Rigoletto is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. The Italian libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave based on the play Le roi s'amuse by Victor Hugo. Despite serious initial problems with the Austrian censors who had control over northern Italian theatres at the time, the opera had a triumphant premiere at La Fenice in Venice on 11 March 1851, it is considered to be the first of the operatic masterpieces of Verdi's middle-to-late career. Its tragic story revolves around the licentious Duke of Mantua, his hunch-backed court jester Rigoletto, Rigoletto's beautiful daughter Gilda; the opera's original title, La maledizione, refers to a curse placed on both the Duke and Rigoletto by a courtier whose daughter the Duke has seduced with Rigoletto's encouragement. The curse comes to fruition when Gilda falls in love with the Duke and sacrifices her life to save him from the assassin hired by her father. La Fenice of Venice commissioned Verdi in 1850 to compose a new opera, he was prominent enough by this time to enjoy some freedom in choosing texts to set to music.

He asked Francesco Maria Piave to examine the play Kean by Alexandre Dumas, père, but soon came to believe that they needed to find a more energetic subject. That came. Verdi explained that "The subject is grand and there is a character, one of the greatest creations that the theatre can boast of, in any country and in all history." However, Hugo's depiction of a venal, womanizing king was considered unacceptably scandalous. The play had been banned in France following its premiere nearly twenty years earlier; as Verdi wrote in a letter to Piave: "Use four legs, run through the town and find me an influential person who can obtain the permission for making Le Roi s'amuse." Guglielmo Brenna, secretary of La Fenice, promised the duo that they would not have problems with the censors. He was wrong, rumours began to spread in early summer that the production would be forbidden. In August and Piave retired to Busseto, Verdi's hometown, to prepare a defensive scheme as they continued work on the opera.

Despite their best efforts, including frantic correspondence with La Fenice, the Austrian censor De Gorzkowski emphatically denied consent to the production of "La Maledizione" in a December 1850 letter, calling the opera "a repugnant immorality and obscene triviality." Piave set to work revising the libretto pulling from it another opera, Il Duca di Vendome, in which the sovereign was a duke and both the hunchback and the curse disappeared. Verdi was against this proposed solution, preferring to negotiate directly with the censors over each and every point of the work. Brenna, La Fenice's sympathetic secretary, mediated the dispute by showing the Austrians some letters and articles depicting the bad character, but great value, of the artist. By January 1851 the parties had settled on a compromise: the action of the opera would be moved, some of the characters would be renamed. In the new version, the Duke would belong to the Gonzaga family; the scene in which he retired to Gilda's bedroom would be deleted, his visit to the Taverna would no longer be intentional, but the result of a trick.

The hunchbacked jester was renamed Rigoletto from a parody of a comedy by Jules-Édouard Alboize de Pujol: Rigoletti, ou Le dernier des fous of 1835. By 14 January, the opera's definitive title had become Rigoletto. Verdi completed the composition on 5 February 1851, a little more than a month before the premiere. Piave had arranged for the sets to be designed while Verdi was still working on the final stages of Act 3; the singers were given some of their music to learn on 7 February. However, Verdi kept at least a third of the score at Busseto, he brought it with him when he arrived in Venice for the rehearsals on 19 February, would continue refining the orchestration throughout the rehearsal period. For the première, La Fenice had cast Felice Varesi as Rigoletto, the young tenor Raffaele Mirate as the Duke, Teresa Brambilla as Gilda. Due to a high risk of unauthorised copying, Verdi demanded extreme secrecy from all his singers and musicians Mirate: the "Duke" had the use of his score for only a few evenings before the première, was made to swear that he would not sing or whistle the tune of "La donna è mobile" except during rehearsal.

Rigoletto premiered on 11 March 1851 in a sold-out La Fenice as the first part of a double bill with Giacomo Panizza's ballet Faust. Gaetano Mares conducted, the sets were designed and executed by Giuseppe Bertoja and Francesco Bagnara; the opening night was a complete triumph the scena drammatica and the Duke's cynical aria, "La donna è mobile", sung in the streets the next morning. Many years Giulia Cora Varesi, the da

The Mill Street–South Branch Raisin River Bridge is a bridge carrying Mill Street over the South Branch of the River Raisin in Brooklyn, Michigan. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000. In the early 1900s, the bridge at this location was a three-span stone arch structure. In 1921, Henry Ford purchased the nearby Brooklyn water-powered mill as part of his village industries program; this bridge, constructed in 1925, was built to accommodate anticipated traffic increases associated with Ford's mill. The stone facing on the bridge came from the earlier bridge; the mill site, remained vacant for several years until 1937, when it began producing automobile horns and starter switches. The Mill Street bridge is a 35-foot-long, three-span concrete arch bridge with a 22.4-foot-wide deck. The maximum span of the arches measures eight feet; the bridge has flared concrete wingwalls covered with a stone veneer. On the upstream side are cutwaters on both piers and at both abutment–wingwall junctions.

On the downstream side, a concrete apron slopes down to the riverbed. Solid parapet railings along each side of the bridge are faced with stone veneer; the riverbanks on both sides of the bridge are lined with mortared stone. Transport portal Engineering portal Michigan portal National Register of Historic Places portal Photos from HistoricBridges.org

Cassis cornuta, common name the horned helmet, is a species of large sea snail, a marine gastropod mollusc in the family Cassidae, the helmet shells and their allies. The length of the shell varies between 50 410 mm, it is the largest of all helmet shells. It has a solid, rotund shell with large, horn-like knobs and a wide, flat base; the shell has a dorsally pale orange colour, its base vivid orange, faintly marked with white and brown. This large sea snail is found on sand and coral rubble around reefs; this species occurs in the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, off the southern African coast from northern KwaZulu-Natal and from Mozambique, as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The shell of Cassis cornuta is a popular collector's item. In some places the snail is traditionally roasted in the shell over fire; because of both of these factors, humans are a major enemy, the species is now at risk in many places. However, worldwide it is not listed in the Red List; because this snail hunts the crown-of-thorns starfish, which feed on corals, Cassis cornuta has been put under strict protection in Queensland.

Rippingale, O. H. & McMichael, D. F. 1961. Queensland and Great Barrier Reef Shells. Jacaranda Press, Brisbane. 210 pp. Abbott, R. T. 1968. The helmet shells of the world. Part 1. Indo-Pacific Mollusca, 2:7-198. Wilson, B. R. & Gillet, K. 1971. Australian Shells. A. H. & A. W. Reed, Sydney Salvat, B. & Rives, C. 1975. Coquillages de Polynésie. Les editions du pacifique, Papeete - Tahiti. 1-391. Kay, E. A. 1979. Hawaiian marine shells.. Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu. Xvii + 653 pp. Wilson, B. 1993. Australian Marine Shells. Prosobranch Gastropods. Odyssey Publishing, Kallaroo, WA. Kreipl, K. 1997. Recent Cassidae. Verlag Christa Hemman, Weisbaden. 1-151, pls 1-24. Media related to Cassis cornuta at Wikimedia Commons "Cassis cornuta". Gastropods.com. Retrieved 15 January 2019