Menotti wrote Amahl and the Night Visitors

It is the birthday of Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti (1911), who is best remembered for his popular Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951) and for founding the Festival of the Two Worlds (1958) in Spoleto, Italy, and Spoleto Festival USA (1977) in Charleston, South Carolina. He also won Pulitzer Prizes for the operas The Consul (1950) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1958). In this video, Menotti tells about establishing the Italian festival and celebrates his birthday.

Happy birthday, Michael Ondaatje

It is the birthday of Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje (1943), who is best known for his novel The English Patient (1992), a remarkable character study of a severely burned English-accented Hungarian man, his Canadian nurse, and an Indian engineer in the British Army. It is set at the end of World War II in an Italian villa. It won the British literary Man Booker Prize and was adapted for film in 1996, and won nine Academy Awards. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and educated in England. He became a Canadian citizen in 1962. Ondaatje also wrote The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Coming Through Slaughter (1976), In the Skin of a Lion (1987), and numerous poetry collections.