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Horses that looked like flame!
CLICK TO READ MOREby Giovanni Battista Tomassini In 1565, a large equestrian feast was held in Lisbon to celebrate the marriage of Alessandro Farnese with Maria of Portugal. A chronicle of the period testifies of…
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Dom Duarte’s travel
CLICK TO READ MOREby Giovanni Battista Tomassini When in 1820, José Xavier Dias da Silva discovered that a large in folio volume kept in the Royal Library of Paris contained two manuscripts, hitherto unknown, of…
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Equestrian traditions of the Roman Carnival during the Renaissance
CLICK TO READ MOREdi Giovanni Battista Tomassini This is the text of the lecture I gave on Tuesday, February 28, 2017, during the final symposium of the 9th edition of the Roman Carnival. I am…
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A riding academy in Sicily during the Renaissance: the Congregazione dei Cavalieri d’Armi
CLICK TO READ MOREdi Giovanni Battista Tomassini At dawn on Friday, May 18, 1565, the sentinels of the Knights of Malta saw on the horizon, the sails of the Turkish fleet, commanded by Admiral Piyale…
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Anglomania (Part 2): Federico Mazzucchelli witness and critic of the “British Fashion”
CLICK TO READ MOREby Giovanni Battista Tomassini In the first part of this article we saw that, in the eighteenth century, a growing interest in the British institutions and culture spread throughout Europe. This trend also…
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Anglomania (Part 1): The spreading of English style equitation in the Eighteenth century
CLICK TO READ MOREby Giovanni Battista Tomassini It seems that James Seymour’s passion for horses and horse racing finally led him to ruin. Not much is known of his life, but a chronicler of the…
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Without horses I’m not even the half of myself. The equestrain passion of Vittorio Alfieri. Part 2
CLICK TO READ MOREby Giovanni Battista Tomassini In the first part of this article, we discovered the great passion for horses and horseback riding of Vittorio Alfieri, one of the greatest Italian poets of the eighteenth…
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Without horses I’m not even the half of myself. The equestrian passion of Vittorio Alfieri. Part 1
CLICK TO READ MOREby Giovanni Battista Tomassini Given the perverse imagination of those who draw up the syllabus, I do not know if today he is still studied at school. To be honest, when I was…
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The Saracen Joust in Piazza Navona (part 2)
CLICK TO READ MOREby Giovanni Battista Tomassini In the first part of this article we analyzed the rules of the Saracen Joust in the seventeenth century. In this second part, we discover the complex dramaturgy of…
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The Saracen Joust in Piazza Navona (part 1)
CLICK TO READ MOREby Giovanni Battista Tomassini With the typical unscrupulousness of the Popes of the time, in 1628, Urban VIII ordained his nephew as cardinal when he was just twenty. In a short time,…
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Snapshots of a medieval knight. Mastino II della Scala and the “a la brida” seat
CLICK TO READ MOREby Giovanni Battista Tomassini When, in 1329, Mastino II della Scala inherited, along with his brother Alberto, the lordship of Verona from his uncle Cangrande, the good fortune of the Della Scala…
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The Austrian Art of Riding
CLICK TO READ MOREby Giovanni Battista Tomassini Have you ever wondered how the riders of the Spanish Riding School of Vienna can have the perfect seat that made them so famous in the world? Obviously,…
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