Born on 7th June 1422 in Gubbio, Federico da Montefeltro was the most celebrated condottiere of his age. He was a mercenary commander of formidable military skill who used the profits of war to create one of the finest courts of the Italian Renaissance at Urbino.
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Lorenzo di Pietro di Giovanni — known to posterity as Vecchietta, ‘the little old one’ — died in Siena on 6th June 1480. He left behind a legacy in paint, bronze and stone that remains inseparable from the identity of one of Italy’s most artistically rich cities.
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29 May 1415: Baldassare Cossa, reigning as Pope John XXIII, is formally deposed by the Council of Constance after fleeing the city in disguise. The Council’s decision brought one of the most colourful and scandalous careers in Church history to an end.
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On 17th May 1510, Florence lost the painter who gave the Renaissance its most enduring face. Sandro Botticelli was a man whose genius was forgotten almost as soon as he died, and whose rediscovery centuries later would reshape how the world understood Italian art.
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Michele Ferrero inherited a small pastry shop in Piedmont and grew one of Italy’s favourite food empires. He was born on 26th April, 1925. There won’t be many Italians who haven’t had Nutella at some point in their lives!
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Giovanni Caselli, the Sienese inventor whose pantelegraph transmitted handwritten images along telegraph wires more than a century before the fax machine, was born on 25 April 1815. He died on the same date he was born in 1891.
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Born on 22 April 1891, in a small Piedmontese town, Vittorio Jano went on to become one of the most consequential figures in the history of motor racing. He was a quiet, methodical genius whose engines powered world champions across four decades and three of Italy’s most famous automotive brands.
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On 21 April 753 BC according to legend, tradition and the calculations of Rome’s own ancient scholars, a man named Romulus ploughed a furrow around the Palatine Hill and founded a city. Today, that city, Rome, turns 2,779 years old.
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Born Giovanni Antonio Canal, Canaletto became the greatest view-painter of the 18th century. His luminous vedute of Venice, Rome and London still the definitive image of a city at the height of its gilded, fading glory.
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Vilified as a femme fatale, celebrated as a patron of the arts, and ultimately remembered in Ferrara as la buona duchessa, the good duchess, Lucrezia Borgia remains one of the most complex and contested women of the Italian Renaissance.
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