← Fame through time1980-1989
The 1980s
Whose names filled the books of the 1980s - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in Italian books during the 1980s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Caravaggio7.3 - 2
Giotto5.4 - 3
Benedetto Croce4.7 - 4
Donato Bramante4.1 - 5
Donatello3.8 - 6
Antonio da Correggio3.7 - 7
Leonardo da Vinci3.1 - 8
Dante Alighieri2.7 - 9
Pietro Perugino2.6 - 10
Charles Borromeo2.4 - 11
Bettino Craxi2.3 - 12
Aldo Moro2.3 - 13
Francis of Assisi2.2 - 14
Alessandro Manzoni2.1 - 15
Tintoretto2.1 - 16
Masaccio2.0 - 17
Giulio Romano2.0 - 18
Luigi Einaudi1.8 - 19
Marco Polo1.8 - 20
Giulio Andreotti1.7 - 21
Giordano Bruno1.7 - 22
Luigi Pirandello1.7 - 23
Lorenzo de' Medici1.7 - 24
Guercino1.7 - 25
Giacomo Leopardi1.6
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1980s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Donald Trump4 decades - 2
Vladimir Putin3 decades - 3
George W. Bush4 decades - 4
Xi Jinping3 decades - 5
Bill Clinton4 decades - 6
Benjamin Netanyahu4 decades - 7
Freddie Mercury3 decades - 8
Robin Williams7 decades - 9
Steven Spielberg5 decades - 10
Arnold Schwarzenegger4 decades - 11
Narendra Modi2 decades - 12
Jackie Channot measured- - 13
David Bowie5 decades - 14
Meryl Streep4 decades - 15
Bob Marley5 decades - 16
Dolly Parton5 decades - 17
Stephen King8 decades - 18
Sylvester Stallone5 decades - 19
Hugo Chávez3 decades - 20
Hillary Clinton3 decades - 21
Chernot measured- - 22
Elton John5 decades - 23
Ozzy Osbourne3 decades - 24
Pablo Escobar4 decades - 25
John Travolta5 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.