Short answers, pulled from the story.
Giacomo Puccini was an Italian composer who lived from 1858 to 1924 and is known primarily for his operas. He is widely regarded as the greatest and most successful proponent of Italian opera after Verdi. His most renowned works are La boheme, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and the unfinished Turandot.
Giacomo Puccini's most renowned operas are La boheme from 1896, Tosca from 1900, Madama Butterfly from 1904, and the unfinished Turandot. La boheme, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly are among the ten most frequently performed operas worldwide.
Giacomo Puccini was born in Lucca, in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in 1858. He was the sixth of nine children of Michele Puccini and Albina Magi, and descended from a family that had served as maestro di cappella at the Cattedrale di San Martino for 124 years.
Giacomo Puccini died in Brussels on the 29th of November 1924, aged 65. A chain smoker of Toscano cigars, he developed throat cancer and traveled to Brussels for experimental radiation therapy, but uncontrolled bleeding led to a heart attack the day after surgery.
Puccini drew La boheme from his own poverty as a young conservatory student in Milan, when he lacked food, clothing, and rent money and often pawned his possessions. He said, I lived that Boheme, when there wasn't yet any thought stirring in my brain of seeking the theme of an opera.
Puccini wrote in the late-Romantic style and later developed in the realistic verismo style, becoming one of its leading exponents. Verismo is distinguished by realistic and sometimes violent depictions of everyday life, and his operas Tosca and Il tabarro are universally considered verismo works.
On the 25th of February 1903, Puccini was seriously injured when his car ran off the road from Lucca to Torre del Lago at night and flipped over. He was pinned under the vehicle with a severe fracture of his right leg, and the medical examinations that followed also revealed he was suffering from diabetes.