Any trip to Italy, whether it is for business or pleasure, will surely include some mention of a few of the people who have helped shape the history of the world as we know it. Italian people are very proud of their fellow countrymen and the contributions they have made to help set themselves apart from the rest of the world. Numerous statues, monuments, churches and paintings are scattered throughout the country to help commemorate the accomplishments of these people.

The list contains: artists, writers, scientists, musicians, political leaders and explorers. All of whom are noted not only in Italian history but in world history as well. Knowing the accomplishments of these people only helps travelers appreciate the sites dedicated to them, because mention of them on a trip is almost certain.

• Verdi
• Rossini
• Francesco Petrarch
• Dante
• Machiavelli
• Michelangelo
• Lorenzo de’Medici
• Leonardo
• Fermi
• Galileo
• Cristoforo Colombo
• Marco Polo
• Isabella D’Este
• Catherine de Medici

Verdi

Verdi (1813-1901)

A composer of dramatic opera, Verdi was born in Roncole, Italy. Born in humble, rural surroundings, his early musical education was subsidized by locals who admired his talent. He later studied at La Scala Opera house in Milan, and began to write operas, achieving his first major success with Nabucco (1842). Later his works included: Rigoletto (1851), Il Trovatore (1853), and La Traviata (1853). They established him as the leading operatic composer of the time. His spectacular Aida was commissioned for the new opera house in Cairo, built in celebration of the Suez Canal (1871). Apart from the Requiem (1874), there was period of 14 years when he did not work. He returned to produce Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893). As an enthusiastic nationalist in his youth during the "Risorgimento", he became active in politics only to find it was not to his taste. He resigned as a deputy in the first Italian parliament (1860) only to become a senator later in life.  Back to Top

Rossini

Rossini (1792-1868)

A composer born in Pesaro, Italy. Rossini studied in Bologna, and began to write comic operas. His early successes included: Tancredi (1813) and L'Italiana in Algeri (1813, The Italian Girl in Algiers). In 1816 he produced his masterpiece, Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville). As a director of the Italian Theater in Paris (1823), he adapted several of his works to French taste, and wrote Guillaume Tell (1829, William Tell) during this time. In 1836 he retired back to Bologna, where he studied, and took charge of the Liceo, which he helped to establish as a leading musical institution. The revolutionary disturbances in 1847 drove him to Florence, and he returned in 1855 to Paris. Later works include his Stabat Mater (1841) and the Petite Messe Solennelle (1863). His overtures in particular have continued to be highly popular items in concert programs.  Back to Top

Francesco Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) (1304-1374)

Poet and scholar, born in Arezzo, Italy. He studied at Bologna and Avignon, where he became a clergyman. In 1327 at Avignon he first saw Laura (possibly Laure de Noves, married in 1325 to Hugo de Sade), who inspired him with a passion, which has become proverbial for its constancy and purity. As the fame of his learnings grew, royal courts competed for his presence, and in 1341 he was crowned poet laureate at Rome. The earliest of the great Renaissance humanists, he wrote widely on the classics, but he is best known for the series of love poems addressed to Laura, the Canzoniere. He left Avignon in 1353 after Laura's death, and lived the rest of his life in Italy. His writing proved to be a major influence on many authors, notably Chaucer.  Back to Top

Dante

Dante

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence around May or June 1265, from a middle class family who were part of the Guelfo political party. In about 1285 he married Gemma di Manetto Donati, they would have three to four children (we don’t know exactly).

Dante’s first studies were mainly in rhetoric, grammar, philosophy, literature and theology. He was a student of Brunetto Latini, who strongly influenced Dante’s cultural growth. In his youth, he was a Stilnovo poet and had many friends among the other members of the Stilnovo School (especially Guido Cavalcanti). After the death of Bice di Folco Portinari (loved by Dante, who mentioned her in his work with the name of Beatrice) Dante began studying philosophy and theology in depth, also attending some sort of cultural associations in Florence (La Studia) which provided lessons mainly about Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Wanting a political career, he became a priore (a sort of governor) in 1300. But in Florence the contrasts in his own political party became harder and serious internal struggles began. Dante had to make some hard-line political decisions: he decided to oppose pope Bonifacio VIII’s expansion policy (supported by others in his party), taking a stand against the pontiff’s temporal interference. Dante, defeated, was strongly accused, even of fraud. He was sentenced to pay a fine and to serve a two-years exile from Florence; but he didn’t pay the fine and so was sentenced to death.

From this moment on, Dante roamed many Italian courts never again to return to Florence: he stayed under the protection of Bartolomeo della Scala in Verona in 1303. In 1306 he moved to Lunigiana (a Tuscan region), then to Lucca. In 1313 he went back to Verona where he stayed till 1319. In the same year, he moved to Ravenna, to the court of Guido Novello da Polenta. He died there, in 1321. He was buried in San Pier Maggiore’s Church where his tomb is still. (The Church is now called San Francesco’s).  Back to Top

Machiavelli

Machiavelli

Machiavelli lived from 1469-1527 and was born in Florence, Italy. As well as an Italian statesman, and a Florentine patriot, he was the head of the Second Chancery at the age of twenty-nine. He was a senior civil servant but when the republic was overthrown, he was imprisoned and tortured. Machiavelli was released in 1513 and retired to work on his major writings. He had a preoccupation with military affairs.

Machiavelli carried out diplomatic missions in France, Germany, and Italy. He was a political philosopher. Machiavelli wrote books that were like handbooks for rulers. His most famous book was Il Principe (The Prince), which was concerned with one ruler who governs a mass of subjects. In this book his philosophy was that a state should be unified, orderly, and in balance; that people should be happy, honorable, secure, and strong; that rulers should do whatever they needed to enforce order. He wrote methods of how a ruler could gain power.

Machiavelli was also a political and military theorist, a playwright, a diplomat, a military planner, and wrote many books and poems. Among his writings are Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, The Art of War, Mandragola, History of Florence, and, of course, Il Principe.  Back to Top

Michelangelo

Michelangelo

Michelangelo (1475-1564), arguably one of the most inspired creators in the history of art and, with Leonardo da Vinci, the most potent force in the Italian High Renaissance. As a sculptor, architect, painter, and poet, he exerted a tremendous influence on his contemporaries and on subsequent Western art in general.

A Florentine- although born March 6, 1475, in the small village of Caprese near Arezzo- Michelangelo continued to have a deep attachment to his city, its art, and its culture throughout his long life. He spent the greater part of his adulthood in Rome, employed by the popes; characteristically, however, he left instructions that he be buried in Florence, and his body was placed there in a fine monument in the church of Santa Croce.  Back to Top

Lorenzo de’Medici (known as Lorenzo the Magnificent)(1449-1492)

Florentine ruler, born in Florence, Italy, the son of Pietro I Medici and grandson of Cosimo de' Medici. He succeeded as head of the family upon the death of his father in 1469, and was an able if autocratic ruler, who made Florence the leading state in Italy. In 1478 he thwarted an attempt by malcontents, with the encouragement of Pope Sixtus IV, to overthrow the Medici, although the rising led to the assassination of his brother, Giuliano (1453--78). A distinguished lyric poet, he was, in the words of Machiavelli, "the greatest patron of literature and art that any prince has ever been".  Back to Top

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was a Florentine artist, one of the great masters of the High Renaissance, who was also celebrated as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. His profound love of knowledge and research was the keynote of both his artistic and scientific endeavors. His innovations in the field of painting influenced the course of Italian art for more than a century after his death, and his scientific studies, particularly in the fields of anatomy, optics, and hydraulics- anticipated many of the developments of modern science.

Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in the small Tuscan town of Vinci, near Florence. He was the son of a wealthy Florentine notary and a peasant woman. In the mid-1460s the family settled in Florence, where Leonardo was given the best education that Florence, the intellectual and artistic center of Italy, could offer. He rapidly advanced socially and intellectually. He was handsome, persuasive in conversation, and a fine musician and improviser. About 1466 he was apprenticed as a garzone (studio boy) to Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his day. In Verrocchio's workshop Leonardo was introduced to many activities, from the painting of altarpieces and panel pictures to the creation of large sculptural projects in marble and bronze. In 1472 he was entered in the painter's guild of Florence, and in 1476 he is still mentioned as Verrocchio's assistant. In Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ (circa 1470, Uffizi, Florence), the kneeling angel at the left of the painting is by Leonardo.

In 1478 Leonardo became an independent master. His first commission, to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Florentine town hall, was never executed. His first large painting, The Adoration of the Magi (begun 1481, Uffizi), left unfinished, was ordered in 1481 for the Monastery of San Donato a Scopeto, Florence. Other works ascribed to his youth are the so-called Benois Madonna (c. 1478, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg), the portrait Ginerva de' Benci (c. 1474, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), and the unfinished Saint Jerome (c. 1481, Pinacoteca, Vatican).  Back to Top

Enrico Fermi

Fermi
While studying the creation of artificially radioactive isotopes in the 1930s, Enrico Fermi became the first physicist to split the atom. His later research pioneered nuclear power generation. Born in Rome, Italy, Fermi graduated from the University of Pisa in 1922, became a lecturer at the University of Florence for two years and then a professor of theoretical physics at Rome. In 1934 he perfected his theory of beta ray emission in radioactivity, and went on to study the creation of artificially radioactive isotopes through neutron bombardment. His bombardment of uranium with slow neutrons caused reactions, which were found later to be atomic fission. With Researcher Leo Szilard, he began work, first at Columbia then at the University of Chicago, on construction of an atomic pile, which would make possible the controlled release of nuclear energy. This was accomplished in 1942. Transferred for a time to the Los Alamos, New Mexico atomic bomb laboratory, Fermi returned to Chicago in 1945 as a professor at the Institute for Nuclear Studies and in the same year became a United States citizen. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1938 for his developments in harnessing nuclear power. Fermi is considered one of the most important architects of the nuclear age.  Back to Top

Galileo

Galileo

Galileo was born February 15, 1564, in Pisa. He started school in the 1570's. Then after, he attended the University of Pisa. He asked his father if he could leave the university. He took courses in astronomy on the basis of the Greek astronomer Ptolmey's theory. In 1610 he went to Florence to continue his studies of the heavens where he found the truth of Copernicus's theory.

In 1632 he published an important book of the dialogues concerning the two chief world systems of Ptolemy and Copernicus. In 1633 the church told him that he was wrong. He refused to say he was wrong and was sentenced to be imprisoned but the sentence changed to house arrest. He spent the remaining years in a country house under arrest where he was watched closely but was allowed to continue his scientific work. In 1630 he went blind after completing his second major book of dialogues concerning the two new sciences. The book was smuggled to Holland where it was published in 1639.

Galileo was 78 years old when he died in 1642. He was one of the chief founders of modern science with his greatest impact the telescope and the laws of motion. They changed the way people viewed the universe.  Back to Top

Christopher Columbus

Cristoforo Colombo

The Genovese mariner and navigator; widely believed to be the first European to sail across the Atlantic Ocean and successfully land on the American continent. Born Cristoforo Colombo, between August and October 1451, in Genoa, Italy. Columbus was the eldest son of Domenico Colombo, a wool-worker and small-scale merchant, and his wife, Susanna Fontanarossa; he had two younger brothers, Bartholomew and Diego. He received little formal education and was a largely self-taught man, later learning to read Latin and write Castilian.

Columbus began working at sea early on, and made his first considerable voyage, to the Aegean island of Chios, in 1475. A year later, he survived a shipwreck off Cape St. Vincent and swam ashore, after which he moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where his brother Bartholomew was living. Both brothers worked as chart makers, but Columbus already nurtured dreams of making his fortune at sea. In 1477, he sailed to England and Ireland, and possibly Iceland, with the Portuguese marine, and he also bought sugar in Madeira for a Genoese firm.

On August 3, 1492, the fleet of three ships- the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María- set forth from Palos, on the Tinto River in southern Spain. After spending nearly a month in the Canary Islands, off the mainland of northwest Africa, the ships continued west, following the parallel of Gomera. According to records of the voyage, weather remained fair throughout. The first sighting of land came at dawn on October 12. (Though Columbus claimed that he himself, on the Niña, was the first to see land, later evidence showed that the sighting was made from the Pinta.) The place of the first Caribbean landfall was most likely modern San Salvador, or Watling Island, in the Bahamas.  Back to Top

Marco Polo

Marco Polo

Merchant and traveler, born in Venice, Italy. After a previous visit to Kublai Khan in China (1260--9), his father and uncle made a second journey (1271--5), taking Marco with them. He became an envoy in Kublai Khan's service, and served as Governor of Yangzhou. He left China in 1292, returned to Venice (1295), and fought against the Genoese, but was captured. During his imprisonment, he compiled an account of his travels, Il milione (trans The Travels of Marco Polo), which became widely read.  Back to Top

Renaissance Women

In Renaissance times Renaissance Woman were supposed to marry well, be loyal to their husbands and give birth to boys. A Renaissance man, on the other hand, had to be well educated, have cultural grace, be a gentleman and understand the arts and sciences. He also had to have refinement, be of noble birth and have courage. Many women did not fit the mold of what they called a "Renaissance Woman." Many of them would fit in as more of a "Renaissance Man" or what we would call a "Renaissance Woman" in our day and age.

Isabella D'Este

Isabella D’Este

Isabella d'Este was born in 1474 into the ruling family of Ferrara. At the age of sixteen Isabella married the wealthy Francesco Gonzaga, duke of Mantova. After the death of her husband, Isabella retained rule over Mantova alone. During her youth, Isabella's father believed in the equality of men and women. Isabella and her siblings were very well-educated and knowledgeable in many areas. By the age of sixteen, Isabella was fluent in Greek and Latin as well as able to read and write music. All of these skills made her very capable of ruling the city of Mantova.

During her rule, she became a major patroness of the arts, commissioning writers, painters, sculptors and musicians. She also wrote over two thousand letters and in these she commented on everything from politics to war.  Back to Top

Catherine de Medici

Catherine de Medici

Catherine de Medici was born in Florence, Italy, 1519. At the age of one, both of Catherine's parents died forcing her to grow up in an orphanage. The nuns trained and disciplined her and as she grew older she became very well-educated. She became a major force in French politics after her son married into the French Royal Family, especially during the thirty years of the Roman Catholic-Huguenot wars. She ruled as a regent to her son and when he reached the Legal age in 1563, Catherine still dominated him. Using this influence, three of Catherine's sons became kings and she also arranged for her daughter to be married to the King of Spain in 1560.

Catherine had a great interest in architecture and personally supervised the building of the new wing of the Louvre Museum, the construction of the Tuilleries Gardens, and the building of the Chateau Monceau.  Back to Top

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