3 August

La Scala - opera and ballet theatre

First night at the world’s most famous opera house

Milan’s Teatro alla Scala was officially inaugurated on this day in 1778.  Known to Italians simply as La Scala, the theatre has become the leading opera house in the world and many famous artists have appeared there. A fire had destroyed the Teatro Regio Ducale, which had previously been the home of opera in Milan. A group of 90 wealthy patrons, the owners of private boxes in the theatre, wrote to Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Este asking that a new theatre be built.  The new theatre was built on the site of the former Church of Santa Maria alla Scala, which is how the theatre got its name. The church was deconsecrated and demolished to make way for the theatre.  With the cost of the project met by the 90 patrons, who paid in advance for boxes, the new theatre was designed by neoclassical architect Giuseppe Piermarini and at the official opening on 3 August 1778, Antonio Salieri’s opera L’Europa riconosciuta was premiered.  As with most theatres at the time, the main floor had no seats, with audience members standing to watch the performances. This had the effect of making the theatre a meeting place, but also a venue for business dealings. Read more…

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Antonio da Sangallo the Younger - architect

Talented Florentine was commissioned by the Popes

Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, who left his mark on Rome during the Renaissance, died on this day in 1546 in Terni in Umbria.  Sangallo was the chief architect on St Peter’s Basilica from 1520 onwards and built many other beautiful churches and palaces in the city and throughout the Papal States.  He was born Antonio Cordiani in Florence in 1484. His grandfather had been a woodworker and his uncles, Giuliano and Antonio da Sangallo, were architects.  The young man followed his uncles to Rome to pursue a career in architecture and ended up taking the name Sangallo himself.  He became an assistant to Donato Bramante and started by preparing sketches for his master.  Recognising his talent, Bramante gave Sangallo projects to complete with no more than an outline of the design and motifs.  Sangallo’s first major commission was for the Church of Santa Maria di Loreto in 1507.  He came to the attention of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who later became Pope Paul III, and was commissioned to design the Farnese Palace in Piazza Farnese and a palace and church in the Cardinal’s home town of Gradoli.  Read more…

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Omero Antonutti - actor and voice dubber

Narrator of Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful had long career

The actor Omero Antonutti, who acted in around 60 films and was the Italian voice of many international stars, was born on this day in 1935 in Basiliano, a village about 13km (eight miles) west of the city of Udine in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northeast Italy.   His most acclaimed performance came in Padre padrone, a 1977 film directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, a Palme d’Or winner at Cannes that was considered by many critics to be the co-directing brothers’ finest work.  Antonutti worked with the Taviani brothers again on La notte di San Lorenzo (1982), which won the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes, and Kaos (1984), in which he took the part of the playwright Luigi Pirandello in a film based on some of Pirandello’s own short stories.  He was often asked to portray significant figures in dramatisations of real-life events. For example, he took the part of Roberto Calvi, the ill-fated chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano in the Giuseppe Ferrara’s 2002 feature The Bankers of God: The Calvi Affair, and played the shady Sicilian banker Michele Sindona in Michele Placido’s 1995 film Un eroe borghese - A Bourgeois Hero.  Read more…

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Imperia Cognati - courtesan

Prostitute who became a celebrity

Imperia Cognati, who acquired celebrity status in Rome in the early 16th century as a courtesan to a number of rich and powerful figures, was born on this day in 1486.  Courtesans were originally the female companions of courtiers of the papal court, whose duties required them to be educated and familiar with etiquette, so that they could participate in the formalities of court life and take part in polite conversation.  In time, however, in some cases their companionship became of a more intimate nature and they became the mistresses of their courtiers, who in the papal court were clerics not permitted to marry.  It was common, too, for courtesans to be the companions of several clients simultaneously.  They were in effect a new class of prostitute, refined and educated enough to hold their own in polite society.  Imperia Cognati acquired her elevated status mainly through being the chosen companion of Agostino Chigi, a Sienese banker closely associated with Pope Alexander VI and others and a patron of the Renaissance.  At one time he was thought to be the richest banker in the world.  He lavished Imperia – as she was usually known – to the extent that she could afford to keep both a palace in Rome and a country villa.  Read more…

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Francesco Ferruccio - military leader

Florentine soldier celebrated in Italy’s national anthem 

Francesco Ferruccio, the military leader whose heroic attempt to defend Florence against the powerful army of the Holy Roman Empire is recalled in Italy’s national anthem, died on the battlefield on this day in 1530.  A Florentine by birth, Ferruccio had been charged with leading the army of the Republic of Florence as the city came under attack during the War of the League of Cognac, when the Pope Clement VII connived with the emperor Charles V to overthrow the republic and restore power in Florence to his own family, the Medici.  Despite being outnumbered, Ferruccio’s soldiers engaged the Imperial forces at Gavinana, just outside Florence, killed their leader and drove them back, only for the enemy to be reinforced by the arrival of 2,000 German mercenaries under the leadership of the condottiero, Fabrizio Maramaldo.  His army almost annihilated, Ferruccio was taken prisoner and, despite being wounded, was stabbed in the throat by Maramaldo and bled to death, an act considered against the code of chivalrous conduct that honourable soldiers were expected to observe.  More than 300 years later, Goffredo Mameli, the poet and patriot, recalled Ferruccio in the lyrics of a song, Il Canto degli Italiani, that would later be adopted as the national anthem of the united Italy.  Read more...

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Book of the Day: A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years, by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker

Abbate and Parker's A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years is the first full new history of opera in sixty years - now in paperback in an updated second edition.  Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their scrupulous and provocative retelling of the history of opera, examining its development, the means by which it communicates, and its societal role. In a new revision with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the twenty-first century this book explores the tensions that have sustained opera over 400 years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Hailed as ‘the best single volume ever written on the subject' by The Times Literary Supplement, Abbate and Parker’s history argues that, though the genre's most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to transform the viewer with its enduring power.

Carolyn Abbate is Professor of Music at Harvard University and the author of Unsung Voices and In Search of Opera. Her work has been translated into many languages. Roger Parker is Professor of Music at King's College, London, and the author of Leonora's Last Act and Remaking the Song. He is editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera.

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2 August

Bologna railway station bombed

Biggest terrorist atrocity in Italy's history killed 85

Italy suffered the most devastating terrorist outrage in its history on this day in 1980 with the bombing of Bologna's main railway station.   A massive 23kg (51lbs) of explosive packed into a suitcase left in a crowded waiting room was detonated at 10.25am, creating a blast that destroyed much of the main building of the station and badly damaged a train on one of the platforms.  Many people, locals and tourists, Italians and foreign nationals, were caught up in the explosion. Some were killed instantly, others died as a result of the roof of the waiting room collapsing on to the victims. There were 85 deaths and more than 200 other people were wounded.  The bomb was clearly placed to cause mass casualties. It was the first Saturday in the traditional August holiday period, one of the busiest days of the year for rail travel, and the explosive-laden suitcase was left in a room with air conditioning, then still relatively rare in Italy. On a hot day, the room was naturally full of people.  The attack was the deadliest of several during a bleak period of 10-12 years in Italian history that became known as the Years of Lead, when the ideological struggle between the left and right in Italian politics was at its height.  Read more…

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Pietro Mascagni – composer

One opera was enough to build reputation of musician

Pietro Mascagni, the creator of the opera Cavalleria rusticana, died on this day in 1945 in Rome, at the age of 81.  Cavalleria rusticana was an outstanding success when it was first performed in Rome in 1890 and was said to have single-handedly brought the Verismo movement, in which the characters were ordinary people rather than gods, mythological figures or kings and queens, into Italian opera.  The beautiful intermezzo from the opera was used in the soundtrack of the 1980 film Raging Bull and a production of the opera was used as the setting for the climax of the 1990 film The Godfather Part III, with Michael Corleone’s son Anthony playing Turridu, the opera’s male protagonist. The film ends with the intermezzo playing.  In 2001 Andrea Bocelli recorded a song entitled Mascagni on his Cieli di Toscana album and had an excerpt from Cavalleria rusticana incorporated into the music.  The opera has been so successful that it has led to Mascagni sometimes being dismissed as a one-opera composer, but, in fact, the composer wrote 15 operas, as well as orchestral and piano music and songs.  Read more…

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Carlo Savina - film composer and musical director

Worked on major scores including The Godfather and Fellini’s Amarcord

Musical director Carlo Savina, who arranged soundtracks written by such luminaries of the film music industry as Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, was born on this day in 1919 in Turin.  Savina was also a prolific film composer in his own right and is credited with writing or arranging the scores of at least 200 movies in a career spanning more than 35 years. He won a David di Donatello award for Best Music for the 1985 crime drama The Pizza Connection, directed by Damiano Damiani and starring Michele Placido, a version of which was released in the United States as The Sicilian Connection.  Yet Savina is more frequently remembered for his work with Rota on the multi-award winning soundtrack of the first film in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy in 1972 and with Federico Fellini the following year on Amarcord, the maestro’s semi-autobiographical film about growing up in a village in the Fascist Italy of the 1930s.  He worked with Fellini and Rota on many projects, including La dolce vita (1960), which remains their most famous collaboration.  Read more…

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Francis Marion Crawford – author

Novelist found inspiration while living in Sorrento

The American writer Francis Marion Crawford was born on this day in 1854 in Bagni di Lucca in Tuscany.  A prolific novelist, Crawford became known for the vividness of his characterisations and the realism of his settings, many of which were places he had visited in Italy.  He chose to settle in later life in the coastal resort of Sorrento in Campania where he even had a street named after him, Corso Marion Crawford.  Crawford was the only son of the American sculptor, Thomas Crawford. He spent his childhood going backwards and forwards between Italy and America and studied at various American and European Universities.  He spent some time in India where he found the inspiration for his first successful novel, Mr Isaacs, which was published in 1882.  In 1883 he returned to Italy to settle there permanently. He lived at the Hotel Cocumella in the village of Sant’Agnello just outside Sorrento to begin with. He then bought a nearby farmhouse, from which he developed the Villa Crawford, an impressive clifftop residence easily identifiable from the sea by the tall buttresses Crawford added as a safeguard against erosion.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, by Richard Drake

What drives terrorists to glorify violence? In The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, Richard Drake seeks to explain the origins of Italian terrorism and the role that intellectuals played in valorising the use of violence for political or social ends.  Drake argues that a combination of socio-economic factors and the influence of intellectual elites led to a sanctioning of violence by revolutionary political groups in Italy between 1969 and 1988. Drake explores what motivated Italian terrorists on both the Left and the Right during some of the most violent decades in modern Italian history and how these terrorists perceived the modern world as something to be destroyed rather than reformed.  In 1989, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy received the Howard R Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies. It was awarded for the best book that year on Italian history. The book is reissued now with a new introduction for the light it might shed on current terrorist challenges. The Italians had success in combating terrorism. We might learn something from their example. 

Richard Drake is the Lucile Speer Research Professor in Politics and History at the University of Montana. His other book publications include Byzantium for Rome: The Politics of Nostalgia in Umbertian Italy, 1878-1900; The Aldo Moro Murder Case; and Apostles and Agitators: Italy's Marxist Revolutionary Tradition.

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1 August

NEW - Kaspar Capparoni - actor

Found fame co-starring with crime-fighting dog

The actor Kaspar Capparoni, an accomplished performer on stage and screen whose fame received its biggest boost after he starred alongside a German Shepherd dog in the TV crime series Il Commissario Rex, was born in Rome on this day in 1964.  Capparoni played the part of Commissioner Lorenzo Fabbri, a homicide detective who is accompanied in his work by an unusually talented police dog known as Rex, whose ever-growing range of skills are often key to solving the crimes Fabbri is charged with investigating.  Il Commissario Rex, which was screened by Italian national broadcaster Rai between 2008 and 2015, revived a show previously shown on TV in Austria but which had ceased production in 2004 after 11 years.  Capparoni portrayed Commissioner Fabbri for four seasons, working alongside two different German Shepherds in the Rex role. The action, which had been set in Vienna in the original version, was switched to Rome for the Italian revival.  Capparoni decided to leave after the show’s producers proposed a return to its former setting in Austria.  Nonetheless, the popularity of Rex with Italian audiences brought Capparoni a much higher profile.  Read more…

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Francesca Scanagatta - soldier

Woman pretended to be a man to join Austrian army

Francesca Scanagatta, an Italian woman who served in the Imperial Austrian army for seven years while pretending to be a man, was born on this day in 1776 in Milan.  Scanagatta – sometimes known as Franziska – was a small and apparently rather plain girl, who was brought up in Milan while the city was under Austrian rule. She admired the Austrian soldiers to the extent of wishing she could join the army, yet knew that as a girl she would not be allowed to.  Even so, it did not stop her dreaming and throughout her childhood and teenage years she worked on becoming physically stronger through exercise while reading as much literature as she could about the army.  By contrast, her brother Giacomo hated the idea of joining up. He was rather effeminate in nature and the very thought of becoming a soldier filled him with dread.  Yet his father wanted him to serve and arranged for him to attend a military school in Vienna.  Giacomo confided his fears in Francesca and she suddenly realised she had an opportunity to fulfil her dreams by signing up in his place.  So, in June 1794, dressed as a man, the 17-year-old travelled with Giacomo to Austria.  Read more…

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Paolo De Poli – enameller and painter

Artist devoted his life to an ancient technique

A painter who became fascinated with the ancient art of enamelling, Paolo De Poli was born on this day in 1905 in Padua.  At first De Poli experimented with enamelling small, decorative objects but after he mastered his craft he moved on to creating large panels for the interiors of ships, hotels and public buildings.  De Poli trained in drawing and embossing on metal at the art school Pietro Selvatico of Padua and then studied oil painting in Verona. He embarked on a career as a portrait and landscape painter.  In 1926 he participated for the first time in the Biennale di Venezia with the oil painting Still Life.  While travelling in the 1930s he visited art museums and archaeological sites and became interested in the traditional art of working with vitreous enamel.  From 1933 onwards, he devoted himself to creating enamel works on metal, experimenting with refined objects of many shapes in brilliant colours. He continued to improve his technique, reaching the highest level of skill.  In the 1940s, he collaborated with Milanese architect Gio Ponti in the production of furniture and decorative panels.  Read more…

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The Arab conquest of Sicily

Fall of Taormina put island in Muslim control

The Arab conquest of Sicily, which began in 827, was completed on this day in 902 with the fall of Taormina, the city in the northeast of the island that was the last stronghold of the Byzantine Empire, which had been in control for more than 350 years.  The island had been coveted by powers around the Mediterranean for centuries and raids by Saracens, as the Muslim Arabs from Roman Arabia became known, had been taking place since the mid-7th century without threatening to make substantial territorial gains.  However, in 827 the commander of the island's fleet, Euphemius, led a revolt against Michael II, the Byzantine Emperor, and when he and his supporters were at first driven from the island by forces loyal to Michael II, he turned to the Aghlabids, the rulers of Ifriqiya, the area of north Africa now known as Tunisia, for help.  The Aghlabids saw this as a strategic opportunity too good to miss and, with Euphemius’s forces to supplement their own, completed a successful landing on the southern coast and began to establish fortresses.  An attempt to capture Syracuse, which was then the capital, was beaten back, but when they turned their attention to Palermo it was a different story.  Read more…

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Cosimo de' Medici

Banker who founded the Medici dynasty

The first of the Medici rulers of Florence, Cosimo di Giovanni de' Medici, died on this day in 1464 in Careggi in Tuscany.  Cosimo had political influence and power because of the wealth he had acquired as a banker and he is also remembered as a patron of learning, the arts and architecture.  Cosimo, who is sometimes referred to as Cosimo the Elder (il Vecchio) was born into a wealthy family in Florence in 1389. His father was a moneylender who then joined the bank of a relative before opening up his own bank in 1397.  The Medici Bank opened branches in Rome, Geneva, Venice and Naples and the Rome branch managed the papal finances in return for a commission.  The bank later opened branches in London, Pisa, Avignon, Bruges, Milan and Lubeck, which meant that bishoprics could pay their money into their nearest branch for the Pope to use.  In 1410, Baldassarre Cossa, who was on one side of a power struggle within the Catholic Church, borrowed money from the bank to buy himself into the office of Cardinal and in return put the Medici in charge of all the papal finances.   This gave the Medici family the power to threaten defaulting debtors with excommunication.  Read more…

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Antonio Cotogni – baritone

Singer who moved the composer Verdi to tears

Antonio ‘Toto’ Cotogni, who achieved international recognition as one of the greatest male opera singers of the 19th century, was born on this day in 1831 in Rome.  Cotogni’s fine baritone voice was particularly admired by the composer Giuseppe Verdi and music journalists wrote reviews full of superlatives after his performances.  Cotogni studied music theory and singing from an early age and began singing in churches and at summer music festivals outside the city.  He made his opera debut in 1852 at Rome’s Teatro Metastasio as Belcore in Donizetti's L’elisir d’amore.  After that he did not sing in public for a while, concentrating instead on building up his repertoire.  After singing in various Italian cities outside Rome he was signed up to sing at Rome’s Teatro Argentina in 1857 in Lucia di Lammermoor and Gemma di Vergy, also by Donizetti. Later that year he performed in Verdi's I due Foscari and Sanelli's Luisa Strozzi at Teatro Rossini in Turin. He met the soprano Maria Ballerini there and married her the following year.  His major breakthrough came in 1858 when he was asked to take the place of the famous baritone Felice Varesi in Nice.  Read more…

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Recording of the Day: Inspector Rex: A Cop's Best Friend - Series Nine - 2-DVD Set 

Produced in Australia, where Il Commissario Rex was repackaged for Australian audiences by the SBS network as Inspector Rex: A Cop's Best Friend, this DVD contains the first series made for Italian television, with subtitles in English. Investigating an unsolved murder case, Rome's Police Inspector Lorenzo Fabbri travels to Vienna, where he meets Rex, the renowned police dog. Though officially in early retirement, Rex has no desire to rest on his laurels. Fabbri recognizes Rex's value as a fellow investigator and takes him back to Rome with him,where he is greeted warmly by Lorenzo's colleagues at the police headquarters; only Lorenzo's boss Filippo Gori seems sceptical. Rex also has to get used to his new environment and a new cuisine: instead of the traditional ham rolls he was fed by his handlers in Austria, he now gets suckling pig! Rome's new four legged crimefighter follows his new master everywhere and is actively involved in Lorenzo's cases. This is a Region 0 DVD, intended to be played worldwide.

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Kaspar Capparoni - actor

Found fame co-starring with crime-fighting dog

Kaspar Capparoni with his German Shepherd
co-star in the crime drama Il Commissario Rex

The actor Kaspar Capparoni, an accomplished performer on stage and screen whose fame received its biggest boost after he starred alongside a German Shepherd dog in the TV crime series Il Commissario Rex, was born in Rome on this day in 1964.

Capparoni played the part of Commissioner Lorenzo Fabbri, a homicide detective who is accompanied in his work by an unusually talented police dog known as Rex, whose ever-growing range of skills are often key to solving the crimes Fabbri is charged with investigating.

Il Commissario Rex, which was screened by Italian national broadcaster Rai between 2008 and 2015, revived a show previously shown on TV in Austria but which had ceased production in 2004 after 11 years.

Capparoni portrayed Commissioner Fabbri for four seasons, working alongside two different German Shepherds in the Rex role. The action, which had been set in Vienna in the original version, was switched to Rome for the Italian revival.  Capparoni decided to leave after the show’s producers proposed a return to its former setting in Austria.

Nonetheless, the popularity of Rex with Italian audiences brought Capparoni a much higher profile. His acting ability was already well regarded within his profession but thanks to Rex he acquired a large following among the public.

Capparoni and his dance partner Julija Musichina
won the 2011 edition of Ballando con le Stelle

Invited to take part in the 2011 edition of Ballando con le Stelle - the Italian equivalent of the UK’s Strictly Come Dancing and the US show Dancing with the Stars - he was paired with the Russian dancer Julija Musichina, the couple emerging from 10 weeks of competition to be crowned champions.

Born Gaspare Capparoni, his father was a surgeon, his mother a German teacher, originally from Sexten - Sesto in Italian - a German-speaking village in Alto Adige, also known as South Tyrol. Kaspar attended Rome’s German School - the Deutsche Schule - and is fluent in German as well as Italian.

After some early work as a model in advertising campaigns, he enrolled for acting lessons at the Teatro Argentina in Rome, where his work came to the attention of the writer and director Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, who gave him his stage debut at the age of 18.

It was the beginning of a relationship that would last 20 years and see Capparoni appear under Griffi’s direction in a host of classic stage plays, including works by Molière, Shakespeare, Goldoni, Ceckhov, Pirandello, Ibsen and Tennessee Williams among others.

Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, who
nurtured Capparoni's stage career

Capparoni’s big screen debut came in 1985 when he was cast in a small role in the horror film Phenomena, directed by Dario Argento and with a cast that included Jennifer Connelly and Donald Pleasance. 

Although he subsequently starred in a number of movies, notably opposite Valeria Golino in Il Sole Nero (2007) and with Claudio Amendola and Elisabetta Rocchetti in Il ritorno del Monnezza (2005), it for his work in television that he has become best known.

In addition to Il Commissario Rex, he is well known for his roles in the drama series such as Solo per amore and Capri, soaps such as Incantesimo and the period drama Elisa di Rivombrosa.

Capparoni has been married twice, first to the former Tunisian model Ashraf Ganouchi, with whom he had two children - Sheherazade, born in 1993, and Joseph, born in 2000 - before a traumatic divorce in 2003, and subsequently to Veronica Maccarone, who was best known for her appearances on Quelli che il calcio, a sports-themed entertainment show. She is the mother of Alessandro, born in 2008, and Daniel (2013).

He recently appeared with Alessandro - a student at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome - in Mothers, Fathers, Sons and Daughters, a production of words and dance, on stage at the Teatro Municipale in Piacenza.

Rome's Teatro Argentina has staged
a number of important premieres 

Travel tip:

The Teatro Argentina, where Capparoni enrolled for acting lessons as a teenager, is one of the oldest theatres in Rome. Located in Largo di Torre Argentina the Teatro Argentina was built over the remains of the curia section of the Theatre of Pompey, where Julius Caesar was murdered in 44BC. It was commissioned by the Sforza-Cesarini family, designed by the architect Gerolamo Theodoli and inaugurated in 1732. In the 19th century, it staged the premieres of Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville as well as Giuseppe Verdi's I due Foscari and La battaglia di Legnano. Several plays by Luigi Pirandello, Henrik Ibsen and Maxim Gorky were performed for the first time there in the 20th century. The auditorium is set out in the traditional horseshoe shape, with seats for 696 people, including 344 in the stalls, and 40 boxes on five levels seating an additional 352.

Sexten (Sesto) enjoys a picturesque setting in 
the Puster Valley in the Alto Adige region

Travel tip:

Sexten - known as Sesto in Italian - is the home village of Capparoni’s mother, who taught German to Italian students. A centre for both winter and summer sports, it is situated in a branch of the Puster Valley, near Innichen (It: San Candido) and Toblach (It: Dobbiaco). Just 3km (1.88 miles) from the Austrian border, it has a population of just under 2,000, 95 per cent of whom speak German as their first language, yet is part of the Alto Adige region. The nearest substantial Italian cities are Bolzano, which is 113km (70 miles) to the west by road, and Belluno, 86km (53 miles) south. Damaged during World War One, when it was on the front line as the Italian army battled against the forces of Austria-Hungary, it is now a thriving centre for skiing in the Dolomite mountains in the winter months and for trekking and mountain biking in the summer. Its most famous sporting product is the tennis player Jannik Sinner, who was born in Innichen but grew up in Sexten.

Also on this day:

902: Arab forces complete their conquest of Sicily

1464: The death of Cosimo de’ Medici, the banker who founded the Medici dynasty

1776: The birth of soldier Francesca Scanagatta

1831: The birth of baritone Antonio Cotogni

1905: The birth of painter and enameller Paolo De Poli

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