Fabio Testi - actor

Successful career followed breakthrough role in De Sica classic 

The poster for the film that
made actor Fabio Testi famous

The actor Fabio Testi, whose role in an Oscar-winning 1970 drama directed by Vittorio De Sica remains his most famous, was born on this day in 1941 in Peschiera del Garda, a town on the southern shore of Lake Garda.

Testi played Giampiero Malnate, one of two young men competing for the affections of Micòl, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish intellectual in De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, with which the director won one of his four Academy Awards.

The performance led Testi to be named best new actor at the 1971 Golden Globes, the awards made annually by foreign journalists accredited in Italy.

Appearing in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis made Testi famous in Italy, representing a major breakthrough just two years after earning his big-screen debut.  Although nothing he subsequently did achieved similar heights, he went on to have a long and successful career, appearing in more than 100 films, working alongside international stars such as Oliver Reed, Anthony Quinn, Robert Mitchum, Eli Wallach and David Hemmings, as well as Charlotte Rampling, Claudia Cardinale, Franco Nero and Vanessa Redgrave.

From the 1980s onwards, he featured in dozens of television dramas, some theatre productions and, in more recent times, became a regular celebrity on reality TV programmes such as survival show L’isola dei famosi (The Island of the Famous) and Grande Fratello (Big Brother).

Despite his workload, Testi found time to turn an experiment growing kiwi fruit on his estate in northern Italy into a thriving business. At one time he was the third largest producer of kiwi fruit in Italy, growing more than 10,000 plants on a 70-hectare site.

Testi’s interest in the cinema was first sparked by seeing Lake Garda used as a backdrop for low-budget pirate films in the 1950s, when a production studio based in Peschiera del Garda would use the lake for scenes supposedly set in the Caribbean. 

He was studying to be an architect, but as a young man with a natural athletic build, he persuaded the studio that he could perform stunts as a body double. He was a stuntman in Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and briefly appeared in the same director’s Once Upon a Time in the West before making his acting big-screen debut in another of the so-called spaghetti western genre, Straniero…Fatto il segno della croce! (Stranger…Cross Yourself!) directed by Demofilo Fidani.

Fabio Testi appeared in more
than 100 films in a long career

Initially, Testi’s plan was to use the money he earned from small parts to help pay for his place at an architectural institute in nearby Verona but eventually enrolled at Verona's Academy of Fine Arts for acting classes.

Later, fearing that his early roles in all-action westerns and other genre films would lead him to be typecast, he went to England, taking acting lessons in London and some diction classes in Cambridge to improve his English.

The life-changing part of Giampiero in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a drama about life among Ferrara’s wealthy elite at a time of increasing Fascist hostility towards the Jewish community, is said to have followed a recommendation made to De Sica by Fidani.

His new-found fame set up Testi for a career that encompassed a wide range of parts, from art films and to thrillers and crime dramas, as well as in the somewhat bloodthirsty giallo murder-mystery genre that became popular with Italian audiences in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Testi’s private life for a while provided good copy for Italy’s burgeoning gossip magazines. He had relationships with several glamorous actresses, including Edwige Fenech, Charlotte Rampling, Lynne Frederick, Ursula Andress, Jean Seberg and Brooke Shields.

He has been married twice, to the Spanish actress and stylist Lola Novarro, with whom he had three children, and later to Antonella Liquori, a gallery owner.

Testi in a scene from his latest starring role, as a
retired spy in Reflection in a Dead Diamond

What turned into a lucrative sideline growing kiwi fruit came after he bought some land near Verona once owned by his grandfather. He saw kiwi fruit being grown in Los Angeles and decided, as an experiment, to see if he could grow some on his newly-acquired plot.

What began as a hobby eventually grew from a 10-acre orchard to a 70-hectare site. Other fruit producers were inspired to add kiwi fruit to their range and in time Italy became the largest grower of kiwi fruit in Europe.

Testi has continued to work in his mid-eighties. His latest big-screen starring role came as recently as 2025, in a French production entitled Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Reflet dans un diamant mort), in which he plays a retired spy living on the French Riviera, who fears old enemies have caught up with him when his beautiful nextdoor neighbour vanishes without trace.

The moat surrounding the fortified historic
centre of Peschiera del Garda

Travel tip:

Peschiera del Garda, where Fabio Testo was born, is a lakeside town on the southeastern shore of Lake Garda, distinctive for its historic centre being contained within the walls of a Venetian fortress, entirely surrounded by water. Some 30km (18 miles) west of Verona, it sits where Lake Garda flows into the Mincio river, which in turn flows into the Po southeast of Mantua. The fortress is a 16th‑century pentagonal stronghold with five bastions, later expanded by the Austrians. It is part of the UNESCO-listed Venetian Works of Defence. It is accessed on one side by the Porta Brescia, one of the monumental gates into the fortress, which has been beautifully preserved and leads directly into the old town.  To the other side is the Porta Verona, the second main gate. Inside, the centre comprises narrow streets, pastel-coloured buildings, bridges over canals, and waterfront cafes and restaurants. Beyond the fortification to the west is the long, lakeside promenade Lungomare Mazzini, which leads to a pebble beach at Lido Cappucini. 

Stay in Peschiera del Garda with Expedia

The wonderfully preserved Castello
Estense in the centre of Ferrara

Travel tip:

Ferrara is a city in Emilia-Romagna, about 50km (31 miles) northeast of Bologna. It was ruled by the Este family between 1240 and 1598. Building work on the magnificent Castello Estense, a medieval-Renaissance moated fortress in the centre of the city, began in 1385 and it was added to and improved by successive rulers of Ferrara until the end of the Este line.  The castle was purchased for 70,000 lire by the province of Ferrara in 1874 to be used as the headquarters of the Prefecture.   Ferrara is also notable for Palazzo dei Diamanti, a palace in Corso Ercole I d’Este, that takes its name from the 8500 pointed diamond shaped stones that stud the façade, diamonds being an emblem of the Este family. It was designed by Biagio Rossetti and completed in 1503. The palace now houses the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara on its first floor. With a population of 132,000, Ferrara is known for its broad Renaissance streets, its cycling culture and remarkably intact urban layout, which was given UNESCO status in 1995. Close to the Castello Estense is the Romanesque‑Gothic Duomo di San Giorgio, begun in the 12th century. Other Renaissance gems include the Palazzo Schifanoia, the Corpus Domini Monastery and the Palazzo Paradiso.

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More reading:

How author Giorgio Bassani wrote The Garden of the Finzi-Continis to reflect the plight of wealthy Jewish Italians in 1930s

Lino Cappolicchio, who played Giampiero’s rival in the De Sica film

Vittorio De Sica, Oscar-winning maestro

Also on this day:

1854: The birth in Tuscany of American writer Francis Marion Crawford

1919: The birth of film composer and musical director Carlo Savina

1945: The death of composer Pietro Mascagni

1980: Terrorists bomb Bologna railway station

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