How to plan a week end in a foreign Country?
You have to choose the destination, plan the activities and itineraries and, above all, come to an agreement with all of your friends and their preferences…

If you like nature you should try out this bed and breakfast in Emilia Romagna, that is part of an organically-operated farm complex.
The B&B Dei Paduli is situated in a 19th-century farm house that was recently remodeled in compliance with innovative ecological construction principles.

If you like art and culture, from there you would visit the many cultural points of interest on the Po Plain, and in the stretch of Apennines running between Reggio and Modena, including the residences of the region’s ruling noble families.

Moreover, if you like cars, you could have a tour of the Ferrari Gallery in nearby Maranello.

Your week end is planned in less than no time!

Italian version.

Without music, life would be a mistake.
Friedrich W. Nietszche

Let’s talk about an undervalued composer…
Not “undervalued” in the true sense of the word, but in the collective imagination he’s not the first name that comes to mind.

Gioacchino Antonio Rossini had been the most popular opera composer in history, at least until his retirement in 1829.
Between 1815 and 1823 he produced 20 operas, but the most famous one has been the Barber of Seville. This opera has been the first Italian opera introduced in the USA.

Rossini lived in many cities, he was born in Pesaro, into a family of musicians, than his mother took him to Bologna. In adult age, after living in Florence, he settled in Paris.

If you want to visit his tomb you have to come in Florence, to the Basilica di Santa Croce,  were his remains were moved after his death.
To keep the point, you can accommodate at Rossini Harmony Bed and Breakfast, in the centre of Florence.

Italian version.

The Florence Baptistry or Battistero di San Giovanni (Baptistery of St. John) is a religious building in Florence (Tuscany), Italy, which has the status of a minor basilica.

This is a description taken by wikipedia.

It is one of the oldest buildings in the city, built between 1059 and 1128. The architecture is in Florentine Romanesque style. The Baptistry is renowned for its three sets of artistically important bronze doors with relief sculptures by Lorenzo Ghiberti. These doors were dubbed by Michelangelo “the Gates of Paradise” because of their beauty, and they were said to have begun the Renaissance.

The octagonal Baptistry stands in the Piazza del Duomo, across from the Duomo cathedral and the Giotto bell tower (Campanile di Giotto).

The Italian poet, Dante Alighieri and many famed artists and leaders of the Renaissance, including members of the Medici family, were baptized here.

Until the end of the 19th century, all Catholic Florentines were baptized in this Baptistry.

It is a place beloved and revered by Florentines for centuries.
For a long time, it was believed that the Baptistry was originally a Roman temple dedicated to Mars, the tutelary god of the old Florence.

The baptistry has eight equal sides with a rectangular addition on the west side.

The sides, originally in sandstone, are clad in geometrically patterned coloured marble, white Carrara marble with green Prato marble inlay, reworked in Romanesque style between 1059 and 1128. The pilasters on each corner, originally in grey stone, were decorated with white and dark green marble in a zebra-like pattern by Arnolfo di Cambio in 1293.

The style of this church would serve as prototype, influencing many architects, such as Leone Battista Alberti, in their design of Romanesque churches in Tuscany.

The exterior is also ornamented with a number of artistically significant statues by Andrea Sansovino (above the Gates of Paradise), Giovan Francesco Rustici, Vincenzo Danti (above the south doors) and others.

The design work on the sides is arranged in groupings of three, starting with three distinct horizontal sections. The middle section features three blind arches on each side, each arch containing a window. These have alternate pointed and semicircular tympani. Below each window is a stylized arch design. In the upper fascia, there are also three small windows, each one in the center block of a three-panel design.

The apse was originally semicircular, but was it was made rectangular in 1202.

There are a lot of Italian genius known all around the world, but maybe you don’t know about Francesco Datini. That’s what I found on wikipedia.

Francesco di Marco Datini (c. 1335 - 1410) was an Italian merchant born in Prato.

He was the only child of Marco Di Datino and Monna Vermigilia, who both died as a result of the Black Death in 1348.
After his parents death, he was raised by a woman whom he called his “substitute mother.” Their relationship seems to have been a positive one. We see a letter from her signed “your mother in love”.

He became an apprentice of a merchant in Florence and when he was fifteen, he joined a group of merchants who were going to Avignon, the city where the Popes had moved at the time. His first business was the arms trade, which was quite profitable in Avignon during the Hundred Years’ War. He eventually became a supplier of luxury goods and art for the wealthy cardinals residing there.

The works of art these figures bought were some of the first consumed for private, non religious use. Before this time, the church had been the primary patron of the arts. Later on, the papacy and other pious individuals commissioned religious artwork, creating a use for Francesco’s merchant skills. He was not interested in the product itself, but whether it was good quality or not, so that it might please his buyers.
This individual buying of artwork is a trend that we see going into the renaissance.

When Datini was more than forty years old he returned to Prato briefly and married Marghareta, who was 25 years his junior. The correspondence through letter provides us with exchanged letters weekly while Datini was away on business, which provides most of the information available today on his life. In the year 1400 (around the time of 17 June), the two fled from Prato to Bologna in fear of the Black Death, along with Datini’s illegitimate daughter. He returned to die a natural death in 1410.

Datini is representative of the classic middle class man of the Middle Ages who lived through the Black Death and shared common anxieties surrounding it. His belief, that the plague was caused by contagion, represents one of the characteristic theories behind the dispersion of the plague. For this reason he and others fled the areas of disease or retreated in castles in an attempt to avoid infection. He shows the fears of the Middle Ages, having been living away from his family, he was extremely anxious and worried about his family’s fate.

Niccolò Machiavelli is an interesting Italian personage, thta’s why I took a short biography on wikipedia.

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) was an Italian diplomat, political philosopher, musician, poet and playwright. Machiavelli was a figure of the Italian Renaissance, and a servant of the Florentine republic.

In June of 1498, following the ouster and execution of Savonarola, the Great Council elected Machiavelli as the Secretary to the second Chancery of the Republic of Florence.

He is most famous — or notorious — for one of his shorter works, The Prince, sometimes described as a work of realist political theory.

However, both that text and the more substantial republican Discourses on Livy — as well as History of Florence (commissioned by the Medici family) — were printed only after his death, all appearing in the early 1530s.

In his own lifetime, while he circulated The Prince among friends, the only work Machiavelli promoted through printing was his dialogue on The Art of War.

But generations from the sixteenth century onwards were most attracted and repelled by the cynical approach to power on display in The Prince, Discourses and History. Whatever Machiavelli’s own intentions (and they remain a matter of heated debate), his name became synonymous with ruthless politics, deceit and the pursuit of power by any means.

What do you know about Roberto Cavalli? This is a summary of his wikipedia’s biography.

Roberto Cavalli was born in Florence, Italy on November 15, 1940. At the beginning of the 1970s, he invented and patented a revolutionary printing procedure on leather, and started creating his now-famous patchworks of different materials.

Roberto Cavalli creates his vibrant patterns by using the most advanced technologies, but he gets his inspiration from nature. He travels the world with a digital camera in hand, ready to capture whatever catches his attention and transform it into a new motif, a glowing print or a sparkling embroidery.

In 2002 Roberto Cavalli opened the first cafè-store in Florence, revamping with his signature animal prints, while still keeping faith to the original space, what was once the city’s most elegant tea-house.
In his private life, Roberto Cavalli loves nature, as his predilection for animal prints and jungle and flower motifs testifies. He lives with his wife Eva and their children in a villa on the hills surrounding Florence that is full of exotic animals and birds.

I’m really curious about the life of the famous Italian trader and explorer Marco Polo, that’s why I checked on Wikipedia…

Marco Polo (September 15, 1254 – January 9, 1324 at earliest, but no later than June 1325) was a trader and explorer from the Venetian Republic who gained fame for his worldwide travels, recorded in the book Il Milione (”The Million” or The Travels of Marco Polo) also known as Oriente Poliano (the Orient of the Polos) and the Description of the World.

Polo, together with his father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo, was one of the first Westerners to travel the Silk Road to China (which he called Cathay, after the Khitan) and visit Kublai Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan and the founder of the Yuan Dynasty.

I found a lot of info about him, so read the entire article if you’re interested…

Francis of Assisi (Giovanni Francesco Bernardone; born 1181/1182 – October 3, 1226) was a friar and the founder of the Order of Friars Minor, more commonly known as the Franciscans.

He is known as the patron saint of animals, the environment and Italy, and it is customary for Catholic churches to hold ceremonies honouring animals around his feast day of 4 October.

Francis was one of seven children born to Pietro di Bernardone, a rich cloth merchant. [...]
In 1201, he joined a military expedition against Perugia, he was taken as a prisoner at Collestrada, and spent a year as a captive. It is probable that his conversion to more serious thoughts was a gradual process relating to this experience.

Upon his return to Assisi in 1203, Francis returned to his carefree life and in 1204, a serious illness led to a spiritual crisis. In 1205 Francis left for Puglia to enlist in the army of the Count of Brienne. In Spoleto, a strange vision made him return to Assisi, deepening his ecclesiastical awakening.

It is said that thereafter he began to avoid the sports and the feasts of his former companions; in response, they asked him laughingly whether he was thinking of marrying, to which he answered “yes, a fairer bride than any of you have ever seen”, meaning his “lady poverty”.

He spent much time in lonely places, asking God for enlightenment. By degrees he took to nursing lepers, the most repulsive victims in the lazar houses near Assisi. After a pilgrimage to Rome, where he begged at the church doors for the poor, he said he had had a mystical vision of Jesus Christ in the Church of San Damiano just outside of Assisi, in which the Icon of Christ Crucified came alive and said to him three times, “Francis, Francis, go and repair My house which, as you can see, is falling into ruins”. He thought this to mean the ruined church in which he was presently praying, and so sold his horse and some cloth from his father’s store, to assist the priest there for this purpose.

His father Pietro, highly indignant, attempted to change his mind, first with threats and then with corporal chastisement. After a final interview in the presence of the bishop, Francis renounced his father and his patrimony, laying aside even the garments he had received from him. [...]

In 1209 Francis led his first eleven followers to Rome to seek permission from Pope Innocent III to found a new religious order. [...]
On 8 May 1213 he received the mountain of La Verna (Alverna) as a gift from the count Orlando di Chiusi who described it as “eminently suitable for whoever wishes to do penance in a place remote from mankind.” The mountain would become one of his favorite retreats for prayer. [...]

Many of the stories that surround the life of St Francis deal with his love for animals.

Perhaps the most famous incident that illustrates the Saint’s humility towards nature is recounted in the ‘Fioretti’ (The “Little Flowers”), a collection of legends and folk-lore that sprang up after the Saint’s death. [...]
Legend has it that St. Francis on his deathbed thanked his donkey for carrying and helping him throughout his life, and his donkey wept.

That’s what I chose for you about St. Francis on Wikipedia.

What do you know about Galileo?

“Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was a Tuscan physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism.

Galileo has been called the “father of modern observational astronomy”, the “father of modern physics”, the “father of science”, and “the Father of Modern Science”.

The motion of uniformly accelerated objects, taught in nearly all high school and introductory college physics courses, was studied by Galileo as the subject of kinematics. His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, named the Galilean moons in his honour, and the observation and analysis of sunspots.
Galileo also worked in applied science and technology, improving compass design.

Galileo’s championing of Copernicanism was controversial within his lifetime. The geocentric view had been dominant since the time of Aristotle, and the controversy engendered by Galileo’s presentation of heliocentrism as proven fact resulted in the Catholic Church’s prohibiting its advocacy as empirically proven fact, because it was not empirically proven at the time and was contrary to the literal meaning of Scripture. Galileo was eventually forced to recant his heliocentrism and spent the last years of his life under house arrest on orders of the Roman Inquisition.”

That’s what I found about him on Wikipedia… astonishing!

Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, but he also was a scientist, inventor, mathematician, engineer, anatomist, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer.

He was born in Vinci (near Florence) in 1452, and died in France when he was 67 years old. He was buried in the castle of Amboise, but his mortal remains got lost during the struggle between Catholics and Huguenots.

He surely is the archetype of the Renaissance man, and has always been considered a real genius, even when he was alive.

His most famous paintings are the Mona Lisa, the Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper. He designed and started to realize an innovative and amazing mural in Palazzo della Signoria in Florence: The Battle of Anghiari. It has never been completed, as well as its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina by Michelangelo.

Their frescoes should have been realized the one in front of the other in the Salone dei Cinquecento (the main room of the palace), filling up two long walls with battle scenes celebrating Florentine victories.

Moreover, he created all sorts of objects and machines and deeply studied the phenomenon of human flidht.
A real genius .