Life is Beautiful - Oscar-winning movie

Roberto Benigni masterpiece released in Italy

Life is Beautiful is remembered as
a modern cinematic masterpiece

The triple Oscar-winning movie La Vita è Bella, which became better known by its English title Life is Beautiful, made its debut in front of Italian cinema audiences on this day in 1997.

Co-written, directed and starring the Tuscany-born actor Roberto Benigni, the film was released in the United States in October 1998 and in the United Kingdom in February 1999. 

At the Academy Awards in March 1999, it received nominations in seven categories, winning three of them, including Best Actor for Benigni, who joined Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren as the only Italians to win Oscars in the two leading actor categories.

Life is Beautiful, which played to English-language audiences in the original Italian but with English subtitles, also picked up the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, while composer Nicola Piovani won for Best Original Score.

In total, the film won 22 awards at film festivals around the world, including the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, a BAFTA for Benigni as Best Actor in a Leading Role, and no fewer than nine David di Donatello awards, considered to be the Italian equivalent of the Oscars.

These included Best Cinematography for Tonino Delli Colli, his fourth David di Donatello in a career spanning more than 50 years that saw him work extensively with the writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini as well as Sergio Leone, Federico Fellini and many other greats of Italian cinema history.

Life is Beautiful was marketed as a comedy-drama, although as the story of an Italian-Jewish bookshop owner in Arezzo seized and taken to a concentration camp by the Nazis, along with his wife and four-year-old son, its subject matter is hardly light-hearted.

The comedy is created by the sense of fun and jollity in Benigni’s character, Guido, as he woos his future wife, Dora - played by Nicoletta Braschi, who is married to Benigni in real life - during the first part of the story.

Roberto Benigni's comic acting talent came
to the fore in his portrayal of Guido

It is Guido’s sense of humour that underpins the drama of the second part of the film, that follows the Nazi occupation of northern Italy and forced deportations, in which Guido goes to extraordinary lengths to shield his son, Giosuè, portrayed by Giorgio Cantarini, from the true horror that confronts them.  

Guido somehow convinces Giosuè that their stay at the camp is actually a complicated game in which he must perform different tasks, earning points in the process, and that the first to reach 1,000 points wins the prize of a tank. He is told that if he cries, pines for his mother - who is forced to stay in another part of the camp - or says that he is hungry, he will lose points, while quiet boys who hide from the guards earn extra points.

He manages to maintain the pretence for his son’s sake almost to the point of liberation by the Allies, with Giosuè believing that the Sherman tank that leads a unit of American soldiers into the camp to free the prisoners is the prize his father promised he would win.

Despite its difficult storyline, Life is Beautiful was enormously successful, winning public acclaim as well as the approval of critics. Produced on a budget of €12.8 million (approx $15 million, £11 million), it achieved gross earnings of $230.1 million (€196 million, £173 million), which made it one of the highest grossing foreign language films in cinema history.

Nicoletta Braschi starred
opposite her husband

Benigni, whose co-author was the highly respected screenwriter Vincenzo Cerami, says the film was partially inspired by the book In the End, I Beat Hitler, a memoir suffused with dark humour by Italian Auschwitz survivor Rubino Romeo Salmonì, and by the experiences of Benigni's own father, who spent two years in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II.

He reportedly based the names of the protagonists on Dora De Giovanni and Guido Vittoriano Basile, the aunt and uncle of Nicoletta Braschi. Guido was arrested for anti-fascist activities during World War II and subsequently died in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Benigni, the first to win the Oscar for Best Actor with a performance in a foreign language, became almost a national hero in Italy, his own exuberance at the Academy Awards ceremony, where he climbed over the back of seats to receive the award on stage from screen icon Loren, attracting almost as much attention as the film itself.

In the context of Italian cinema history, Life is Beautiful has been placed by some commentators alongside Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves and Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece La dolce vita among films that have reshaped international perceptions of Italian big-screen artistry.

Arezzo's famously sloping main square, Piazza Grande,
featured in several scenes in Life is Beautiful

Travel tip:

Much of the location shooting in the first part of Life is Beautiful took place in Arezzo, the city in Tuscany. Situated at the confluence of four valleys - Tiberina, Casentino, Valdarno and Valdichiana – its medieval centre suffered massive damage during the Second World War but a remarkable number of monuments, churches and museums survived, and the city recovered to be one of the most prosperous in Tuscany. Arezzo’s main sights include the Basilica di San Francesco, with its beautiful frescoes by Piero della Francesca, the central Piazza Grande, with its sloping pavement in red brick and the setting for several scenes, the Medici Fortress, the duomo and a Roman amphitheatre.  Arezzo’s original duomo was built on the nearby Pionta Hill, over the burial place of Donatus of Arezzo, who was martyred in 363. In 1203 Pope Innocent III had the cathedral - dedicated to Saints Donato and Pietro - moved within the city's walls, to the current site in another elevated position a short walk from Piazza Grande.  The construction of the current structure started in 1278 and continued in phases until 1511, although the façade visible today, designed by Dante Viviani, was not completed until 1914, replacing one left unfinished in the 15th century.  The interior contains several notable artworks, including a relief by Donatello, entitled Baptism of Christ, and a cenotaph to Guido Tarlati, lord of Arezzo until 1327, said to be designed by Giotto, near to which is Piero della Francesca's Mary Magdalene.  The wooden choir of the Grand Chapel was designed by Giorgio Vasari.

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The colonnaded front of Terni's main church,
the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta

Travel tip:

The concentration camp scenes in Life is Beautiful were filmed mainly at an abandoned factory, adapted for the purpose, near the city of Terni in Umbria, about 82km (49 miles) south of the region’s capital, Perugia. Terni, originally a Roman settlement, of which some remains still exist, including the Cascata delle Marmore, a spectacular 165-metre man-made waterfall. In the medieval period, Terni became associated with Saint Valentine, a former bishop of Terni martyred by the Romans, probably in the fourth century. He was adopted as Terni’s patron saint, his ashes kept in an urn under the main altar of the present Basilica di San Valentino, in Viale Papa Zaccaria, giving rise to Terni becoming known as the City of Love.  Terni’s main church, though, is the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta, with its wide portico along the front and eight statues of former bishops of Terni, including the aforementioned San Valentino. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Terni developed into a major steel-producing hub and today the city balances its industrial character with cultural heritage and natural attractions, making it both a working city and a tourist destination.  

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More reading:

How Life is Beautiful rocketed Roberto Benigni to fame

The five-year-old who captivated audiences with his portrayal of Giosuè

A real-life Holocaust survivor spared while her family perished 

Also on this day:

69: The death of Roman emperor Aulus Vitellius

1676: The birth of San Leonardo da Porto Maurizio

1856: The death of Sicilian patriot Francesco Bentivegna

1947: The birth of singer and TV presenter Gigliola Cinquetti

1948: The birth of journalist Giuliana Sgrena

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Omero Antonutti - actor and voice dubber

Narrator of Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful enjoyed long and successul career

Omero Antonutti had success on
screen and as a stage actor

The actor Omero Antonutti, who acted in around 60 films and was the Italian voice of many international stars, was born on this day in 1935 in Basiliano, a village about 13km (eight miles) west of the city of Udine in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northeast Italy.

His most acclaimed performance came in Padre padrone, a 1977 film directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, a Palme d’Or winner at Cannes that was considered by many critics to be the co-directing brothers’ finest work.

Antonutti worked with the Taviani brothers again on La notte di San Lorenzo (1982), which won the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes, and Kaos (1984) in which he took the part of the playwright Luigi Pirandello in a film based on some of Pirandello’s own short stories.

He was often asked to portray significant figures in dramatisations of real-life events. For example, he took the part of Roberto Calvi, the ill-fated chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano in the Giuseppe Ferrara’s 2002 feature The Bankers of God: The Calvi Affair, and played the shady Sicilian banker Michele Sindona in Michele Placido’s 1995 film Un eroe borghese - A Bourgeois Hero. In Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy, directed by Marco Tullio Giordano in 2012, Antonutti was cast as the Italian president, Giuseppe Saragat.

At the same time, his strong, deep voice meant his skills were in big demand as a voice dubber, with Italian cinema and television audiences preferring international productions to be voiced over by Italian actors, rather than have the visual experience spoiled by subtitles.

Antonutti was the Italian voice of Christopher Lee in the Lord of the Rings series, Sleepy Hollow, The Hobbit and other films. He voiced over Michael Gambon in The King’s Speech, Christopher Plummer in The Mystery of the Templars - National Treasure and Millennium - The Girl with the Hatred, and John Hurt in V for Vendetta. Omar Sharif, Robert Duvall, Donald Sutherland and Rutger Hauer were others whose words were interpreted by Antonutti.

Antonutti's voice can be heard as
the narrator in Life is Beautiful

Robert Benigni chose him to narrate Life is Beautiful in 1997, the film going on to win Oscars for Best Foreign Film, Best Leading Actor for Benigni himself and Best Soundtrack for Nicola Piovani.

As a young man, Antonutti lived in Trieste, the port city on the border of Italy and Slovenia. He found work in the shipyards but acted in his spare time, in the late 1950s appearing in the shows of the Silvio D’Amico Acting School before joining the company of the Teatro Stabile di Trieste.

His first film part came in 1966, when he appeared in Le piacevoli notte - Pleasant Nights, a trilogy of comedic tales set in the Middle Ages directed by Luciano Lucignani, acting in the illustrious company of Ugo Tognazzi, Gina Lollobrigida and Vittorio Gassman.

But it was not until the 1970s that his big screen career began in earnest. After landing a part in La donna della domenica (1975), the dramatisation of a popular murder mystery starring Marcello Mastroianni and Jacqueline Bisset and directed by Luigi Comencini, it was only two years before the Taviani brothers cast him as Efisio Ledda, the despotic father of Gavino Ledda in Padre Padrone, based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same title by Gavino Ledda, which describes the way Efisio refused to let his son attend elementary school in the 1940s and forced him instead to work on the family sheep farm in Sardinia, which meant he grew up illiterate.

The acclaim Antonutti received for the dramatic intensity of his portrayal of Efisio set him up for a long career in the cinema, part of which he spent in Spain, where his life is commemorated at the Valencia Film Festival.

Antonutti (left) played opposite Saverio Marconi
in the Taviani brothers' Padre Padrone

The last important movie in which he appeared was Gianna Amelio’s Hammamet, released in 2020, a story about the last years in Tunisia of the controversial former prime minister, Bettino Craxi, who went into voluntary exile there to escape jail after being prosecuted as part of the Tangentopoli bribes scandal that rocked Italian politics in the 1990s. Antonutti, by then in his 80s, played Craxi’s father.

In his 50-plus years as a movie and television actor, Antonutti never forgot his theatrical roots. He often returned to the Teatro Stabile in Trieste, taking part whenever a milestone was celebrated in the theatre’s history and occasionally even accepting a part in a play, such was his love of acting in its purest form, on stage in front of a live audience.

Sadly, he did not live long enough to witness the release of his final film. In declining health for a number of years, he died from cancer in November 2019 at the Ospedale Civile in Udine where he was receiving treatment.

Antonutti had spent the final 10 years of his life with his wife, Graziella, whom he married in 2009. His funeral took place at the Chiesa di Sant'Antonio Nuovo in Trieste.

The Loggia del Lionello is one of the architectural
features of Udine's Piazza della Libertà

Travel tip:

Udine, the nearest city to Antonutti’s home village of Basiliano, is an attractive and wealthy provincial city, known as the gastronomic capital of Friuli. Udine's most attractive area lies within the mediaeval centre, which has Venetian, Greek and Roman influences. The main square, Piazza della Libertà, features the town hall, the Loggia del Lionello, built in 1448–1457 in the Venetian-Gothic style, and a clock tower, the Torre dell’Orologio, which is similar to the clock tower in Piazza San Marco - St Mark's Square - in Venice. Long regarded as something of a hidden gem, Udine does not attract the tourist traffic of other, better-known Italian cities, yet with its upmarket coffee shops, artisan boutiques and warm, traditional eating places in an elegant setting, it has much to commend it.

Trieste's Canal Grande is overlooked by the 
Chiesa di Sant'Antonio Nuovo

Travel tip:

The port of Trieste, tucked away in a bay at the top of the Adriatic sea, is the capital of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region. Within only a few kilometres of the border with Slovenia to its east and south and less than 30km (19 miles) from the northern border of Croatia, Trieste had been disputed territory for thousands of years and officially became part of the Italian Republic only as recently as 1954. Previously it had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and then Yugoslavia, who disputed the border until the Treaty of Osimo in 1975.  The area today is one of the most prosperous in Italy and Trieste is a lively, cosmopolitan city and a major centre for trade and ship building.  The city has a coffee house culture that dates back to the Habsburg era.  Caffè Tommaseo, in Piazza Nicolò Tommaseo, near the grand open space of the Piazza Unità d’Italia, is the oldest in the city, dating back to 1830.

Also on this day:

1486: The birth of celebrated courtesan Imperia Cognati

1530: The death of Florentine military leader Francesco Ferruccio

1546: The death of architect Antonio da Sangallo the Younger

1778: The inauguration of Milan’s Teatro alla Scala

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Giorgio Cantarini - actor

Child star of Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful

Cantarini's performance as Roberto Benigni's son in Life Is
Beautiful captivated cinema audiences

Giorgio Cantarini, who delivered an award-winning performance in the triple Oscar-winning movie Life Is Beautiful when he was just five years old, was born on this day in 1992 in Orvieto.

Cantarini was cast as Giosuè, the four-year-old son of Roberto Benigni’s character, Guido, in the 1997 film, which brought Academy Awards for Benigni as Best Actor and, as the director, for Best Foreign Film. For his own part, Cantarini was rewarded for a captivating performance in the poignant story with a Young Artist award.

Three years later, in Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning blockbuster Gladiator, Cantarini was given another coveted part as the son of Russell Crowe’s character, Maximus.

Born to parents who separated soon after his fifth birthday, Cantarini went to an audition for the part of Giosuè after an uncle read a description in a newspaper article of the kind of child Benigni wanted and told him he was a perfect match.

Cantarini remains a close friend of
the director Roberto Benigni (above)

Cantarini recalled in an interview in 2018 that the audition consisted simply of a conversation with Benigni, with no acting involved. Once shooting began, he was told what to do on a scene-by-scene basis.

Despite the success of Life Is Beautiful and Gladiator, and the acclaim he received, Cantarini went back to school with no thought of becoming an actor when he grew up. His ambition was to become a footballer. Once he was in high school, however, his friends and teachers convinced him he should not let his acting talent go to waste.

After appearing in a small number of films and tv dramas - plus an appearance on the the popular tv show Ballando con le Stelle - he joined hundreds of hopefuls in applying for a place at the prestigious Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia - the national film school - in Rome and to his surprise and delight was accepted as one of just six boys and six girls to be admitted in 2012.

After graduation, he was immediately cast in the lead role of AUS- adotta uno studente - Adopt a Student - the first online-only series produced by Rai.

Following a period working in Paris, he returned to Italy in 2016 to perform, direct and produce Harold Pinter's play The Dumb Waiter for theatres in Rome and Vicenza, in collaboration with his friend and colleague, Miguel Gobbo Diaz.

Giorgio Cantarini today

In 2017, he played the lead role in Il dottore dei pesci - The Fish Doctor - an Italo-American short film directed by Susanna Della Sala, which was presented at numerous film festivals in Europe and Canada.

At the beginning of 2018 he moved to New York to study at the New York Film Academy and later in the year  was selected for the cast of Lamborghini - the Legend, directed by Bobby Moresco, filmed in Italy and starring Antonio Banderas and Alec Baldwin.

Cantarini’s home in Italy is in Viterbo in Lazio, where his mother and brother Lorenzo live. He remains in touch with Roberto Benigni, who provided a reference for his application for a visa to work in the United States.

Travel tip:

Orvieto, where Cantarini was born, is a small city in Umbria with a population of just 20,000, built on the top of a cliff of volcanic tuff stone. Surrounded by defensive walls built by the Etruscans, it makes an imposing sight. Situated about 120km (75 miles) north of Rome, it boasts one of Italy’s finest cathedrals in Italy - the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta - with a stunningly beautiful Romanesque Gothic facade inlaid with gold mosaics fronting a building constructed from alternate layers of black and white marble.  The city’s medieval streets are known as a cultural paradise - busy with cafés and restaurants, bookshops, artisans' workshops and antique emporia.

Travel tip:

Viterbo, where Cantarini now lives when in Italy, is the largest town in northern Lazio, situated about 80km (50 miles) north of Rome. It is regarded as one of the best preserved medieval towns in Italy, with many buildings in the San Pellegrino quarter featuring external staircases. The town’s impressive Palazzo dei Papi, was used as the papal palace for about 20 years during the 13th century. Completed in about 1266, the palace has a large audience hall, which connects with a loggia raised above street level by a barrel vault.

More reading:

How Life Is Beautiful turned Roberto Benigni into a household name

Dino De Laurentiis – the Campanian pasta seller helped make Italian cinema famous 

The brilliance of Life Is Beautiful cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli

Also on this day:

1710: The birth of the famed castrato opera singer Caffarelli

1948: The birth of World Cup-winning coach Marcello Lippi

1950: The birth of controversial entrepreneur Flavio Briatore



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