The Italian Almanac for September 28: stories and curiosities

It started here 📅 1913

Rudolph Valentino, from a Puglia ravine town to first screen idol

His name was Rodolfo Guglielmi, born in 1895 in Castellaneta, a town on the edge of the ravines near Taranto, in Puglia, southern Italy. In 1913, aged eighteen, he boarded the freighter Cleveland and landed in New York on 23 December. Eight years later, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik turned him into Rudolph Valentino: cinema's first male superstar, the Latin Lover America lost its head over. He died in 1926, at thirty-one, at the peak of his fame. The boy from Puglia had become the most desired face of the silent screen.

📍 Discover Castellaneta

Today's tidbits

Place names

Yes, there is a village in Italy called Polenta

In the hills of Bertinoro, in Romagna in northern Italy, one hamlet is called Polenta. The name suggests cornmeal, but its history is about castles and Dante: from the castle of Polenta the Da Polenta family took its name, ruling Ravenna from 1275 to 1441. Francesca da Rimini, whose tragic love Dante set in his poem, belonged to this house, and it was Guido Novello da Polenta who sheltered the exiled poet in his final years. The hamlet still keeps the parish church of San Donato, documented since 911, with a crypt from the late ninth century, to which the poet Carducci devoted an ode.

📍 Bertinoro →

Vanished Italy 1968

Poggioreale, the Sicilian town frozen in January 1968

On the night between 14 and 15 January 1968, the Belice earthquake razed four towns in western Sicily, and Poggioreale was one of them. Its people never moved back: a new town was rebuilt a few kilometres further down the valley, while the old one stayed up on its hill, empty, its ruins still showing the shape of life as it was before 1968. Locals call it the ghost town; curious visitors wander its streets, and so has the film industry, since Giuseppe Tornatore shot scenes of Cinema Paradiso and Malena among these stones.

📍 Poggioreale →

🎉 Celebrations today in… 1

1 towns with a guide celebrate their patron saint on September 28

Other saints of the day 1

Ortucchiosant'Orante · Abruzzo