Guccio Gucci

Guccio Gucci (1881-1953) was the son of a Florentine leather craftsman. As a young man, he went to Paris and then London, where he gained an appreciation of cosmopolitan culture, sophistication, and aesthetics. He returned to Italy in 1920 and opened the first Gucci shop in Florence with a capital of only 30.000 lira. Guccio began with finely craf ...

Vittorio Gassman

Born in Genoa in 1922, the son of a German building engineer and a Pisan mother Luisa Ambron, Vittorio Gassman interrupted his law studies to enrol at the Academy of Dramatic Arts for the 1941-42 season. Before completing his studies he made his stage debut alongside Alda Borelli in Niccodemi's La nemica (1943). He went on to establish himself as ...

Gaetano Donizetti

A native of Bergamo, Donizetti studied locally under Johann Simon Mayr.

He was the leading composer of Italian opera for nearly a decade after the early death of Bellini in 1835.

His first success came in 1822 with the opera "Zoraida di Granata".

This was followed by more than sixty other operas, most of which ch ...

Federico Fellini

Life -- the women who both attracted and frightened him and an Italy dominated in his youth by Mussolini and Pope Pius XII -- inspired the dreams that Fellini started recording in notebooks in the 1960s. Life and dreams were raw material for his films. His native Rimini and characters like Saraghina (the devil herself said the priests who ran his s ...

Donatello

Donatello (Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi), master of sculpture in both marble and bronze, one of the greatest of all Italian Renaissance artists. A good deal is known about Donatello's life and career, but little is known about his character and personality, and what is known is not wholly reliable. He never married and he seems to have been ...