Giacomo Lauri-Volpi (11 December 1892 – 17 March 1979) was an Italian tenor with a lyric voice of exceptional range and technical facility. He performed throughout Europe and the Americas in a top-class career that spanned 40 years.
Silvio Muccino (born 14 April 1982) is an Italian actor, film director and screenwriter.
Mimmo Locasciulli (born 7 July 1949) is an Italian singer-songwriter, composer, producer and musician.
Cristiana Capotondi (born 13 September 1980) is an Italian actress.
Agostino Cacciavillan (14 August 1926 – 5 March 2022) was an Italian prelate of the Catholic Church, and a cardinal since 2001. He worked in the diplomatic service of the Holy See from 1959 to 1998; he was given the titles of archbishop and nuncio in 1998 and served as Pro-Nuncio to Kenya, India, Nepal, and the United States between 1976 and 1998. He then worked in the Roman Curia from 1998 to 2002 as President of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See.
Giacomo Lauri-Volpi (11 December 1892 – 17 March 1979) was an Italian tenor with a lyric voice of exceptional range and technical facility. He performed throughout Europe and the Americas in a top-class career that spanned 40 years.
Federico Zeri (12 August 1921 – 5 October 1998) was an Italian art historian specialised in Italian Renaissance painting. He wrote for the Italian newspaper La Stampa, and was a well known television-personality in Italy.Zeri was born in central Rome, and graduated from Sapienza University of Rome in 1945. Not wishing to enter the academic world, he worked in the Ministry of Public Education until 1952. In 1948 he was nominated director of Galleria Spada in Rome.In 1963 Zeri was among the founding members of the Getty Villa's board of trustees. He left in 1984, after his argument that the Getty kouros was a forgery and should not be bought, was rejected.Following this episode, Zeri became notorious for denouncing forgeries and misattributions. In 1984, when four students in Livorno hoaxed both the city and Modigliani experts into believing that a group of sculptures they have made were authentic, he was one of the few who called on their amateurish style. Zeri also argued that some of the frescoes in the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi, were made by Pietro Cavallini and not Giotto. Zeri's insistence that a painting can be attributed to an artist, by means of a careful examination or connoisseurship, without resort to external evidence such as documents or dates, met controversial responses.Zeri edited and researched catalogues of the collections of many institutions, including the Frederick Mason Perkins collection in the Sacro Convento in Assisi; Accademia Carrara; Museo Civico Amedeo Lia, La Spezia; Galleria Spada, Rome; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. and Narodna Galerija in Ljubljana (with Ksenija Rozman).
Zeri died at the age of 77, in his villa in Mentana on 5 October 1998. He bequeathed his estate to the University of Bologna, complete with his library and papers, a collection of about 400 ancient inscriptions and a grand collection of photographs. Most photographs documented artworks from Italy and elsewhere, some done by himself and some acquired from other collections, including part of the collection of Evelyn Sandberg-Vavalà. The collections and accompanying database are managed, partly digitized, by the Federico Zeri Foundation.All through his life, Zeri maintained close connections with Bernard Berenson, Roberto Longhi, and his teacher Pietro Toesca. He taught art history at the University of Rome, and had visiting positions at Harvard, where he delivered a series of lectures on Lauro De Bosis in 1962, and at the Columbia University in New York.
Severino Antinori (born 6 September 1945 in Civitella del Tronto) is an Italian gynecologist and embryologist. He has publicly taken controversial positions over in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and human cloning. On 13 May 2016 Antinori was arrested and accused of kidnapping a woman, and stealing her ovules.He began his career interested in veterinary biology. He studied at the University of Rome La Sapienza, graduating in 1972 with a degree in medicine. Initially he worked in gastroenterology, but following a lecture by Patrick Steptoe he re-trained in obstetrics and gynecology, moving into reproductive and infertility work from 1978. He set up his own clinic in Rome in 1982. In 1986, he pioneered the use of the ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection) process in Italy. From 1989 he extended IVF to women who had passed the menopause.
In 1994 he assisted Rossana Della Corte, aged 63, in becoming pregnant. She became one of the oldest women in history to give birth.
In May 2006 it was announced that 62-year-old East Sussex child psychiatrist, Patricia Rashbrook, was seven months pregnant after being treated by Antinori, who said that 62 or 63 was the upper limit for IVF in healthy women. He commented that he would only consider couples with at least 20 years' life expectancy left for fertility treatment. Josephine Quintavalle, from Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE), accused Rashbrook of selfishness and said it would be extremely difficult for a child to have a mother who is as old as a grandmother.
In May 2009, after it was announced a 66-year-old woman was pregnant he criticised her decision saying that he felt she was too old and may not live long enough to raise her child.