's Bosco Verticale tower blocks are now
a eyecatching feature of the Milan skyline

He was editor-in-chief of the international architectural magazine Domus from 2004 to 2007 and the Italian monthly design magazine Abitare from 2007 to 2011. He founded Multiplicity, a research agency investigating the relationships between geopolitics and urban planning, took part in numerous international exhibitions and wrote many academic articles.

In 1999, he founded the Boeri Studio with fellow architects Gianandrea Barreca and Giovanni La Varra, that evolved in 2009 into Stefano Boeri Architetti, in partnership with Michele Brunello, which now has offices in Shanghai and Doha, Qatar as well as Milan.

Between April 2011 and March 2013, Boeri was Head of Culture, Design and Fashion for the city of Milan, and between July 2014 and October 2015 was Councillor for Culture and Major Events for the Mayor of Florence.

Other notable projects for which Boeri was responsible include the Villa Méditerranée in Marseille and the House of the Sea of La Maddalena in Sardinia.

The Villa Méditerranée in Marseille, with the city's
Romanesque-Byzantine style cathedral in the distance

The Villa Méditerranée is a museum and cultural center dedicated to historical, cultural, scientific, and sociological matters affecting countries bordering the Mediterranean. Located in the docks area of the port of Marseille, the building features a cantilevered exhibition floor and an underwater conference suite.

Located on the south-western edge of the port area of La Maddalena, the main a town in the Maddalena archipelago off the northern tip of the island of Sardinia, the House of the Sea building, which is used for commercial purposes as well as hosting exhibitions dedicated to nautical and sailing events, is a striking structure consisting of two rectangular elements of different sizes, one placed flush with the quay and, suspended above, a larger upper body that juts out over the water.

Boeri is married to Maddalena Bregani, a former TV writer and editor who co-founded the Multiplicity agency with him and now works as a consultant in projects around the cultural production and the communication fields, based in Milan. 

The Unicredit Tower is
another Isola landmark

Travel tip:

Situated adjacent to the Porta Garibaldi railway station, Isola used to be one of Milan’s toughest working-class neighbourhoods but since the early 2000s, after rents in the sought-after Brera and Navigli districts increased sharply, artists and young professionals began to be drawn to the Isola area’s village vibe and much cheaper apartments and is now one of the city’s trendiest,  up-and-coming areas, well connected to the city centre by a metro line. The area boasts a vibrant nightlife, chic boutiques, some fine restaurants and an array of cafes serving good coffee and delicious pastries. The area has also become famous for second-hand shops that stock vintage designer pieces, such as Chanel bags and Ferragamo shoes.

The Maddalena Archipelago is known for its
white sand beaches and crystal clear waters

Travel tip:

The Maddalena Archipelago is a group of islands in the Strait of Bonifacio between the French island of Corsica and north-eastern Sardinia (Italy). It consists of seven main islands and numerous small islets, the largest one of which is the island of La Maddalena with its homonymous town. Maddalena has the same clear waters and wind blown granite coastlines as the nearby upmarket tourist resorts of the Costa Smeralda but remains a haven for wildlife, home to the Parco Nazionale Arcipelago di La Maddalena.

Also on this day:

1343: Amalfi destroyed by tsunami

1881: The birth of Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII

1939: The birth of actress Rosanna Schiaffino

1950: The birth of novelist Giorgio Faletti

1955: The birth of dance show judge Bruno Tonioli

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24 November

Pietro Torrigiano – sculptor

Achievements overshadowed by assault on Michelangelo

Pietro Torrigiano, the sculptor credited with introducing Renaissance art to England in the early years of the 16th century but who is best remembered for breaking the nose of Michelangelo in a fight, was born on this day in 1472 in Florence.  The incident with the man who would become the greatest artist of their generation came when both were teenagers, studying in Florence under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici.  Torrigiano was older than Michelangelo by two and a half years and confessed some years later that he found his young rival to be somewhat irritating, especially since it was his habit to peer over the shoulders of his fellow students and make disparaging comments about the quality of their work. On the occasion they clashed, when Michelangelo was said to be about 15, he was with Torrigiano and some others in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, studying frescoes by Masaccio.  Looking at a sketch Torrigiano was making, the younger boy made some slighting remark and Torrigiano lashed out.  He caught him such a blow that Michelangelo, who was knocked out cold at the time, suffered a broken nose and a disfigurement he would carry for life.  Read more…

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Lucky Luciano - Mafia boss

Sicilian who brought order among warring clans

Charles 'Lucky' Luciano, the mobster best known for shaping the structure of Italian-dominated organized crime in the United States, was born Salvatore Lucania on this day in 1897 in Lercara Friddi, a town about 70km (44 miles) south-east of the Sicilian capital, Palermo.  Raised in New York's Lower East Side after his family emigrated in 1906, it was Luciano who famously put the New York underworld into the control of the so-called Five Families and also set up The Commission, which served as a governing body for organized crime nationwide.  After he was jailed in 1936 on extortion and prostitution charges, Luciano is said to have struck a deal with the American authorities to use his criminal connections to help the Allies in their invasion of Sicily, a vital first step in driving the German forces and their supporters out of the Italian peninsula.  In return he was given parole and allowed to return to Sicily at the end of the Second World War.  Luciano, whose father, Antonio, had worked in a sulphur mine in Lercara Friddi, began his life in crime as a teenager, when he set up his own gang and became friends with Jewish gang members Meyer Lansky and his associate Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel.  Read more…

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Carlo Collodi - journalist and writer

Satirical journalist created Pinocchio to express his own views 

Carlo Collodi, in real life Carlo Lorenzini, was born on this day in 1826 in Florence.  Although he was a satirical journalist who supported the cause of the Risorgimento, Collodi is best remembered for his stories for children about the character, Pinocchio.  The writer was brought up in the small town of Collodi where his mother had been born and he adopted the name of her birthplace as a pen name.  After becoming interested in politics he started the satirical newspaper, Il Lampione, in 1848. This was censored by order of the Grand Duke of Tuscany so in 1854 he started Lo Scaramuccia, which was also controversial.  In 1856 he wrote his first play for the theatre and, after Italian unification in 1861, he turned his attention to writing for children.  Collodi’s stories about his first main character, Giannettino, were a way of expressing his own political ideas through allegory.  He began writing Storia di un Burattino (The Story of a Marionette), in 1880. He went on to contribute regular stories about his character, who he later called Pinocchio, to a newspaper for children.  Pinocchio was created out of wood by a woodcarver, Geppetto, but he became a mischievous boy whose nose grew when he told a lie.   Read more…

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Vittorio Miele - artist

Painter scarred by Battle of Monte Cassino

The 20th century artist Vittorio Miele, who found a way to express himself in art after losing his family in the Battle of Monte Cassino, was born in Cassino on this day in 1926.  Miele was a teenager when his hometown and the mountain top Benedictine monastery witnessed one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War as Allied armies attempted to break the Gustav Line of the Axis forces.  Over a three-month period, the Allies made four assaults, each backed up by heavy bombing, and though the objective was eventually achieved it was at a very high price. There were at least 80,000 soldiers killed or  wounded, as well as countless civilians caught in the crossfire.  Miele lost his father, mother and sister. He survived but left the area as soon as he was able, settling 400km (249 miles) north in Urbino in the Marche. It was there, from the age of 19, that he took courses in painting and became part of the city’s artistic life, developing a talent that in his mature years saw him once described as “the poet of silence”.  In the following decades his work began to reach further afield.  Read more…

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23 November

Franco Nero – actor

The film Camelot sparked long love affair with English actress

Francesco Clemente Giuseppe Sparanero, better known by his stage name Franco Nero, was born on this day in 1941 in San Prospero Parmense.  Nero became well-known for playing the title role in Sergio Corbucci’s Spaghetti Western film Django in 1966 and then reprising the role in Nello Rossati’s film Django Strikes Again in 1987.  The actor has had a long-standing relationship with British actress Vanessa Redgrave, which began in the 1960s during the filming of the musical comedy-drama Camelot. They had a son, Carlo Gabriel Redgrave Sparanero in 1969. Now known as Carlo Gabriel Nero, their son is a screenwriter and director. Franco Nero was the son of a Carabinieri officer, who was originally from San Severo, a city in the province of Foggia in Apulia.  He grew up in Bedonia in Emilia-Romagna and then in Milan, where he studied briefly at the Economy and Trade Faculty of the University. He left there to study at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan.  Nero’s first film role was a small part in Giuseppe Fina's Pelle Viva in 1962. After his success in Django, he played the part of Lancelot in Camelot, opposite Vanessa Redgrave as Guinevere, in 1967.  Read more…

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Ludovico Einaudi – composer

Musician world famous for his unique blend of sounds

Pianist and film music composer Ludovico Maria Enrico Einaudi was born on this day in 1955 in Turin.  Einaudi has composed the music for films such as The Intouchables and I’m Still Here and has released many solo albums for piano and orchestra.  His distinctive music, which mixes classical with contemporary rhythms of rock and electronic, is now played all over the world and has been used as background music and in television commercials.  Einaudi’s mother, Renata Aldrovandi, played the piano to him as a child and her father, Waldo Aldrovandi, was a pianist, opera conductor and composer, who went to live in Australia after the Second World War.  His father, Giulio Einaudi, was a publisher, who worked with authors Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, and his grandfather, Luigi Einaudi, was President of Italy between 1948 and 1955.  Einaudi started composing his own music and playing it on a folk guitar when he was a teenager.  He began his musical training at the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan, obtaining a diploma in composition in 1982. He took an orchestration class with the composer Luciano Berio, in which, according to Einaudi himself, he learnt to have a very open way of thinking about music.  Read more…

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Prospero Alpini - botanist

How coffee was first introduced to Europe

Physician and botanist, Prospero Alpini, was born on this day in 1553 in Marostica near Vicenza.  He is credited with being the first person in Europe to observe and write about the coffee plant.  Alpini went to study medicine in Padua in 1574 and after taking his degree settled down to work as a doctor in nearby Campo San Pietro.  He was very interested in botany and so to extend his knowledge of exotic plants he travelled to Egypt in 1580 as physician to George Emo, the Venetian consul in Cairo.  While in Egypt he studied date trees which helped him to work out that there were gender differences between plants. He wrote that: “the female date trees or palms do not bear fruit unless the branches of the male and female plants are mixed together, or, as is generally done, unless the dust found in the male sheath or male flowers is sprinkled over the female flowers.”  In 1593 he was appointed professor of botany at Padua University and, after he died in 1617, he was succeeded in the role by his son, Alpino Alpini.  His botanical work De Medicina Aegyptiorum is believed to contain the first report on the coffee plant ever published in the western world.  Read more…

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Fred Buscaglione - singer and actor

Fifties sensation who died tragically young

The singer and actor Fred Buscaglione, a nightclub singer who became a huge star of the pop world in 1950s Italy, was born on this day in 1921 in Turin.  Buscaglione’s style - he portrayed himself tongue-in-cheek as a sharp-suited gangster with a taste for whiskey and women - caught the imagination of an Italian public desperate to be entertained after the austerity of Fascism, when all ‘foreign’ music was banned.  He formed a partnership with the writer Leo Chiosso after their first collaboration, on a song called Che bambola (What a Babe!), which resulted in more than one million record sales, catapulting Buscaglione to fame.  They had several more hits, including Love in Portofino, which was covered by Andrea Bocelli in 2013 as the title track from an album.  Born Ferdinando Buscaglione, he was from a creative family. His father was a painter and his mother a piano teacher. They enrolled their son at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Turin at the age of 11 but by his teens Buscaglione had adopted jazz as his passion.  His career as a singer and musician was going well and Chiosso was one of the friends he had made through his appearances in night clubs around Turin.  Read more…

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22 November

NEW - Joe Adonis - Mafia boss

Boy from mountainous Campania who became powerful New York mobster

The Mafia criminal Joe Adonis, who at one time was effectively America’s senior gangster as chairman of the so-called ‘Commission’, was born Giuseppe Antonio Doto on this day in 1902 at Montemarano, a small town in mountainous Campania.  Doto became a friend and associate of the powerful Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, who would head one of the New York Mafia’s powerful Five Families.  As Adonis, Doto would emerge as a powerful figure in his own right in Brooklyn and Manhattan and later New Jersey.  Accounts of his arrival in the United States as a child vary. Many suppose that he travelled with his family among thousands of migrants from Italy who left for a new life in America in the 1900s, their names recorded at the immigrant inspection station on Ellis Island in 1909.  Others suggest that he arrived in 1915, having travelled as a stowaway on a liner from Naples. Either way, he appears to have settled in Brooklyn, where he quickly turned to crime, making money through stealing and picking pockets.  It was in partnership with Luciano and two up-and-coming figures in the Jewish-American underworld, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, that he became involved in bootlegging. Read more…

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Nevio Scala - footballer and coach

Led Parma to success in golden era of 1990s

Nevio Scala, a European Cup winner with AC Milan as a player and the most successful coach of Parma's golden era in the 1990s, was born on this day in 1947 in Lozzo Atestino, a small town in the Euganean Hills, just south of Padua.  A midfielder who also played for Roma, Vicenza and Internazionale at the top level of Italian football, Scala was never picked for his country but won a Serie A title and a European Cup-Winners' Cup in addition to the European Cup with AC Milan.  But his achievements with Parma as coach arguably exceeded even that, given that they were a small provincial club that had never played in Serie A when Scala was appointed.  He had given notice of his ability by almost taking the tiny Calabrian club Reggina to Serie A in 1989 only a year after winning promotion from Serie C, and needed only one season to take Parma to the top flight for the first time.  With the massive financial backing of Calisto Tanzi, the founder and chairman of the local dairy giants Parmalat, Scala then led Parma into a period of sustained success no one could have predicted.  Between 1991 and 1995, Parma won the Coppa Italia, the European Cup-Winners' Cup, the European Super Cup and the UEFA Cup.  Read more…

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Rocco Commisso - entrepreneur

US businessman with roots in Calabria

Rocco Commisso, the founder of the American cable TV provider Mediacom and owner of football clubs in the United States and Italy, was born on this day in 1949 in Marina di Gioiosa Ionica, a small seaside town in Calabria.  With annual revenues of more than $2,000 million, Mediacom is the fifth largest cable company in the US, having been launched from Commisso’s basement in 1995, when he began to buy up small community cable systems, mainly in the Midwest and Southeast. It now has its headquarters in Blooming Grove, New York.  Commisso, a football fan from his childhood, bought a majority stake in the New York Cosmos club in 2017 and completed the purchase of ACF Fiorentina in Italy two years later, with plans to return each club to its glory days of the past.  With a southwest aspect on the Ionian coast, Marina di Gioiosa Ionica is something of an idyllic spot today, blessed with wide beaches and clear inviting water. As Commisso was growing up, however, it was a relative deprived area as Italy struggled to rebuild after World War Two and it was not uncommon for families to leave the area in search of prosperity elsewhere.  Read more…

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Bernardo Pasquini - composer

Talented musician wrote music for a queen

Baroque composer Bernardo Pasquini died on this day in Rome in 1710.  He is remembered as an important composer for the harpsichord and for his musical scores for operas. Along with his fellow composers Alessandro Scarlatti and Arcangelo Corelli, Pasquini was a member of the Arcadian Academy (Accademia degli Arcadi) which was set up in Rome by one of his patrons, Queen Christina of Sweden.  Pasquini enjoyed Queen Christina’s protection while he was living in Rome and produced several operas in her honour. These were staged in Rome initially and then replayed in theatres all over Italy.  Queen Christina had abdicated from the throne of Sweden in 1654, converted to Roman Catholicism and moved to live in Rome.  While living in the Palazzo Farnese, she opened up her home for members of the Arcadian Academy to enjoy music, theatre, literature and languages with her.  She became a cultural leader and protector of many Baroque artists, composers and musicians.  The Baroque period, which influenced sculpture, painting and architecture, as well as literature, dance, theatre and music, began in Rome around 1600.  Read more…

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Alfonso II d’Este – Duke of Ferrara

Tasso’s patron raised Ferrara to the height of its glory

Alfonso II d’Este, who was to be the last Duke of Ferrara, was born on this day in 1533 in Ferrara in Emilia-Romagna.  Famous as the protector of the poet Torquato Tasso, Alfonso II also took a keen interest in music.  He was also the sponsor of the philosopher Cesare Cremonini, who was a friend of both Tasso and the scientist and astronomer Galileo Galilei.  Although he was married three times, he failed to provide an heir for the Duchy.  Alfonso was the eldest son of Ercole II d’Este and Renée de France, the daughter of Louis XII of France.  As a young man, Alfonso fought in the service of Henry II of France against the Habsburgs but soon after he became Duke in 1559 he was forced by Pope Pius IV to send his mother back to France because she was a Calvinist.  In 1583 he joined forces with the Emperor Rudolf II in his war against the Turks in Hungary.  Alfonso II was proficient in Latin and French as well as Italian and like his ancestors before him encouraged writers and artists. He welcomed the poet Tasso to his court in Ferrara and he wrote some of his most important poetry while living there, including his epic poem, Gerusalemme Liberata.  Read more…

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Paolo Gentiloni – politician 

Italy’s 57th premier both noble and a Democrat

Italy’s Prime Minister from 2016 to 2018, Paolo Gentiloni, was born on this day in 1954 in Rome.  A member of the Democratic Party, Gentiloni was asked to form a Government in December 2016 by Italian President Sergio Mattarella.  A professional journalist before he entered politics, Gentiloni is a descendant of Count Gentiloni Silveri and holds the titles of Nobile of Filottranno, Nobile of Cingoli and Nobile of Macerata.  The word nobile, derived from the Latin nobilis, meaning honourable, indicates a level of Italian nobility ranking somewhere between the English title of knight and baron.  Gentiloni is related to the politician Vincenzo Ottorino Gentiloni, who was a leader of the Conservative Catholic Electoral Union and a key ally of Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, who held the office five times between 1892 and 1921.  Gentiloni attended the Classical Lyceum Torquato Tasso in Rome and went on to study at La Sapienza University in the city where he became a member of the Student Movement, a left wing youth organisation. He moved on to become a member of the Workers’ Movement for Socialism and graduated in Political Sciences.  Read more…

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Joe Adonis - Mafia boss

Boy from mountainous Campania who became powerful New York mobster

The mug shots of Joe Adonis held in the files of
the New York police department in the 1930s

The Mafia criminal Joe Adonis, who at one time was effectively America’s senior gangster as chairman of the so-called ‘Commission’, was born Giuseppe Antonio Doto on this day in 1902 at Montemarano, a small town in mountainous Campania.

Doto became a friend and associate of the powerful Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, who would head one of the New York Mafia’s powerful Five Families.  As Adonis, Doto would emerge as a powerful figure in his own right in Brooklyn and Manhattan and later New Jersey.

Accounts of his arrival in the United States as a child vary. Many suppose that he travelled with his family among thousands of migrants from Italy who left for a new life in America in the 1900s, their names recorded at the immigrant inspection station on Ellis Island in 1909.

Others suggest that he arrived in 1915, having travelled as a stowaway on a liner from Naples. Either way, he appears to have settled in Brooklyn, where he quickly turned to crime, making money through stealing and picking pockets. 

It was in partnership with Luciano and two up-and-coming figures in the Jewish-American underworld, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, that he became involved in bootlegging soon after the National Prohibition Act made the sale of alcohol illegal. Doto, who had a natural charm, found numerous clients among the actors, writers and producers that frequented the Broadway theatre scene.

Charles 'Lucky' Luciano, pictured in Rome in the 
1940s, was a close friend of Adonis during his heyday

It is thought that it was around this time that Doto, who was something of a lothario and notoriously vain, changed his name to Joe Adonis, which was supposedly a nickname given to him by a chorus girl in the Ziegfeld Follies he was dating at the time.

Seeking to advance their careers as the Italian and Jewish gangs expanded their reach in the New York crime scene, Adonis became an enforcer for Frankie Yale, a Brooklyn racketeer, while Luciano took on a similar role working for Giuseppe Masseria.

Masseria became embroiled in a bloody battle for power with Salvatore Maranzano known as the Castellammarese War. By this time Adonis was working for Masseria. When ultimately, it became clear that Maranzano would prevail, Luciano secretly offered his services to Maranzano.

Word of this betrayal reached Masseria, whose immediate reaction was to want Luciano dead. He made the mistake, however, of asking Adonis to arrange the killing. Loyal to Luciano, Adonis warned his friend, who came up with a counter plot to eliminate Masseria.

This involved arranging a meeting with Masseria at a restaurant on Coney Island on 15 April, 1931, at one point in which Luciano excused himself to go to the bathroom. In his absence, Adonis, Siegel and two others - Vito Genovese and Alberto Anastasia - entered the restaurant and simultaneously opened fire on Masseria.

Salvatore Maranzano was ultimately
killed by the ruthless Luciano

With Masseria gone, Maranzano decided that to avoid future wars, the New York gangs should agree on territorial boundaries, from which agreement the Five Families were born. But his decision to anoint himself as the overall boss - the capo di tutti capi - irked Luciano, who did not disguise his dissatisfaction. 

Now Maranzano wanted Luciano out of the way but again Luciano was tipped off and instead, on 10 September, 1931, it was Maranzano who was killed, gunned down in his office in Manhattan by Luciano loyalists.

Adonis and Luciano presided over a lucrative bootlegging operation in Brooklyn and Midtown Manhattan, Adonis also moving into car sales and buying vending machines which he filled with stolen cigarettes. Luciano built on Masseria’s ideas for organising the New York crime scene by setting up a national committee, known as the 'Commission' or the 'Syndicate', as an umbrella organisation for gang activity across the whole of North America. 

Meanwhile, Adonis helped protect himself and Luciano from attention by bribing politicians and high-ranking police officers. 

Not everyone could be bought, however, and their luck ran out in 1936 when Thomas E Dewey, a state prosecutor, secured a conviction against Luciano on charges relating to his prostitution rackets that put him in jail for 30 years.

Genovese briefly took control of the Luciano family but fled to Italy to avoid prosecution in 1937, leaving Frank Costello as the new Luciano family capo, with Adonis at the head of the 'Syndicate'.

Luciano was released from prison in 1946 after helping the United States military plan their invasion of Sicily in 1943, but only on condition he was deported to Italy. Nonetheless, Luciano tried to hang on to his operations in New York and met with Adonis and other crime bosses in Havana, Cuba in 1946, with the intention of using the island as his base. Within less than a year, however, he was sent back to Italy after US authorities put pressure on the Cuban government to expel him.

Adonis pictured around the
time he was deported to Italy

Meanwhile, Adonis, whose operations had now shifted largely to New Jersey, after New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's crackdown on illegal gambling, found himself summoned to appear before a US Senate commission on organised crime, chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver. He refused to testify, invoking his Fifth Amendment privileges against self-incrimination, but the exposure in televised hearings brought his activity in New Jersey into the spotlight.

Convicted in 1951 on charges of operating three illegal gambling rooms in New Jersey, he was handed a two-to-three year jail sentence, during which it was established that he had never obtained American citizenship and was deported as an illegal alien, eventually leaving after his last appeal against the deportation order was thrown out in 1956.

He managed to move enough money to bank accounts in Italy to live out the next decade or so in comfort, with an apartment in Milan and a villa outside Naples. Although Luciano also lived in the Naples area, they never met. Adonis did attend his former associate’s funeral in 1962, however.

Adonis himself died in 1971. Arrested by Italian police as part of a general round-up of Mafia suspects, he was moved to Serra de' Conti, a small town near the Adriatic, along with more than 100 other mobsters for questioning over the murder of Pietro Scaglione, the public prosecutor in Palermo, Sicily. Under interrogation, Adonis suffered a heart attack and died in hospital in nearby Ancona.

Despite having declared him an alien, the US government acceded to requests from Adonis’s family, who had remained in New Jersey, to have his body flown back to America and, after a small funeral attended only by immediate family, he was buried at Madonna Cemetery in Fort Lee, New Jersey, under the name of Joseph Anthony Doto.

A view of the town of Montemarano, situated in
the hills of inland Campania, near Avellino

Travel tip:

Giuseppe Antonio Doto’s home town of Montemarano, situated about 30km (19 miles) east of the city of Avellino by road, is a good example of a typical town in Irpinia, the inland area of Campania that clings to ancient traditions. The area produces famous Campania wines such as Fiano di Avellino, Greco di Tufo, and Taurasi and among several festivals taking place annually in Montemarano is the Festa del Vino. Another is the Festa del Bosco, dedicated to woodlands produce such as chestnuts, mushrooms, and truffles. The annual Carnevale di Montemarano features the tarantella montemaranese, the town’s own version of the traditional southern Italian folk dance.

A view over the largely rebuilt city of Avellino,
which suffered war and earthquake damage

Travel tip:

The city of Avellino has its origins in the ancient Roman settlement, Abellinum, although the present city was founded by the Lombards and ruled at different times by the Byzantines, Normans, Swabians, Angevin, Aragonese, the Viceroy of Spain, the Austrians and the Bourbons.  Heavily bombed during World War Two by Allied planes attempting to cut off the retreat of German panzer units, it suffered further massive damage in the huge earthquake that affected the area in 1980. Nonetheless, it has a cathedral, dedicated to the Madonna dell 'Assunta, that was built in the 12th century and has a neoclassical facade redone in 1891.

Also on this day:

1533: The birth of Alfonso II d’Este, the last Duke of Ferrara

1710: The death of Baroque composer Bernardo Pasquini

1947: The birth of football coach Nevio Scala

1949: The birth of businessman Rocco Commisso 

1954: The birth of former prime minister Paolo Gentiloni 

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