Eduardo Scarpetta - actor and playwright

Much-loved performer began theatrical dynasty

Scarpetta's comic plays were hugely
popular with Neapolitan audiences

Eduardo Scarpetta, one of the most important writers and actors in Neapolitan theatre in the last 19th and early 20th centuries, was born on this day in 1853 in Naples.

Fascinated by the commedia dell’arte and Neapolitan puppet theatre character Pulcinella, Scarpetta was the writer of more than 50 dialect plays in the comedy genre, creating his own character, Felice Sciosciammocca, a wide-eyed, gullible but essentially good-natured Neapolitan who featured prominently in his best-known work, Miseria e Nobiltà (Misery and Nobility).

His plays made him wealthy, although his standing was damaged towards the end of his career by a notorious dispute with Gabriele D’Annunzio, the celebrated playwright and poet with aristocratic roots who was a considerable figure in Italian literature.

A showman with a reputation for throwing extravagant parties, Scarpetta led a complicated personal life that saw him father at least eight children by at least four women, of which only one was by his wife, Rosa De Filippo.

One of his relationships, with Rosa’s niece, Luisa, a theatre seamstress, produced three children - Eduardo, Peppino and Titina De Filippo - central figures in an Italian theatre and film dynasty in the 20th century.

Another daughter, Maria, was the child of an affair with a music teacher, while a relationship with his wife’s half-sister, Anna, produced the journalist, poet and playwright, Ernesto Murolo, who co-wrote a number of famous Neapolitan songs with the composer Ernesto Tagliaferri, and another actor, Eduardo Passarelli.

His only legitimate son, Vincenzo, also became an actor, and later a director, playwright and composer. The part of Peppeniello in Miseria e nobiltà was written specifically for Vincenzo.

Scarpetta in character as his own
creation, Felice Sciosciamocca

Scarpetta did not come from a theatrical background. His father, Domenico, was a civil servant who tried without success to steer Eduardo into a more secure profession.

By joining a theatre company at the age of 15, Scarpetta believed he could help bring money into the family after his father’s poor health led to them falling on hard times.

He soon met Antonio Petito, a playwright and actor who at the time was one of Naples’s most famous interpreters of the Pulcinella character, and joined his company at the Teatro San Carlino on Piazza Castello, near the Castel Nuovo. It was while working with Petito that he created Felice Sciosciammocca, with whom Petito was so impressed he began to write plays with Pulcinella and Sciosciammocca as the main characters. 

Petito’s Pulcinella had evolved from the rather simple, slow-witted character of tradition to a sharp, insolent and above all instinctively cunning individual. Where Pulcinella was working class, Scarpetta’s middle-class Sciosciammocca was a perfect foil.

His partnership with Petito ended with the latter’s death in 1876, after which he worked briefly in Rome before returning to Naples. After a period performing at the Teatro Metastasio on the city’s pier, he returned to San Carlino as manager, investing much time and money in saving it from impending closure and restoring it.

San Carlino would in 1884 be demolished to make way for a new urban square, the Piazza Municipio, as part of a rehabilitation project for the area, which had become rather run down.

Nonetheless, Scarpetta had enjoyed a number of huge successes with his own plays, notably Miseria e Nobiltà, but also Il medico dei pazzi, na santarella, Lo scarfalietto, Nu Turco Napulitano and O miereco de’ pazzi.

Na santarella was one of Scarpetta's
most successful plays

His wealth enabled him to build a substantial palazzo on Via Vittorio Colonna in the prestigious Chiaia district and a villa on the Vomero hill, in Via Luigia Sanfelice, which he named La Santarella.

La Santarella hosted a huge party each year on the occasion of his daughter Tatina’s birthday, to which Scarpetta invited actors, directors, journalists, writers and poets for a celebration that traditionally ended with a spectacular fireworks display that was visible all over the city.

Rosa was happy to accommodate all of Eduardo’s various children. Indeed, after his affair with the music teacher, Francesca Gianetti, it was Rosa who was said to have rescued the child, Maria, from the religious institute to which she had been abandoned.  Rosa, in fact, had a son of her own, Domenico, whose father was none other than the King of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II, with whom she had a relationship as a teenager before marrying Scarpetta.

Scarpetta’s fortunes began to decline when his Teatro Salone Margherita, a cabaret theatre in the basement of the then newly-built Galleria Umberto I in the centre of Naples began to suffer financially. At the same time a play he had written as a parody of a play by Gabriele D’Annunzio which prompted the well-connected D’Annunzio to accuse him of plagiarism and take him to court for staging the play without permission.

In the event, the court case went in the favour of Scarpetta, who successfully argued that his play, Iorio’s Son, was not a copy but a comic send-up of D’Annunzio’s tragedy, Iorio’s Daughter, but the case - and the panning that Iorio’s Son received from the critics - left Scarpetta embittered and though he continued to write he decided he would no longer act. 

He died at the age of 72 in 1925 and after an elaborate funeral in which his body was placed in a crystal coffin, he was buried in the De Filippo-Scarpetta-Viviani family tomb at the Cimitero Monumentale di Poggioreale in Naples, close to what would become the site of the city’s international airport at Capodichino.

Scarpetta's impressive villa in the Vomero
district, which he named La Santarella

Travel tip:

Vomero, where Scarpetta had his impressive villa, La Santarella, is a middle class largely residential area of central Naples but has a number of buildings of historic significance. The most dominant, on top of Vomero hill, is the large medieval fortress, Castel Sant'Elmo, which stands guard over the city. In front of the fortress is the Certosa San Martino, the former Carthusian monastery, now a museum.  Walk along the adjoining street, Largo San Martino, to enjoy extraordinary views over the city towards Vesuvius.  Vomero's other tourist attraction is the Villa Floridiana, once the home of Ferdinand I, the Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies.  Surrounded by extensive gardens, the building now houses the Duke of Martina National Museum of Ceramics.

Chiaia is one of the more upmarket areas
of the city of Naples

Travel tip:

Chiaia, where Scarpetta’s wealth enabled him to build a large family house, is a neighbourhood bordering the seafront in Naples, roughly between Piazza Vittoria and Mergellina. It has become one of the most affluent districts in the city, with many of the top fashion designers having stores on the main streets. It is the home of a large public park known as the Villa Comunale, flanked by the large palazzi along the Riviera di Chiaia on one side, and the sweeping promenade of the Via Francesco Caracciolo on the other.  The area is home to many fine seafood restaurants and has become a popular nightlife destination for well-heeled young Neapolitans.

Also on this day:

1925: The birth of actor and voice-dubber Corrado Gaipa

1955: The birth of footballer and coach Bruno Conti

1960: The birth of rock musician Luciano Ligabue

1980: The birth of dancer Flavia Cacace

Home

Peppino De Filippo - comedian, actor and playwright

Talented Neapolitan who lived in shadow of his brother

Peppino de Filippo enjoyed a successful
career on stage and screen

The playwright and comic actor Peppino De Filippo was born Giuseppe De Filippo on this day in 1903 in Naples.

A highly accomplished performer on stage in serious as well as comedy roles, De Filippo also had a list of film credits numbering almost 100, of which he is best remembered for his screen partnership with the brilliant comic actor Totò.

To an extent, however, he spent his career in the shadow of his older brother, Eduardo De Filippo, who after Luigi Pirandello was regarded as the second great Italian playwright of the 20th century.

The two fell out in the 1940s for reasons that were never made clear, although it later emerged that they had many artistic differences.

They were never reconciled, and though Peppino went on to enjoy a successful career and was widely acclaimed it annoyed him that he was always seen as a minor playwright compared with his brother.

When Peppino published an autobiography in 1977, three years before he died, he called it Una famiglia difficile - A Difficult Family. In the book he described his relationship with his sister, Titina, as one of warmth and affection, but portrays Eduardo as something of a tyrant.

Peppini, second from the right, with his father,
mother, brother and sister in about 1910

The son of Eduardo Scarpetta, one of the most prominent Neapolitan playwrights of the early 20th century, and Luisa De Filippo, he was born in a house on the corner of Via Giovanni Bausan and Via Vittoria Colonna in the Chiaia district of central Naples, about a 20-minute walk from Piazza del Plebiscito and the Royal Palace.

Yet he spent the first five years of his life being cared for by a nanny in Caivano, a small town about 14km (9 miles) northeast of Naples, and returned to his family somewhat reluctantly.

He made his stage debut at the age of six in a play written by his father, learned to play the piano and worked in various theatre companies as he grew up, meeting Totò for the first time in 1920 at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples, in the Spanish Quarter.

Married in 1929 to Adela Carloni, he became a father the following year and soon afterwards joined his brother, Eduardo, and Titina in forming the Compagnia Teatro Umoristico: i De Filippo - the De Filippos’ Humorous Theatre Company.

They were very successful, touring Italy, presenting new comedies to full theatres and enthusiastic reviews.

However, in 1944, after a number of clashes with Eduardo - one story was that Eduardo disapproved of his brother’s relationship with another woman, Lidia Maresca, who later became his second wife  - Peppino left the company.

Peppino de Filippo, right, with Totò, centre, in a scene
from their 1956 movie, La Banda degli Onesti

His own plays were lighter in tone than Eduardo’s and, some critics argued, superior work, yet he never achieved the same recognition for his writing.

On the other hand, he became a highly respected actor known for his versatility. His performances in Harold Pinter’s play The Caretaker and in Molière’s The Miser attracted glowing reviews.

Nonetheless, Peppino’s career tends to be defined by the high profile he achieved in film and on television.

His films with Totò, of which there were 16, though snubbed by the critics, were hugely successful, so much so that the popularity of De Filippo in his own right meant that several movies in which the pair collaborated, such as Totò, Peppino e la malafemmina and Totò, Peppino e le fanatiche, had his name in the title as well as that of his more famous co-star.

He worked with Federico Fellini - in Boccaccio '70, for example - and with Alberto Lattuada and also invented Pappagone, a character for a TV show, who represented a servant employed by himself, a typical character in Neapolitan theatre, whose phrases and jargon became popular sayings.

He married three times in total but had only child, his son Luigi, who maintained the family tradition by becoming an actor, director and playwright, producing and performing in many works by his father and uncle.

De Filippo died in Rome in 1980 and was buried at the Campo Verano cemetery.

The Naples waterfront to the west of the city centre - Chiaia
is the area behind the trees of Villa Comunale 

Travel tip:

Chiaia, where Peppino De Filippo was born, is a neighbourhood bordering the seafront in Naples, roughly between Piazza Vittoria and Mergellina. It has become one of the most affluent districts in the city, with many of the top fashion designers having stores on the main streets. It is the home of a large public park known as the Villa Comunale, flanked by the large palazzi along the Riviera di Chiaia on one side, and the sweeping promenade of the Via Francesco Caracciolo on the other.

An artist's sketch of the Teatro Nuovo in around 1900

Travel tip:

The Teatro Nuovo, where Peppino first met Toto, is located on Via Montecalvario in the Quartieri Spagnoli - Spanish quarter - of Naples, off the Via Toledo, a few steps from Piazza del Plebiscito. The original theatre was an opera house designed by Domenico Antonio Vaccaro completed in 1724. It specialised in the opera buffa genre and saw the world premieres of hundreds of operas in its heyday, including 15 by Cimarosa and seven by Donizetti. The theatre has twice been destroyed by fire, in 1861 and again in 1935.

More reading:

How Eduardo De Filippo captured the spirit of Naples

The brilliance of Luigi Pirandello

The versatility of Alberto Lattuada

Also on this day:

1540: The death of the artist Parmigianino

1902: The birth of Mafia boss Carlo Gambino


Home

Massimo Troisi – actor, writer and director

Tragic star died hours after completing finest work

Troisi was only 41 when he died in 1994,
hours after finishing Il Postino

Massimo Troisi, the comic actor, writer and director who suffered a fatal heart attack in 1994 only 12 hours after shooting finished on his greatest movie, was born on this day in 1953 in a suburb of Naples.

Troisi co-directed and starred in Il Postino, which won an Oscar for best soundtrack after being nominated in five categories, the most nominations in Academy Award history for an Italian film.

He also wrote much of the screenplay for the movie, based on a novel, Burning Patience, by the Chilean author Antonio Skármeta, which tells the story of a Chilean poet exiled on an Italian island and his friendship with a postman whose round consists only of the poet’s isolated house.

Plagued by heart problems for much of his life, the result of several bouts of rheumatic fever when he was a child, Troisi was told just before shooting was due to begin that he needed an urgent transplant operation.

However, he was so committed to the project, a joint enterprise with his friend, the British director Michael Radford, he decided to postpone his surgery.  He was so ill that he collapsed on set on the third day but recovered to continue, shooting many of his location scenes in one take, with a body double used for any shots that required physical activity, and invariably unable to last for more than an hour before succumbing to exhaustion.

Yet he completed the movie, for which the location shots were shared between the islands of Pantelleria and Salina – off Sicily - and Procida, in the Bay of Naples, and then travelled from Naples to his sister’s house in Ostia, outside Rome. He had tickets booked on a plane to London, where he was due to receive a new heart at the famous Harefield Hospital the following day.  Sadly, he had a cardiac arrest during the night and never woke from sleep.

Massimo Troisi (left) and Lello Arena in the staircase
scene from Troisi's second film, Scusate il ritardo

Troisi, who had a successful career as a comedian on radio and television before turning to film, wrote and directed six movies, in which he also starred, and acted in half a dozen others.

Born in San Giorgio a Cremano, a town in the foothills of Mount Vesuvius about 6km (3.75 miles) south of central Naples, he grew up in a large house in Via Cavalli di Bronzo, which his mother and father, a railway engineer, and their six children shared with his mother’s parents and seven other members of the extended family.

He suffered his first brush with rheumatic fever, common among poor children in Naples at the time, when he was very young and had to travel to the United States for heart surgery when he was 23, by which time he was already well known on the Naples cabaret circuit as part of a comic trio he had formed with two childhood friends.

Their success led to their own radio show and then to regular appearances on prime television shows such as the popular Luna Park.  Troisi’s talent was compared to his boyhood idols from the tradition of Neapolitan comedy, Totò and Eduardo and Peppino DeFilippo.

Troisi is one of only seven actors to be
nominated posthumously for an Oscar

After the trio broke up in the late seventies, Troisi turned to film, winning critical appraisal and box office success with his first venture, Ricomincio da tre (I start again from three), in 1981.

Due to his fears that his second effort would not be as good as his first, it was two years before he made another movie, but Scusate il Ritardo (Sorry for the delay) was just as well received.  Like his first film, it focussed on the troublesome love life of the Neapolitan lead character, drawing on his own life experiences, told with sometimes surreal humour. 

It featured dialogues between Troisi’s character, Vincenzo, and his friend Tonino, played by his childhood friend Lello Arena, that were so memorable that the Via Mariconda stairs in the Chiaia district of Naples, where they were filmed, have recently been renamed the Scale Massimo Troisi in his honour.  Arena received a David di Donatello award for Best Supporting Actor.

Troisi had more success starring opposite Roberto Benigni in Non ci resta che piangere (Nothing to do but cry), about two friends accidentally transported in time to the 15^th century, where they meet Leonardo da Vinci and attempt to stop Christopher Columbus discovering America.

Troisi starred in several films directed by Ettore Scola before teaming up with Radford for Il Postino, which they wrote together in just three weeks in a hotel room in Santa Monica, outside Los Angeles.  It was his first American studio production and ensured he found fame outside Italy, as many thought his talent deserved, and he was nominated posthumously for Best Actor at the Academy Awards, one of only seven actors to be given that distinction.

The Villa Vannucchi at San Giorgio a Cremano
has extensive monumental gardens

Travel tip:

Now a densely populated suburb of the Naples metropolis, San Giorgio a Cremano enjoyed its heyday in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when as one of the five towns first encountered by travellers heading south from Naples, along with Portici, Ercolano, Torre del Greco and Torre Annunziata, it became a popular resort with wealthy and aristocratic families, whose sumptuous summer residences became known as the Ville Vesuviane (Vesuvian Villas).

Book your stay in Naples with Booking.com

The picturesque harbour and historic centre of Procida

Travel tip:

Procida is a small but heavily populated island between the Naples mainland and its much larger and better-known neighbour Ischia, characterised by its narrow streets and colourful harbourside houses. Its lack of tourists compared with Ischia and particularly Capri give it a much more authentic feel and Michael Radford is not the only movie director to appreciate its value as a location.  In 1999, Anthony Minghella brought members of a star-studded cast including Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law to the island to film several scenes from The Talented Mr Ripley.

Find accommodation in Procida with Booking.com

More reading: 

Roberto Benigni - Italy's first male Oscar winner

Why Totò is still regarded as Italy's greatest comedy genius

How Eduardo De Filippo captured the spirit of Naples

Also on this day:

1605: The death of church musician Orazio Vecchi

1461: The birth of Venetian cardinal and art collector Domenico Grimani

1743: The birth of composer and cellist Luigi Boccherini

1977: The birth of operatic tenor Vittorio Grigolo

(Picture credits: Troisi on bench by Gorup de Besanez; Villa Vannuchi by Tozzabancone; Procida harbour by Jamiethearcher; all via Wikimedia Commons)

Home