Leopoldo Franchetti (Livorno, May 31, 1847 – Rome, November 4, 1917), was an Italian publicist and politician. He was a deputy in the Italian Chamber of Deputies and later became a Senator. He was very active in promoting education and concrete solutions for economic, social and political problems in Italy.

Baron Franchetti was born in Livorno into a family in good standing. The Franchetti family came to Livorno from Tunisia in the last decades of the eighteenth century. From the Napoleonic era to the second half of the 1830s they were one of the most important families in the local Jewish community.

Leopoldo Franchetti was influenced by the ideas of John Stuart Mill and became a liberal. His relation with his Jewishness was so conflictual that no trace of it can be found in his public activity. In 1873 he took a sabbatical in southern Italy and became one of the foremost authorities regarding the "problems of southern Italy," and pioneer of meridionalism.

In 1876, Franchetti travelled to Sicily with Sidney Sonnino to conduct an unofficial inquiry into the state of Sicilian society. In 1877, the two men published their research on Sicily in a substantial two-part report. In the first part Sonnino analysed the lives of the island's landless peasants. Franchetti's half of the report, Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily, was an analysis of the Mafia in the nineteenth century that is still considered authoritative today. Franchetti would ultimately influence thinking about the Mafia more than anyone else until Giovanni Falcone over a hundred years later. Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily is the first convincing explanation of how the Mafia came to be.

Maria Rita Camargo Mariano (Portuguese pronunciation: [maˈɾiɐ ˈʁitɐ]; born September 19, 1977, in São Paulo, Brazil) is the performance name of Maria Rita Mariano, a Brazilian singer. She is the daughter of famed pianist/arranger César Camargo Mariano and the late Brazilian singing legend Elis Regina and sister to Pedro Mariano and music producer João Marcelo Bôscoli. Her namesake is family friend and famed Brazilian rock legend Rita Lee. Maria Rita majored in Latin American studies and communications at New York University, and worked as a journalist at a magazine for adolescents.

Maria Rita began singing professionally at the age of 24, although she had wanted to sing since she was 14. Her first CD, Maria Rita, launched her career symbolically, with the first cut on her first album, A Festa (The Party), being written by Milton Nascimento, a Brazilian singer-songwriter whose career was launched by Maria Rita's mother, Elis Regina. The CD went platinum and was a hit worldwide, making her an international star. Her mother's reputation as one of Brazil's greatest female singers has been a major influence in Maria Rita's life although she respectfully avoids the songs identified with her mother; she has said that she was always conscious of being the only daughter of a great singer. Despite having her mother's vocal DNA, she has developed her own jazzy vocal style, with singers like Ella Fitzgerald as her model.

Alberto Sordi, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (June 15, 1920 – February 25, 2003) was an Italian actor. He was also a film director and the dubbing voice of Oliver Hardy in the Italian version of the Laurel & Hardy films.

Born in Rome to a schoolteacher and a musician, Sordi enrolled in Milan's dramatic arts academy but was kicked out because of his thick Roman accent. In the meantime he studied to be an opera singer, a bass. It was his accent and voice that would later prove to be his trademark.

In a career that spanned seven decades, Sordi established himself as an icon of Italian cinema with his representative skills at both comedy and light drama. His movie career began in the late 1930s with bit parts and secondary characters in wartime movies. After the war he began working as a dubber for the Italian versions of Laurel and Hardy shorts, voicing Oliver Hardy. Early roles included Fellini's The White Sheik in 1952, Fellini's I vitelloni (1953), a movie about young slackers, in which he plays a weak, effeminate immature loafer and a starring role in Lo scapolo (The Bachelor) playing a single man trying to find love. In 1959 he appeared in Monicelli's The Great War, considered by many critics and film historians to be one of the best Italian comedies. The Hollywood Foreign Press recognized his abilities when he was awarded a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Actor in a Musical or Comedy for Il diavolo (1963). Sordi acted alongside Britain’s David Niven in the World War II comedy The Best of Enemies and in 1965 he was in another highly regarded comedy, I complessi (Complexes).

Umberto Zanotti Bianco (22 January 1889 – 28 August 1963) was an Italian archaeologist, environmentalist and lifetime senator (1952-1963).