FAMOUS PERSONALITIES OF ITALY
The list of famous personalities from Italy is almost endless! Due to its long history, Italy has always had influential artists and personalities to offer in many fields, such as painting, music, science or fashion.
Italy's famous discoverer and scientists
The most famous Italian is the discoverer Christopher Columbus (Italian Cristoforo Colombo), who was born in Genoa in 1451 and became famous as the discoverer of America in 1492. Marco Polo (born 1254 in Venice) became known as a world traveller and through the reports of his travels to China.
Galileo Galilei became famous as an Italian universal scholar. He was a philosopher, mathematician, engineer, physicist, astronomer and cosmologist and many of his discoveries – especially in mechanics and astronomy – are still considered groundbreaking today. Leonardo Da Vinci is also considered one of the most famous universal scholars of all time. He was a painter, sculptor, architect, anatomist, mechanic, engineer and natural philosopher. His suffix da Vinci is translated “from Vinci”. He was born in 1452 in the small town west of Florence.
Important composers and musicians
Italian music has played an important role in European cultural history for centuries. Famous composers such as Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini and Antonio Vivaldi and many more have shaped the music history of Italy.
Verdi was born in 1813 in Le Roncole near Busseto in Italy and was a great Italian romantic composer. He composed numerous masterpieces of Italian opera literature such as “Nabucco” (1842), “Rigoletto” (1851) and “La Traviata” (1853).
Puccini’s home is the city of Lucca in Tuscany, where he was born in 1858. With the successful compositions “Manon Lescaut” (1893) and “La Bohème” (1896) he achieved world fame and his works “Tosca” and “Madame Butterfly” and some more are still among the standard works of opera literature today.
Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice in 1678 and was a Baroque composer and violinist. He has written over 300 instrumental concertos for almost all instruments used in the Baroque period. His four violin concertos “Die vier Jahreszeiten” are probably his most famous work. Vivaldi is still one of the most frequently played baroque composers of our time.
Famous painters and sculptors
One of Italy’s most famous sculptors and painters is undoubtedly Michelangelo Buonarroti, born in 1475 in Caprese, Tuscany.
He is considered one of the most important artists of the Italian High Renaissance. With his works such as the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel (1512) or the “David” of Florence (1504), he is still one of Italy’s most famous artists.
The universal genius Leonardo da Vinci impressed not only as a scientist and philosopher, but also with his famous paintings “The Last Supper” (1494-1498) and the “Mona Lisa” (1503-1506).
Raphael da Urbino, or Raphael for short, was born in March 1483 in Urbino in the Marche. He is considered one of the most famous painters and architects of Italian art of the 15th century and was particularly impressive with his portraits of the Madonna del Granducca and the Madonna with the Stieglitz, which are now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. He also made numerous wall and ceiling paintings, such as the frescoes in the Vatican Palace.
Contemporary actors, musicians and fashion icons of Italy
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