On This Day (April 8)

[MSFixR]

• 217 – Roman Emperor Caracalla was assassinated at a roadside near Harran.
• 1341 – Italian scholar and poet Petrarch took the title poet laureate at a ceremony in Rome.
• 1820 - The Venus de Milo is discovered on the Aegean island of Melos.
  
  
  Aphrodite of Milos (Venus de Milo)
  
  
• 1848 - Gaetano Donizetti, Italian composer died. (b. 1797) (Donizetti was an Italian opera composer from Bergamo, Lombardy. Donizetti's most famous work is Lucia di Lammermoor (1835). Along with Vincenzo Bellini and Gioacchino Rossini, he was a leading composer of bel canto (beautiful singing) opera.)
  
  
  Lucia de Lammermoor “Mad Scene” Katia Ricciarelli, Bregenz, 1982, Lamberto Gardelli, conducting
  
  
• 1867 - The first World's Fair is inaugurated in Paris.
• 1886 – British Prime Minister William Gladstone introduced the first Irish Home Rule Bill into the British House of Commons.
• 1904 – France and the United Kingdom signed the entente cordiale, agreeing to a peaceful coexistence after centuries of intermittent conflict.
• 1904 – British occultist, writer Aleister Crowley began transcribing The Book of the Law, a Holy Book in Thelema.
• 1929 – Indian independence movement: Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh with the help of Batukeshwar Dutt bombed the Central Assembly in Delhi.
• 1973 - Pablo Picasso, Spanish artist and sculptor died (b. 1881) (Picasso was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. As one of the most recognized figures in twentieth-century art, he is best known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work.)
  
  
  Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Oil on Canvas