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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On 17 April 1598, one of the most influential figures of 17th-century science, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, was born in Ferrara. A dedicated Jesuit priest and a meticulous astronomer, Riccioli’s legacy remains visible to anyone who looks at the night sky through a telescope. His nomenclature for lunar features is still the international standard used today.
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The creator of beloved vegetable rebel Cipollino, Gianni Rodari, winner of children’s literature’s highest honour, passed away on 14 April 1980.
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9 April 1454 — On this day, five rival Italian powers signed the Treaty of Lodi, on the banks of the river Adda, that gave the peninsula four decades of relative peace.
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8 April 1492 — Lorenzo the Magnificent, the man who made Florence the centre of the Renaissance world, took his last breath at the villa of Careggi, aged just 43.
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The painter and mosaicist Gino Severini was born on 7 April 1883 in the hilltop Tuscan town of Cortona. A leading figure in early 20th-century Italian art, Severini became one of the most internationally connected members of the Futurist movement, bridging artistic developments in Italy and Paris before moving through Cubism and later Neoclassicism.
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Born with every gift Florence could bestow, Cosimo I’s brilliant eldest daughter, Maria de’ Medici, was dead at seventeen. Her story casts a long shadow over one of history’s most powerful families.
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