Walter Chiari - actor

Talented star with taste for high life

Walter Chiari had the bonus of 
good looks on top of acting talent

The actor Walter Chiari, whose passionate affair with the American superstar Ava Gardner in 1950s Rome is said to have influenced Federico Fellini in the making of his landmark movie La dolce vita, was born on this day in 1924 in Verona.

Chiari was an accomplished stage and film actor when he met Gardner on the set of The Little Hut, a 1957 romantic comedy that was British made and with a Canadian director but was filmed largely at Cinecittà in Rome.

Gardner was still married to Frank Sinatra at the time but the pair were estranged and she was open to romance. She developed a taste for the Rome nightlife around the Via Vittorio Veneto and her relationship with the handsome Chiari soon began to dominate the gossip columns. They were constantly harassed by photographers, some of whom felt the rough edge of Chiari’s temper.

Fellini supposedly based Paparazzo, the photographer who relentlessly pursues Anita Ekberg’s character in La dolce vita, on the antics of some of the real-life snappers who followed Chiari and Gardner’s every move.

Chiari, who enjoyed much success on screen and in theatre, mostly in comedy roles, was already a high-profile figure in Rome’s glitzier clubs and bars, often stepping out with glamorous partners. Among those with whom he was romantically linked were actresses Elsa Martinelli, Silvana Pampanini and Lucia Bosè, and the pop star Mina. He reportedly had a brief fling with Ekberg herself.

In his professional life, he was best known for his film roles in the aforementioned The Little Hut (1957), Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Chimes at Midnight (1966) and The Valachi Papers (1972), which brought him international acclaim. 

He appeared opposite Anna Magnani in Luchino Visconti's film Bellissima (1951), won much praise for the quality of his performances in the commedia all’italiana genre and worked with some of Italy’s leading directors, including Mario Soldati, Mario Monicelli, Luigi Comencini, Ettore Scola, Dino Risi, Alessandro Blasetti and Damiano Damiani.

Chiari's relationship with the American star
Ava Gardner (left) dominated the gossip columns

Fluent in English and as comfortable acting on stage as he was in front of the camera, he was an accomplished performer in musical comedy and enjoyed a long run on Broadway in The Gay Life, with lyrics by Howard Dietz and music by Arthur Schwartz. 

He starred in an Italian production of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple and, towards the end of his career, won critical approval for his performances in more serious stage roles, in plays such as Marc Terrier’s Six Heures au Plus Tard, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Richard Sheridan’s The Critic.

Born Walter Michele Armando Annicchiarico, Chiari spent the early part of his childhood in Via Quattro Spade in the heart of historic Verona, where his father, Carmelo, originally from Puglia, worked as a security officer for the local authority.

On finishing school he took a job as a warehouseman at a car factory in Milan, where the family had moved when he was nine. He subsequently found work as a radio technician and a bank, where - already showing a talent for acting - he was sacked after imitating Adolf Hitler while standing on a desk.

His break in acting came on a night out at the Teatro Olimpia in Milan, when the revue he had gone to see with a group of friends was on the point of being cancelled because one of the actors was absent. Urged to volunteer as a stand-in by his friends, he so impressed the director that he was invited to join the company.

Chiari had a brief marriage to the actress
Alida Chelli between 1969 and 1972

It opened the door into a career in revue theatre that flourished after he moved to Rome. He demonstrated his versatility by taking more serious roles, too, which in turn created opportunities to transfer his talents to the screen. In fact, his debut movie, in which he played the lead role in Giorgio Pastina’s Vanità (1947), won him a Nastro d’Argento award as best new actor.

Apart from his regular appearances in the gossip pages, Chiari was at the centre of other scandals. In 1970 he spent 98 days in the Regina Coeli prison in Rome after being arrested on charges of cocaine use and cocaine trafficking. He was released on payment of three million lire bail and acquitted of all but the possession charge at trial in 1971.

He received a suspended sentence for possession, but even though he had been cleared of the more serious charges the scandal severely damaged his career. The national TV channel Rai dropped him from a number of shows in which he had participated and until the late stages of his career his only television work was for minor, regional channels.

After his death, it was revealed that he had served for part of World War Two in the German army, who posted him to northern France with an anti-aircraft unit. He was captured by the Allies after being wounded soon after the D-Day landings and sent to an American prisoner of war camp in Tuscany.

Chiari was married - once and for just three years - to the singer and actress Alida Chelli. They had a son, Simone Annicchiarico, who became a TV presenter.  Chiari died from a heart attack in Milan in 1991, at the age of 67. His funeral, attended by more than 3,000 people, took place at the church of San Pietro in Sala, near Milan’s Teatro Nazionale.

His tombstone in Milan’s monumental cemetery famously is inscribed with the words: "Don't worry, I'm merely catching up with sleep".

The Via Quattro Spade in Verona,
where Walter Chiari was born

Travel tip:

Verona, where Walter Chiari was born, is the third largest city in the northeast of Italy, with a population across its whole urban area of more than 700,000. Among its wealth of tourist attractions is the Roman amphitheatre known as L’Arena di Verona, which dates back to AD30. Just a five-minute walk from Chiari’s home in Via Quattro Spade, the arena has a seating capacity of 22,000, often selling out for open air opera performances and pop concerts. Verona was chosen as the setting for three plays by William Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew - although it is unknown whether the English playwright ever actually set foot in the city.  Each year, thousands of tourists visit a 13th century house in Verona where Juliet is said to have lived, even though there is no evidence that Juliet and Romeo actually existed and the balcony said to have inspired Shakespeare’s imagination was not added until the early 20th century.

The church of San Pietro in Sala in the Wagner
district of Milan, which held Chiari's funeral

Travel tip:

The church of San Pietro in Sala is in the well-heeled Wagner district of Milan, which has some expensive apartments and upmarket shops but is also seen as a trendy neighbourhood. The main shopping streets, Corso Vercelli and Via Belfiore, are lined with quirky boutiques and shoe shops, while the area has a lively vibe in the evening. One attraction is the indoor food market in Piazza Riccardo Wagner, directly opposite the church. The largest food market in Milan, it stocks all manner of gourmet treats and is not to be missed by food-loving visitors to the city. Situated about 3km (1.9 miles) west of the centre of Milan, a 15-minute Metro ride from the station in Piazza Duomo.

Also on this day:

La Festa della Donna - International Women’s Day

1566: The birth of composer Carlo Gesualdo

1925: The birth of priest and politician Gianni Baget Bozzo

1949: The birth of singer-songwriter Antonello Venditti

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Pier Paolo Pasolini - writer and film director

Controversial figure who met violent death

Pier Paolo Pasolini courted controversy in his films,
his private life and his politics

The novelist, writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini was born on this day in 1922 in Bologna.

Pasolini's best-known work included his portrayal of Jesus Christ in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), his bawdy adaptations of such literary classics as Boccaccio’s Decameron (1971) and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1972), and and his brutal satire on Fascism entitled Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). 

He also wrote novels and poetry, made documentaries, directed for the theatre and was an outspoken columnist for the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera, expressing political views that would regularly spark heated debate.

A former member of the Communist Party and openly homosexual, Pasolini died in violent circumstances in Ostia, near Rome, in November 1975, supposedly murdered by a young man he had picked up at the city’s Termini railway station, although there was some mystery around the incident and speculation over motives continues to this day.

The son of an army lieutenant, Pasolini lived in various northern Italian towns in his childhood, determined by his father’s postings. Family life was somewhat turbulent. His father spent time in prison over gambling debts but was also the man who detained Anteo Zamboni, a teenager suspected of attempting to assassinate Mussolini in 1926.

The house where Pasolini was born in Bologna - now an
office of the Guardia di Finanzia, is marked with a plaque

Pasolini graduated from the University of Bologna and began to pursue an interest in writing poetry that he had nurtured since the age of seven, inspired by the beauty of Casarsa della Delizia, a town in Friuli and the home of his mother’s family. He published his first volume of poetry in 1942.

He attributed his mostly Marxist politics to his experience of the oppressed peasant communities around Casarsa. His 19-year-old brother Guido, a member of the anti-Fascist Partito d’Azione, was accidentally killed in by partisans in an ambush.

After 1945, Pasolini worked as a secondary school teacher in nearby Valvasone but his activities as a Communist Party member made him a controversial figure and he was eventually forced out of his job by the local Christian Democrats, whom he accused of manufacturing a scandal that saw him charged with the "corruption of minors and (committing) obscene acts in public places".

In January 1950, Pasolini moved to Rome with his mother Susanna to start a new life. He was later acquitted of both charges. They moved to the run-down suburb of Rebibbia, next to a prison, which provided the inspiration for his first novels, which dealt with the violent lives of poor proletarian immigrants living in often horrendous sanitary and social conditions, and his debut movie, Accattone (1961).

Pasolini taking part in a radio broadcast
in Rome in 1975

Prior to that he had worked variously as a teacher in Ciampino and a writer for Italian state radio before making the acquaintance of the director Federico Fellini, who employed him to help with the Roman dialect in both Le notti di Cabiria and La Dolce Vita.

Pasolini was prepared to tackle controversial subjects. Mamma Roma (1962), featuring Anna Magnani, which told the story of a prostitute and her son, was considered an affront to morality and widely criticised.

The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964), which won awards at both the Venice Film Festival and BAFTA, also attracted criticism, portraying Christ as a revolutionary ‘Red Messiah’, but Pasolini vowed to direct it from the "believer's point of view" and the Catholic Church has since described it as “the best film ever made about Jesus Christ.”

He attracted criticism for different reasons with his sex-laden Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (literally The Flower of 1001 Nights, released in English as Arabian Nights, 1974), his Trilogy of Life, which celebrated the human body while commenting on contemporary sexual and religious mores and hypocrisies. They were hugely popular, Decameron and The Canterbury Tales winning awards at the Berlin Film Festival, although Pasolini later regretted his association with them, because the many softcore imitations of the films made him uncomfortable about their success.

His final work, Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), exceeded what most viewers could accept at the time in its explicit scenes of intensely sadistic violence. A satire on Fascism - Salò being the name of the Fascist ‘republic’ Mussolini set up in northern Italy in a desperate attempt to cling to power - it is based on the novel 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade, and is considered Pasolini's most controversial film.

Willem Dafoe starred as Pasolini in the 2014
film about his life directed by Abel Ferrara

Despite evidence that more than one person was involved, only Giuseppe (Pino) Pelosi, the young man he supposedly picked up, was convicted of his murder. Pelosi was caught after police stopped him as he sped from the scene in Pasolini’s Alfa Romeo.

The autopsy indicated that the director had been run over by the car on the beach as Ostia, having first been severely beaten with blunt instruments. Pelosi confessed his guilt, claiming he attacked the director after refusing to be subjected to a particularly violent sexual act.

The verdict of the 1976 court hearing was that Pelosi “and unknown others” were guilty of the crime, although the “unknown others” did not appear in the wording when that verdict went to appeal.

Speculation about alternative motives began almost immediately and intensified when, 29 years later, Pelosi retracted his confession. He said he had made it under the threat of violence to his family and claimed that the crime had been committed by three people regularly seen at the Tiburtina branch of the neo-fascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement).

The conspiracy theorists discussed extortion following the theft of a number of reels of film from Salò as one explanation, while others suspected a political motive.

Franca Rame, who married the playwright
Dario Fo and became a political activist

In his columns in the Corriere della Sera, long before the Tangentopoli enquiry led to the collapse of Italy’s then deeply-corrupt political establishment, Pasolini said that the leadership of the ruling Christian Democratic party should stand trial, not only for corruption and links with the Mafia, but for association with neo-fascist terrorism, such as the bombing of trains and a demonstration in Milan.

Also, at the time of his death, Pasolini was working on a novel, Petrolio, that was clearly based on the mysterious death of Enrico Mattei, the former president of the state oil company ENI, which suggested that the scandal went to the heart of power via the involvement of the illegal masonic lodge Propaganda Due.

Attacks on left-wing activists were relatively common in the 1970s. For example, Franca Rame, the actress wife of the playwright Dario Fo and a prominent member of the Italian Communist Party, was kidnapped and raped by a group of neo-Fascists in 1973.

However, though the Pasolini case was reopened in 2005, no new conclusions were reached.

In 2014 the director Abel Ferrara made a biopic about Pasolini, with Willem Dafoe in the lead role, which was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 71st Venice International Film Festival.

The ruins of the Roman city of Ostia Antica are better
preserved than Pompei yet are much less well known

Travel tip:

The seaside resort of Ostia, where Pasolini’s life ended so tragically, lies 30km (19 miles) to the southwest of Rome, situated just across the Tiber river from Fiumicino, home of Rome’s largest international airport. It  adjoins the remains of the ancient Roman city of Ostia Antica, a much-better preserved site than volcano-ravaged Pompei occupying around 10,000 square metres, radiating from a mile-long main street.  There are many houses and apartment blocks, plus warehouses and public buildings, and an impressive amphitheatre.. Many Romans spend their summer holidays in the modern town, swelling a population of about 85,000.

Hotels in Ostia Antica by Booking.com

The church of Santa Croce and San Rocco, where the
funeral for Pier Paolo Pasolina took place in 1975

Travel tip:

Casarsa della Delizia is a town in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, about 40km (25 miles) west of Udine and about 18km (11 miles) from Pordenone. It is today an important agricultural centre, particularly for wine production, and an important rail hub. Until the end of the Cold War saw numbers reduced, it hosted a large number of Italian military personnel. Pasolini’s funeral took place in the parish church of Santa Croce and San Rocco, before his body was buried in the municipal emetery. The church of Santa Croce and San Rocci contains a cycle of 16th century frescoes by Pomponio Amalteo or by Pordenone.

Look for hotels in and around Casarsa della Delizia with Tripadvisor

More reading:

What made Francesco Rosi one of Italy's most influential film-makers

Why the death of Enrico Mattei remains an unsolved mystery

Laura Betti, the actress and singer who became Pasolini's companion

Also on this day:

1696: The birth of painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

1827: The death of scientist Alessandro Volta

1834: The birth of 19th century opera star Marietta Piccolomini

Selected books:

Stories from the City of God: Sketches and Chronicles of Rome 1950-1966, by Pier Paolo Pasolini

A Violent Life (novel), by Pier Paolo Pasolini

(Picture credits: plaque by Renaud Camus; Ostia Antica street by Camelia.boban; church by Intoinside)

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Marisa Pavan - actress

Twin sister of tragic star Pier Angeli

Marisa Pavan (left) with Anna
Magnani in The Rose Tattoo

The actress Marisa Pavan, whose twin sister Pier Angeli was a Hollywood star in the 1950s and 1960s, was born on this day in 1932 as Maria Luisa Pierangeli in Cagliari, Sardinia.

Pavan’s career ran parallel with that of her sister, who was born 20 minutes before her, but she rejected the re-invention as an ultra-glamorous starlet that Pier Angeli underwent within the Hollywood studio system.

She turned roles down when she felt they did not have enough substance and did not hesitate to sack agents if she felt they were putting her forward for unsuitable parts.  She refused to sign up to any one studio.

Her biggest success was The Rose Tattoo, the 1955 film adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play in which she played the daughter of the central character, played by Anna Magnani, one of postwar Italian cinema’s most respected actresses.

Magnani won an Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of a Sicilian widow, with Pavan receiving a nomination for best supporting actress at the Academy Awards and although that award went to someone else she did have the substantial compensation of winning a Golden Globe for the role.

The Pierangeli family had left Sardinia for Rome when the twins were three years old as their father, Luigi, pursued his career as an architect. Life began to change for the family in 1948 when her sister, then still known by her real name, Anna Maria Pierangeli, was approached by the famous actor and director, Vittorio De Sica, while walking along fashionable Via Veneto, and asked if she might be interested in a part.

Pavan with her husband, the French actor
Jean-Pierre Aumont, in 1965

She won an award at the Venice Film Festival for the role De Sica gave her and it was not long before the twins, their younger sister Patrizia and their mother were leaving for the United States to support Anna Maria’s new career in Hollywood. The only sadness was that they travelled without the girls’ father, Luigi, who had died a short time before they were due to leave.

Marisa, who had always been more studious than her sister, had no intention of becoming an actress herself, devoting herself to studying languages and journalism.  She nonetheless did follow Anna into the movie business, but only after claiming she was ‘tricked’ into an audition by the producer Albert Romolo ‘Cubby’ Broccoli.

Broccoli invited her to look round the Twentieth Century Fox studios and while visiting one set he gave her a costume to try on and asked her if she would like to show off her language skills by singing a song in French. Thinking it was just for fun she obliged.

The penny dropped only when she spotted an actress she recognised, Anne Bancroft, wearing the same costume. It turned out that among a small number of people on the set was the director John Ford, who hired her for a part in his 1952 comedy drama, What Price Glory, starring James Cagney and Corinne Calvet.

Although she agreed to have a shorter, catchier name for professional purposes - she chose Pavan after a Jewish soldier her family hid from the authorities during the Second World War - that was one of the few ways in her career resembled that of Pier Angeli.

Marisa Pavan has campaigned for
Alzheimer's research in recent years

Always keen to take parts that demanded something of her acting ability, she played a blind American woman in Down Three Dark Streets (1954), a Native American girl in Drum Beat (1954), the Italian noblewoman Catherine de’ Medici in Diane (1956), a French lady at the Court of Louis XVI in John Paul Jones (1959) and a Jewish woman in ancient Israel in Solomon and Sheba (1959).

Married in Santa Barbara in 1956 to the French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont, she raised two sons, Jean-Claude and Patrick, while continuing to act, diversifying into television in the 1960s and 1970s.

After the tragedy of Pier Angeli’s death from a barbiturates overdose in 1971, which continued to work, but increasingly in France, after she and her husband moved to Gassin, in the South of France.

Once her career was effectively over, she devoted much time to URMA (Unis pour la Recherche sur la Maladie d'Alzheimer), an organisation she created to support and finance research laboratories working to find treatments for Alzheimer’s.

She remained close to her sister Patrizia, also an actress, who worked in Paris dubbing movies. Her husband died in 2001.

The old town of Castello stands above modern Cagliari

Travel tip:

Cagliari is Sardinia’s main port and an industrial centre it is now also a popular tourist destination, with tree-lined boulevards and a charming historic centre, known as Castello, with limestone buildings that prompted DH Lawrence, whose first view of the city was from the sea as ‘a confusion of domes, palaces and ornamental facades seemingly piled on top of one another’, to call it 'the white Jerusalem'.

The tree-line Via Vittorio Veneto in Rome

Travel tip:

Rome’s Via Vittorio Veneto, more often known simply as the Via Veneto, is traditionally one of the most famous, elegant, and exclusive streets in the city, the home of many expensive hotels and of chic cafes where the famous and those who wanted to be famous would hang out, particularly in the 1950s and 60s. Much of the action in Federico Fellini's classic 1960 film La Dolce Vita took place in the Via Veneto area.  The street was actually named to commemorate a the victory of Italian forces at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto towards the end of the First World War.

More reading:

The brilliance of Oscar winner Anna Magnani

How Fellini became Italy's most famous film director

Marcello Mastroianni - star who immortalised Rome's Trevi Fountain

Also on this day:

1918: The death in action of World War One fighter pilot Francesco Baracca

1932: The birth of Hollywood film star Pier Angeli

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Lamberto Maggiorani - unlikely movie star

Factory worker who shot to fame in Bicycle Thieves

Maggiorani with Enzo Staiola, who played his son, Bruno,
in Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves

Lamberto Maggiorani, who found overnight fame after starring in the neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves (1948), was born on this day in 1909 in Rome.

Maggiorani was cast in the role of Antonio Ricci, a father desperate for work to support his family in post-War Rome, who is offered a job pasting posters to advertising hoardings but can take it only on condition that he has a bicycle – essential for moving around the city carrying his ladder and bucket.

He has one, but it has been pawned.  To retrieve it, his wife, Marie, strips the bed of her dowry sheets, which the pawn shop takes in exchange for the bicycle. They are happy, because Antonio has a job which will support her, their son Bruno and their new baby.

However, on his first day in the job the bicycle is stolen, snatched by a thief who waits for Antonio to climb to the top of his ladder before seizing his moment.  The remainder of the film follows Antonio and Bruno as they try to find the bicycle.

As a portrait of life among the disadvantaged working class in Rome in the late 1940s, the film is hailed as a masterpiece, director Vittorio de Sica and his screenwriter Cesare Zavattini fêted by the critics for turning a little-known novel by Luigi Bartolini into a piece of cinema genius.

For Maggiorani, however, his participation was something of a bitter-sweet experience.

An original poster from the 1948 movie

De Sica, who had won an Academy Award two years earlier with Shoeshine, attracted plenty of interest when news spread of his new project, with one American producer willing to offer a lucrative deal to cast Cary Grant in the lead role.

It did not interest De Sica, who was determined to be faithful to the principles of the burgeoning neorealist genre be picking actors who would infuse his characters with realism, regardless of whether they had any experience.

Maggiorani was not an actor at all, but a worker in a steel factory. He had himself experienced unemployment as Rome and De Sica saw him as perfect for the role of Antonio.

Delighted, Maggiorani accepted De Sica’s offer, taking time off work for the filming. He was paid $1,000 dollars, the equivalent of about $10,500 dollars (€8,800) today, with which he was able to give his family their first real holiday and buy new furniture for their home.

His performance was magnificent.  Sometimes, De Sica had to use another actor to dub Maggiorani’s dialogue because his strong Roman accent was occasionally hard to follow, but otherwise he was delighted with how his unlikely protégé understood the way he wanted his character to be portrayed. The critics hailed the arrival of a new star.

Yet once the fuss died down and his pay cheque was spent, Maggiorani found his life had changed. One thousand dollars might have been a large sum but it did not set him up for life.

The director Vittorio de Sica

He went back to the factory, but when orders fell away he was told he was no longer required, the perception being that he must be worth millions of lire after his movie success and that there were others whose need for work was greater.

Shunned by many of his friends, too, after failing to share his perceived wealth, he went back to the movie industry, assuming he would be offered more parts.

He was given some, but usually they were minor roles. Pier Paolo Pasolini gave him a bit part in Mamma Roma, a film about a prostitute trying to start a new life and starring Anna Magnani, but only because he thought his name in the credits would raise the movie’s profile.

De Sica was reluctant to use him at all as anything but an extra. Zavattini recognised and sympathised with his predicament and wrote a screenplay entitled ‘Tu, Maggiorani’ about how non-professional actors such as Maggiorani were sometimes used to execute one particular role and then cast aside.

Maggiorani made 16 movies, the last one a comedy entitled Ostia, directed by Sergio Citti and produced by Pier Paolo Pasolini, but none was particularly successful nor earned him much money.

He died at the San Giovanni Hospital in Rome in 1983 at the age of 73, having never regained the standing he enjoyed with Bicycle Thieves.  It is ironic that the film has recently been recognised as one of the greatest of all time.

The Basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura adjoins
the Campo Verano cemetery

Travel tip:

Lamberto Maggiorani is buried at the Cimitero Comunale Monumentale Campo Verano, situated beside the Basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura, in the Tiburtino area of Rome. It is the city's largest cemetery, with some five million internments. The name 'Verano' is thought to date back to the Roman era, when the area was known as Campo dei Verani.

The San Giovanni Addolorata Hospital is built on top of
Roman Ruins on Celio hill, south-east of the city centre

Travel tip:

The hospital complex San Giovanni Addolorata, where Maggiorani died, is on the Celio hill, an area of ancient Roman urban settlements. Under the existing buildings are archaeological remains, including the Villa of Domitian Lucilla, mother of Emperor Marcus Aurelius.  Renovation work has also uncovered a villa belonging to the powerful Valerii family, great landowners, which contained historic mosaics preserved in perfect condition.

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Suso Cecchi D'Amico - screenwriter

Woman who scripted many of Italy's greatest movies

Suso Cecchi D'Amico, pictured in 1999

Suso Cecchi D’Amico, the most accomplished and sought-after screenwriter in 20^th century Italian cinema, was born on this day in 1914 in Rome.

She collaborated on the scripts of more than 100 films in a career spanning 60 years and worked with almost every Italian director of note, particularly the pioneers of neorealism, the movement in which she was a driving force.

The classic films in which she was involved are some of the greatest in cinema history, including  Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), William Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953), Mario Monicelli's I Soliti Ignoti (1958), which was released in the United States and Britain as Big Deal on Madonna Street, and Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano (1962).

She also worked with Michelangelo Antonioni on Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955) and Franco Zeffirelli on Jesus of Nazareth (1977), but she was best known for her professional relationship with Luchino Visconti, for whom she was the major scriptwriter on almost all his films from Bellissima (1951) to The Innocent (1976), including his acclaimed masterpieces Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and Il Gattopardo - The Leopard (1963).

She was born Giovanna Cecchi in Rome. Just after her birth, her father named her Susannah, of which Suso is a Tuscan diminutive. Her mother, Leonetta Pieraccini, was a painter from a theatrical family in Tuscany, while her father, Emilio Cecchi, from Florence, was a journalist and literary critic. They lived for a while in Ariccia, in the Castelli Romani.

Anna Magnani and Luchino Visconti on the set
of Bellissima, scripted by Cecchi D'Amico

For a few years in the early 1930s, her father had worked for Mussolini's government, running the state-backed film company, which brought her into contact with many prominent figures from the film industry and the theatre, including Italy's leading theatre critic, Silvio D'Amico, whose son, Fedele, would later become Cecchi’s husband.

Cecchi was educated in Switzerland and then at Cambridge University before her father pulled strings to find her a job in Mussolini's ministry of foreign trade, where she worked for seven years as a secretary and interpreter.

She left when she married, from which point she became known as Cecchi D’Amico, although it would have been difficult for her to continue to work for the Fascist government given Fedele’s politics.

Fedele was a prominent member of the Italian resistance during the Second World War and edited an anti-Fascist newspaper, which meant he had to go into hiding.

After the war, he was in poor health and went to Switzerland for treatment for tuberculosis. With three children to raise, Cecchi D’Amico was obliged to become the breadwinner. She helped her father translating English literary works into Italian, including Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure and Shakespeare plays, which in turn led her into writing scripts for the cinema. She and her father worked together, in fact, on her first film, in 1946.

In 1947 she worked on two films directed by Luigi Zampa -  Vivere in Pace (To Live in Peace) and L'Onorevole Angelina (roughly Angelina: Member of Parliament), the latter starring Anna Magnani, who she had met first during the filming of Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City in 1945, in which she had peripheral involvement, and who became one of her closest friends.

Cecchi D'Amico with her husband, Fedele, in 1943

In 1948 she was one of several scriptwriters who shared credits with De Sica and Cesare Zavattini on Bicycle Thieves, based on Luigi Bartolini's novel, which followed an impoverished man who searches for his stolen bicycle with his young son. It was Cecchi D’Amico who contributed the moving final scene in which, in a departure from the book’s ending, the man attempts to steal a replacement bicycle but is caught by the crowd and humiliated in front of his son, which leads them, as it happens, to form an even closer bond. She would later work with De Sica on another neorealist masterpiece, Miracle in Milan, in 1951.

She was invited to work on Roman Holiday after Wyler became aware Ben Hecht's original script, about a princess (Audrey Hepburn) who meets an American reporter (Gregory Peck) in Italy, failed to capture the real mood of 1950s Rome.

Cecchi D’Amico made her first film with Visconti in 1951, a satirical look at the film business entitled Bellisima, again starring Magnani. Subsequently she wrote or co-wrote all Visconti's films except two.

She was popular with directors because she was content to make creative suggestions and let them believe the ideas were their own. She had a special relationship, both professionally and in private, with Visconti, who generally conceived the outline of films himself but looked to Cecchi D’Amico for suggestions and advice.

The story of her life, Suso, aired
on Italian TV in 2007

She helped further the careers of many Italian stars. For instance, the comedy Big Deal on Madonna Street made a star of Marcello Mastroianni and gave Gina Lollobrigida her first significant part.

Cecchi D’Amico scripted several projects for Mario Monicelli. Indeed, her last work was on a Monicelli film, The Roses of the Desert (2006), a war movie set in Libya.

Given a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival in 1995, she explained that had there been more newspapers in the post-War years she might have been a journalist and that the neorealist movement was in essence another way in which she and others could write stories about the Italy they saw around them.

She died in Rome in 2010, having survived her husband by 20 years. Their three children have all made contributions to Italian cultural life - Silvia as a film producer, Caterina in directing the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia film school in Rome, and Masolino as a translator, critic and teacher.

Masolino's daughter, Margherita, interviewed her grandmother for the 1996 book Storie di Cinema (e d'Altro) – Stories About the Cinema (and Other Things), the closest Cecchi D’Amico came to an autobiography.  In 2007, a film about Cecchi D'Amico's life, entitled Suso, featuring conversations with Margherita and directed by the actor Luca Zingaretti was shown on Italian TV.

The Liceo Chateaubriand in Rome

Travel tip:

Cecchi D’Amico went to school in Rome at the Liceo Chateaubriand on Via di Villa Ruffo, not far from Piazza del Popolo at the start of the fashionable Flaminio district, a chic residential area but also home to the Auditorium Parco della Musica, a venue designed by Renzo Piano, the Maxxi Museum of Modern Art and the Ponte della Musica, the modern foot and cycle bridge across the Tiber.

A stall at the Porta Portese market 

Travel tip:

Many of the sights of Rome have been used for movie locations but some are less well known than others.  The exterior shots for Gregory Peck’s apartment in Roman Holiday were filmed in Via Margutta, a street not far from Piazza di Spagna and the Scalinata di Trinita dei Monti, otherwise known as the Spanish Steps, where Federico Fellini once lived.  Many of the scenes in Bicycle Thieves were shot around Porta Portese in Trastevere, which still hosts the largest Sunday market in Rome.

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Amedeo Nazzari - movie star

Sardinian actor seen as the Errol Flynn of Italian cinema

Amedeo Nazzari in a scene from the 1950s film by
Federico Fellini, Nights of Cabiria

The prolific actor Amedeo Nazzari, who made more than 90 movies and was once one of Italian cinema's biggest box office names, was born on this day in 1907 in Cagliari.

Likened in his prime to the Australian-American star Errol Flynn, with whom he had physical similarities and the same screen presence, Nazzari enjoyed a career spanning five decades.

One of his first major successes, in the title role of the 1938 drama Luciano Serra, Pilot, in which he played a First World War veteran, established him as Italy's leading male star in 1930s and he maintained his popularity in the 40s and 50s.

He is remembered also for his appearance in Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, which won the 1957 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film.

Towards the end of his career, he featured in Henri Verneuil's 1969 Mafia caper The Sicilian Clan, for which the score was composed by Ennio Morricone.  His last big screen appearance came in 1976 in A Matter of Time, an Italian-American musical fantasy directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring his daughter, Liza Minnelli.

Nazzari was born Amedeo Carlo Leone Buffa, the son of a pasta manufacturer, Salvatore Buffa, and Argenide Nazzari, who was the daughter of the President of the Court of Appeal in Cagliari, Amedeo Nazzari, whose name he decided to take as his stage name.

The poster advertising Nazzari's first
big success, Luciano Serra, Pilot

Salvatore Buffa died when Amedeo was only six and the family moved to Rome, where his mother guided him through his teenage years and hoped he would develop a career as an engineer. After joining a drama society, however, Amedeo became infatuated with theatre and, ultimately, cinema.

After the death of Rudolph Valentino, the movie sex symbol of the 1920s, he entered a competition organised by Twentieth Century Fox to find an Italian who could step into his shoes.  He was rejected on the grounds that he was too tall and too thin and that he had a gloomy expression.  There was no putting him off, however, and he continued to pursue his dream.

His first big break came in 1936, when the emerging actress Anna Magnani saw him on stage in the theatre and, impressed with his energy, recommended him to her husband, the director Goffredo Alessandrini for a lead role in his next film, Cavalry.  The film debuted at the Venice Film Festival and subsequently played to full houses all over Italy.

A man of strong principals, he turned down Benito Mussolini's invitation to join the Fascist party after the success of Luciano Serra, Pilot.  Nazzari had become a matinee idol and Mussolini wanted to promote him as a symbol of Italian masculinity but Nazzari allegedly told him: 'Thank you, Duce, but I would prefer not to concern myself with politics, occupied as I am with more pressing artistic commitments.'

Given that Mussolini, the driving force behind the Cinecittà complex in Rome that was in time to be known as 'Hollywood on the Tiber', was keen to ally himself with the stars of the movie industry, Nazzari risked his stand being interpreted as a snub but in the event it had no detrimental effect on his career, perhaps because he willingly participated in some wartime productions that were blatantly propagandist, in particular the 1942 film Bengasi, an anti-British war film set in Libya.

A year earlier, in 1941, the Venice Film Festival had awarded Nazzari the title of Best Actor for the film Caravaggio, il pittore maledetto - Caravaggio, the cursed painter - also directed by Alessandrini. Earlier in 1942, he had starred in La cena delle beffe - the dinner of mockery - a costume drama that takes place in the Florence of the Medici, directed by Alessandro Blasetti.

Later, Nazzari would turn down the chance to play opposite Marilyn Monroe in Let's Make Love, his proposed role going to Yves Montand after Nazzari expressed doubt over his ability to play convincingly in an English-speaking part and confessed that he feared his attempts to sing and dance would attract ridicule.

Amedeo Nazzari in the 1950 film Il brigante Musolino

In fact, he rejected most approaches to play comedy roles in Italy, preferring meatier parts such as that of the brave Neapolitan magistrate who stands up to the Camorra in Luigi Zampa's Processo alla città - A city on trial.

Married in 1957 to Irene Genna, an Italian-Greek actress, he had a daughter, Maria Evelina, who followed him into acting and established a successful career in theatre and television.

In his later years he developed kidney problem and died in Rome in November 1979, aged 71, a few months before his daughter gave birth to his first grandchild, Leonardo.

He is buried at the monumental cemetery of Verano in Rome under the name of Amedeo Nazzari Buffa.

Cagliari as seen by travellers arriving by sea

Travel tip:

Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, is an industrial centre and one of the largest ports in the Mediterranean but is also a city of considerable beauty and history.  When D.H. Lawrence arrived in the 1920s, witnessing the confusion of domes, palaces and ornamental facades that seemed to be piled on top of one another as he approached from the sea, he likened the city to Jerusalem, describing it as 'strange and rather wonderful, not a bit like Italy.’

Travel tip:

Rome's Cinecittà studios were founded in 1937 by Mussolini, his son Vittorio and the Fascist government's head of cinema, Luigi Freddi, under the slogan 'Cinema is the Most Powerful Weapon'. The Fascist leader had propaganda in mind but he was also keen to revive the Italian film industry, which was in crisis at the time.  Later, Cinecittà would become closely associated with the director Federico Fellini, who filmed La Dolce Vita, Satirycon and Casanova there, among other productions.  It is also used for shooting television shows and houses the set for Grande Fratello, the Italian version of Big Brother.

More reading:

Anna Magnani - Oscar-winning actress famous for Rossellini's Rome, Open City

Four-times Oscar winner Federico Fellini left huge legacy of influence

Rudolph Valentino - heartthrob actor who died tragically young

Also on this day:

1936: Death of the brilliant writer Luigi Pirandello

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Virna Lisi - actress

Screen siren turned back on glamour roles to prove talent

Virna Lisi in a Hollywood publicity shot

The actress Virna Lisi, born on this day in 1936, might have become the new Marilyn Monroe if she had allowed Hollywood to shape her career in the way the movie moguls had planned.

She was certainly blessed with all the physical attributes to fulfil their commercial ambitions - no less a screen goddess than Brigitte Bardot called her 'the most beautiful woman in the world' - but decided she was too good an actress to be typecast as mere window dressing or eye candy and ultimately rejected their advances.

In time she proved to herself that she made the right decision when her portrayal of the manipulative Catherine de' Medici, the Italian who was Queen of France between 1547 and 1559, in Patrice Chéreau’s 1994 film La Reine Margot won her three awards - Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, a César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) and the Italian film critics' award, the Nastro d'Argento (Silver Ribbon).

Born Virna Pieralisi in the town of Jesi, in the province of Ancona  in Marche, where her father had a marble importing business, she moved with her family to Rome in the early 1950s and Virna's progress through school had her earmarked for a place at business college.

But on the recommendation of a friend of the family, the singer and actor Giacomo Rondinella, she was given a part in a film, E Napoli canta (And Naples sings).  Just 17 years old and a natural beauty, so much did she charm Italian film producers that she was quickly in demand.

It was clear to the critics that she could act, winning praise for her performance in Sergio Corbucci's Romolo e Remo (Romulus and Remus), and she won many parts in Italian TV dramas. But it was her looks that were most sought after, earning her a lucrative contract advertising toothpaste in a TV commercial, her face accompanied by the slogan 'con quella bocca può dire ciò che vuole' (with that mouth, she can say whatever she wants).

Hollywood studio bosses wanted Virna Lisi
 to become the new Marilyn 

She minded less about her acting talent being overlooked in the early 1960s than she would later, especially when the chance came to make significant money in Hollywood.

Transformed into a blue-eyed blonde temptress, Lisi starred opposite Jack Lemmon in the comedy How to Murder Your Wife, famously making her entrance by emerging from a giant cake, and had other hits with Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra and Rod Steiger.

The press fawned over her, one magazine article describing her as 'like Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly put together', but although she accepted being a cover girl she soon tired of lightweight, fluffy roles. She wanted to be seen as an actress, rather than simply someone who looked good on screen.

She turned down an invitation to pose in Playboy magazine, bought herself out of her contract with United Artists and returned to Italy. Back home, as if to prove she was serious about wanting different, more challenging parts, she rejected the title role offered by Dino de Laurentiis in Roger Vadim's film Barbarella, which went instead to Jane Fonda.

It took a while to achieve her ambitions but, little by little, Lisi shed her former image.  Her performance alongside Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani in The Secret of Santa Vittoria, in which an Italian wine-producing village hides millions of bottles from plundering Nazis, was one step in her chosen direction.

She took a break into the early 1970s to spend more time with her husband and their son, Corrado, but on her return was acclaimed for her role as the sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, which won her the first of six Nastro d'Argento awards for best actress or best supporting actress.

Virna Lisi achieved her ambition where her portrayal
of Catherine de' Medici won acclaim and awards

At the age of 57, she was overcome with emotion when he name was read out for La Reine Margot at Cannes. "My son told me not to cry," she said later. "It was very stupid - but it had taken me 35 years."

Two years later, Lisi won an Italian Golden Globe for best actress in Follow Your Heart (1996), in which she played an elderly woman dying of cancer.

Lisi continued to work until she died in Rome in December 2014, aged 78, having filmed a television comedy earlier in the same year.  Her husband, Franco Pesci, an architect she had met in Rome in the late 1950s and to whom she had been married 53 years, passed away in 2013.

Travel tip: 

Rome's Colosseum, the largest and most famous Roman amphitheatre in the world, was constructed over eight years between 72 AD and 80 AD. It was capable of accommodating 50,000 spectators and had 80 entrances. It remains the city's most visited tourist attraction, ahead of St Peter's Basilica and The Pantheon.

Hotels in Rome by venere.com

The 18th century Teatro Pergolesi in Jesi

Travel tip:

Jesi, which was the site of a settlement in the fourth century BC, has developed as an industrial centre but maintains its cultural heritage within perfectly preserved medieval walls, built along the lines of its old Roman defences between the 13th and 14th centuries.  Notable buildings include the Cathedral of San Settimio in Piazza Federico II, the nearby 12th century church of San Floriano, which once contained paintings by Lorenzo Lotto that are now housed in the Pinacoteca Civica.  The Teatro Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, named in honour of the 18th century musician and composer who was born in Jesi, stands in the elegant Piazza della Repubblica.

Hotels in Jesi by Hotels.com

More reading:

Anna Magnani - Oscar-winner whose characters shared her down-to-earth qualities

Dino de Laurentiis - producer who help take Italian cinema to the world

Roberto Benigni - eccentric comedian, actor and director who scored a first for Italy

Also on this day:

1830: Death of the king of Naples and Sicily

(Photos of Virna Lisi from YouTube; photo of Teatro Pergolese from gaspa via Wikimedia Commons)

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