Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino is a man who made each of life's "events" count, from his childhood to his death in 1985. Calvino was born "under the sign of Libra" in 1923, far from the European country where he would spend most of his life. His parents were traveling botanists, who stayed in Cuba two more years after Italo's birth. The family then moved to San Rem ...

Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice on March 4th, 1678. Though ordained a priest in 1703, according to his own account, within a year of being ordained Vivaldi no longer wished to celebrate mass because of physical complaints ("tightness of the chest") which pointed to angina pectoris, asthmatic bronchitis, or a nervous disorder. It is also possible ...

Rodolfo Valentino

The Great Lover. The Sheik. Mention the name Rudolph Valentino, and these monikers are likely to be the response you'll get. As a boy in Castellaneta, Italy, Rodolpho Alfonzo Rafaelo Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla couldn't have anticipated the fame he would gain in America as Rudolph Valentino. The bi-lingual and intelligent R ...

Giacomo Puccini

Puccini was born in Lucca on the 22nd of December 1858, he was the last of the great Italian composers. Puccini, along with his brother Michele, who died young, were the fifth generation of a family of professional musicians and composers, living and working in and around Lucca, Tuscany Italy. All the previous generations of Puccini's were basicall ...

Francesco Petrarca

Petrarch (1304-74), Italian poet and humanist, who is considered the first modern poet. His perfection of the sonnet form later influenced such English poets as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser. His wide knowledge of the classical authors and his restoration of the classical Latin language earned him his reputation as the f ...