On this day: birth of Maria Salviati
Maria Salviati was a Florentine noblewoman whose descendants included kings of France and England. She was also, the mother of Cosimo I de’ Medici.
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Category: History of Italy
On this day: Birth of St Clare of Assisi
St Clare was born on 16 July 1194 in Assisi, into a noble family whose sheltered future she abandoned at eighteen for a life of poverty. She founded one of the great religious orders of medieval Europe.
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On this day: Fire destroys Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls
One of Rome’s four great papal basilicas – Saint Paul Outside the Walls – and the last of the city’s ancient churches to have survived largely untouched since antiquity, was gutted by fire on 14/15th July 1823. It was a disaster that shook the Christian world as deeply as the Notre-Dame fire would nearly two […]
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On this day: birth of Giulio d’Este of Ferrara
Giulio d’Este, who spent more than half of his life in prison for taking part in a failed conspiracy against his half-brother, the Duke of Ferrara, was born 13 July 1478 in Ferrara.
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On this day: death of artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo
The artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo died on 11 July 1593 in Milan. He is celebrated for his imaginative portrait heads built entirely from objects such as fruit, vegetables, flowers and fish,
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On this day: birth of Clara Gonzaga
Born on 1st July 1464, Clara Gonzaga, the eldest daughter of Federico I Gonzaga lived only 38 years but left a dynastic legacy that stretched from the Bourbon kings of France to King Charles III of Britain and Northern Ireland.
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On This Day: Birth of architect Paolo Soleri
On 21 June 1919, the pioneering architect, urban planner, and ecologist Paolo Soleri was born in Turin, Italy. Renowned for his radical philosophy of “arcology”, a fusion of architecture and ecology, Soleri dedicated his life to reimagining how human habitations could coexist harmoniously with the natural world.
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On This Day: death of Luca Pacioli, ‘Father of Accounting’
The Franciscan friar, mathematician and friend of Leonardo da Vinci – Luca Pacioli – died on 19 June 1517 in the Tuscan town of Sansepolcro where he had been born. He left behind a legacy that still shapes the way the world does business.
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On this day: poet Giacomo Leopardi dies
On 14 June 1837, Giacomo Leopardi — poet, philosopher and one of the most original literary minds in the Italian tradition — died in Naples aged 38. He was the victim of the cholera epidemic then sweeping the city. In a life marked by physical suffering, intellectual isolation and serial heartbreak, he produced a body […]
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On This Day: The Battle of Campaldino
On 11 June 1289, two armies met on a Tuscan plain and fought a battle whose consequences would shape the Italian Renaissance. The horrors of the Battle of Campaldino would find their way into one of the greatest poems ever written.
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