Showing posts with label Luchino Visconti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Luchino Visconti. Show all posts

6 September 2023

Nino Castelnuovo - actor

Starred in sumptuous French musical and TV adaptation of literary classic

Nino Castelnuovo worked with some of Italy's  most famous 'golden age' directors
Nino Castelnuovo worked with some of Italy's
 most famous 'golden age' directors
The actor Nino Castelnuovo, best known for playing opposite a young Catherine Deneuve in a Palme d’Or-winning French musical and as the star of a celebrated TV adaptation of Alessandro Manzoni’s classic novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), died on this day in 2021 at the age of 84.

Castelnuovo’s talent came to the fore during a golden age of Italian cinema, working with leading directors such as Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, Pietro Germi, Luigi Comencini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and starring opposite such luminaries as Alberto Sordi, Monica Vitti and Claudia Cardinale.

Yet it was the visually beautiful, deeply sentimental French musical, Le parapluies de Cherbourg - The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - that catapulted him to fame in 1964, five years after his screen debut.

Directed by Jacques Demy, the musical, in which the dialogue is entirely sung (although by voice dubbers rather than the actors appearing on screen), Castelnuovo played the handsome Guy, a mechanic, who is in love with Deneuve’s character, Geneviève, who works in her mother’s umbrella shop.

Their romance is interrupted when Guy is called up to serve in the Algerian War. Geneviève gives birth to their child while Guy is away but they lose touch. When they meet again, six years later, they are both married to other people, their lives having taken very different courses. An affecting tale, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for five Academy Awards.

Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo arrive at a promotional event for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo arrive at a
promotional event for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Born in the lakeside town of Lecco, in Lombardy, Castelnuovo was christened as Francesco. His mother, Emilia Paola, a maid, was married to Camillo Castelnuovo, who worked in a button factory. 

Nino worked at different times as a mechanic and a painter. An enthusiastic cinema-goer, he idolised Fred Astaire, which prompted him to take lessons in gymnastics and dancing.  After moving to Milan at the age of 19, he studied drama at the Piccolo Teatro, presided over by the director Giorgio Strehler.

His first screen appearance came via a bit part in a film titled The Virtuous Bigamist in 1956, but his first credited role was in the 1959 thriller Un maledetto imbroglio, directed by Germi, based on Carlo Emilio Gadda’s crime novel, which was titled in English as That Awful Mess on Via Merulana. The film was shown in America as The Facts of Murder.

The following year he starred with Alain Delon in Visconti’s acclaimed drama Rocco and His Brothers and alongside the actor-director Pasolini in The Hunchback of Rome. 

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg won him gushing reviews, yet where Deneuve’s career took off internationally after the film’s release, Castelnuovo fared less well.  He was never short of parts, going on to make more than 50 films, yet Italian cinema audiences in particular were slow to warm to him.

Castelnuovo with Claudia Cardinale in a scene from his first credited movie, Un maledetto imbroglio
Castelnuovo with Claudia Cardinale in a scene from
his first credited movie, Un maledetto imbroglio
In the event, it was the small screen that provided him with his second, career-defining part, as Renzo, the principal male character in a television adaptation of Manzoni’s epic I promessi sposi, first published in three volumes in 1827.

The revised, definitive version published in 1842 has become the most widely-read novel in the Italian language, studied by virtually every Italian secondary school student and regarded by Italian scholars as a literary masterpiece on a par with Dante’s Divine Comedy.

By coincidence, Manzoni places Renzo and Lucia, the couple at the centre of the novel’s storyline, in a village just outside Lecco, where their story begins.  The novel is notable for its description of 17th century Milan during a major outbreak of plague. Rai’s adaptation won much praise from critics and Castelnuovo enjoyed a surge of popularity that won him an audience with Pope Paul VI, among other things.

Thereafter, Castelnuovo became a familiar face in TV dramas both in Italy and in other European countries, although he continued to make films and was keen to work in theatre, too. He performed in several stage productions of the works of Carlo Goldoni, the 18th century Venetian playwright, and returned to the cinema in 1996 when director Anthony Minghella cast him as an archaeologist in the Oscar-winning The English Patient.

Despite suffering problems with his eyesight due to glaucoma, Castelnuovo continued working, mainly on television, into his late 70s.  He suffered two personal tragedies, losing both his brothers. In 1976, Pierantonio died after being beaten up by a group of revellers at a festival, while Clemente was killed in a car accident in 1994.

Nino himself died in hospital in Rome after a long period of ill health. He was survived by his wife, the actress Maria Cristina Di Nicola, and a son, Lorenzo, from a previous relationship.

Piazza XX Settembre in the Lombardy town of Lecco, looking towards the Basilica di San Nicolò
Piazza XX Settembre in the Lombardy town of
Lecco, looking towards the Basilica di San Nicolò
Travel tip:

Lecco, where Nino Castelnuovo was born, lies at the end of the south eastern branch of Lago di Como, which is known as Lago di Lecco. The town is surrounded by mountains including Monte Resegone, which has cable-car access to the Piani d’Erna lookout point, and Monte Barro, a regional park area that contains the remains of a fifth-century settlement and the Costa Perla birdwatching station. In the centre of Lecco, the Basilica di San Nicolò, with its neo-Gothic bell tower, is a notable attraction, while the town makes much of it being the childhood home of Alessandro Manzoni, who chose it as the home of his betrothed lovers, Renzo and Lucia, in I promessi sposi. The historic fishermen’s quarter of Pescarenico, which features in the book, has a number of restaurants that make it well worth a visit.

Bellagio is one of many pretty towns dotted around the shores of Lago di Como
Bellagio is one of many pretty towns dotted
around the shores of Lago di Como
Travel tip:

Lago di Como - Lake Como - the third largest lake in Italy after Garda and Maggiore, has been a popular retreat for aristocrats and the wealthy since Roman times, and remains a popular tourist destination. Its many lakeside villas include the Villa Carlotta, overlooking the lake at Tremezzo, built in the late 18th century as a holiday home for the Clerici family, successful silk merchants, the Villa Olmo in Como, built for the marquis Innocenzo Odescalchi, and  Villa d'Este, in Cernobbio, now a luxury hotel and, between 1816 and 1817, home to Caroline of Brunswick, estranged wife of the Prince of Wales and later Queen Consort of King George IV of the United Kingdom.  Numerous pretty towns along the shores of the lake, which covers an area of 146 sq km (56 sq miles), include Bellagio, Menaggio and Varenna. 

Also on this day:

1610: The birth of Francesco I d’Este, Duke of Modena

1620: The birth of composer Isabella Leonarda

1825: The birth of painter Giovanni Fattori

1925: The birth of novelist and screenwriter Andrea Camilleri


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28 November 2019

Laura Antonelli - actress

Pin-up star of 1970s sex-comedies


Laura Antonelli first moved to Rome to be a gymnastics teacher
Laura Antonelli first moved to Rome
to be a gymnastics teacher
The actress Laura Antonelli, whose career was at its peak while Italian cinema audiences were indulging a taste for sex-comedies during the 1970s, was born on this day in 1941 in Pula, a port city now part of Croatia but then known as Pola, capital of the Italian territory of Istria.

A curvaceous brunette who posed for both the Italian and French editions of Playboy magazine in the early 1980s, although Antonelli was mostly remembered for appearing scantily clad opposite male stars such as Marcello Mastroianni and Michele Placido, she was a talented actress, winning a Nastro d’Argento - awarded by Italian film journalists - as best actress in Salvatore Samperi’s 1974 comedy-drama Malizia (Malice).

She also worked on several occasions for Luchino Visconti, one of Italy’s greatest directors. Indeed, she starred in 1976 as the wife of a 19th century Roman aristocrat in Visconti’s last film, L’Innocente (The Innocent), based on the novel The Intruder by Gabriele d'Annunzio.

However, the success of her career was largely built on roles in films such as Devil in the Flesh (1969), The Divine Nymph (1975) and Tigers in Lipstick (1979), the content of which outraged Italy’s fledgling feminist movement and shocked the Catholic Church.

Devil in the Flesh, also known as Venus in Furs and based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s erotic novel of the latter name, was released in Germany in 1969 but immediately banned upon its first showing in Italy in 1973, with all copies of the film confiscated by the authorities on the grounds of indecency.  It was re-released two years later, but in a heavily-censored version.

Antonelli was most frequently cast as a sultry  temptress in 1970s sex-comedies and dramas
Antonelli was most frequently cast as a sultry
temptress in 1970s sex-comedies and dramas
Malizia was her breakthrough film, but even that had a plot that was sexually highly-charged as Antonelli portrayed a widower’s young housekeeper who battles the advances of both her employer and his teenage sons. The film was a box-office hit and Antonelli became Italy’s newest sex symbol.

She was seldom out of the gossip magazines and in 1972 began a long and sometimes tempestuous relationship with the French playboy actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, her co-star in The Scoundrel (1971) and Docteur Popaul (1972), whose previous girlfriends included Ursula Andress and Brigitte Bardot.  They had met in Paris.

Antonelli was born Laura Antonaz in Pola. Her family was displaced during the Second World War and lived in refugee camps before moving to Naples, where her father found work as a hospital administrator.

As a teenager, her parents regarded her as ugly and clumsy and pressed her to take up gymnastics, in her words, “in the hope I would at least develop some grace.” She became proficient, excelling in rhythmic gymnastics and eventually qualified as a gymnastics instructor.

She moved to Rome and began a career as a high-school gym teacher. Her social life in Rome enabled her to meet people in the entertainment industry, who helped her first find modelling work and then some small parts in films.  She made her big-screen debut in 1966.

Antonelli had a long relationship with the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo
Antonelli had a long relationship with
the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo
Antonelli, who had been married to a publisher, Enrico Piacentini, broke up with Belmondo in 1980.

She had another major success in 1981 opposite the French actor Bernard Giraudeau in Ettore Scola’s drama Passione d’amore (Passion of Love), in which she played the beautiful married mistress of an army captain. The film was later the inspiration for a Stephen Sondheim musical Passion.

Thereafter, Antonelli career began to slip into decline and after a 1991 sequel to Malizia bombed, she began a retirement that saw her eventually become a recluse, her well-being not helped by a 10-year battle to overturn a conviction for dealing cocaine after the drug was discovered by police in a raid on her home. She protested her innocence and finally won €108,000 (£76,000) in compensation.

Unwilling to be seen in public in her later years after botched cosmetic surgery, she become the beneficiary of a law passed in Italy that provides financial assistance for artists who have fallen on hard times.  She died in June 2015 from a heart attack, aged 73, at her villa in Ladispoli, a modest seaside resort about 35km (22 miles) from Rome.

The Croatian port city of Rovinj on the Istrian peninsula,  which was part of Italy between 1920 and 1945
The Croatian port city of Rovinj on the Istrian peninsula,
 which was part of Italy between 1920 and 1945
Travel tip:

The Istrian peninsula, which includes a number of beautiful towns and cities such as Pula, Rovinj, Perec and Vrsar, was partitioned to Italy in the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920 after the dissolution of the Austria-Hungary empire following the First World War. In the Second World War it became a battleground for rival ethnic groups and political groups. It was occupied by Germany but with their withdrawal in 1945  Yugoslav partisans gained the upper hand and Istria was eventually ceded to Yugoslavia. It was divided between Croatia and Slovenia following the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991. Nowadays, only the small town of Muggia, near Trieste, remains part of Italy.

The remains of the Roman villa of Pompeo at Ladispoli, the seaside resort near Rome, where Antonelli died
The remains of the Roman villa of Pompeo at Ladispoli,
the seaside resort near Rome, where Antonelli died
Travel tip:

Modern Ladispoli is a somewhat characterless seaside resort made up of hotels and apartment buildings built on a grid of criss-crossing parallel streets. Ladispoli occupies the area of the ancient Alsium, the port of the Etruscan city of Cerveteri and later a Roman colony.  Remains of both ancient civilisations are visible in the Etruscan necropolis of Monteroni and Vaccina and the Roman Villa of Pompeo.  There is also a castle, the Castle of Palo, built in the 12th century and rebuilt 400 years later.

Also on this day:

1873: The death of astronomer Caterina Scarpellini

1907: The birth of novelist Alberto Moravia

1913: The birth of film music composer Mario Nascimbene

1977: The birth of World Cup hero Fabio Grosso


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9 May 2019

Carlo Maria Giulini - conductor

Boy violinist who became a maestro of the baton


Giulini conducted some of the world's  great orchestras in a long career
Giulini conducted some of the world's
great orchestras in a long career
Carlo Maria Giulini, who conducted many of the world’s great orchestras in a career spanning 54 years, was born on this day in 1914 in Barletta, a town on the Adriatic coast 66km (41 miles) north of the port city of Bari.

Appointed musical director of Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1953, he went on to become one of the most celebrated conductors of orchestral performances, developing long associations with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia of London in particular, as well as the orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

He became renowned for projecting serene authority from the podium, as well as his selfless devotion to the score. A handsome man who was always impeccably tailored, he had a magisterial presence. Initially most recognised for the breadth and detail he brought to the operas of Verdi and Mozart, he eventually became as well known for his orchestral repertoire.

Carlo Maria Giulini was born to a Neapolitan mother and a father from Lombardy. Although born in the south of Italy, he was raised in Bolzano, which was part of Austria until 1915. For Christmas in 1919, when he was five, Giulini was given a violin and he progressed rapidly thanks to local instructors, notably a pharmacist who was also a violinist, whom he nicknamed Brahms.

Giulini with his wife Marcella de Girolami, to whom he was married for more than half a century
Giulini with his wife Marcella de Girolami, to whom
he was married for more than half a century
When the distinguished Italian violinist and composer Remy Principe gave a recital in Bolzano in 1928, he invited Giulini to study with him at Italy's foremost conservatory, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. He soon won a place in the academy’s prestigious orchestra.

He played under such giants of conducting as Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, and Otto Klemperer. Giulini’s first public performance was the Brahms Symphony No. 1 under Walter.

In 1940, Giulini won a competition with the prize of a chance to conduct the St. Cecilia orchestra. However, before the concert took place at which he was due to conduct, he was drafted into the Italian army and sent to the front in Croatia, in spite of being unequivocally opposed to Benito Mussolini and a committed pacifist. He refused to fire his gun at human targets.

In 1942, on a 30-day break in Rome, he married Marcella de Girolami, his girlfriend since 1938. They would remain together until her death 53 years later.

Giulini began his career mainly conducting opera, first for the Rai radio orchestra
Giulini began his career mainly conducting
opera, first for the Rai radio orchestra 
In September 1943, the Armistice between Italy and Allied armed forces was signed, but the occupying Nazis refused to abandon Rome. When Giulini's Italian commander ordered his troops to fight on, Giulini went into hiding, living for nine months in a tunnel underneath a home owned by his wife's uncle, along with two friends and a Jewish family. There were posters around Rome showing his face with instructions that he be shot on sight.

After the Allies liberated Rome in June 1944, Giulini - one of the few conductors not tainted by associations with Fascism - was chosen to lead the Accademia's first post-Fascist concert, held in July 1944. On the programme was the Brahms Symphony No. 4, which would become almost his signature work, one that he conducted 180 times over the course of his career.

In 1948, Giulini conducted his first opera, a production of Verdi’s La Traviata for Italian radio, before conducting his first theatre production of the same opera in Bergamo in 1950.

After hearing Giulini’s radio broadcast of Debussy's La mer, the great conductor Arturo Toscanini asked to meet Giulini and recommended him to be musical director at La Scala. He took up the post in 1953, although in the event he resigned after members of the audience jeered Maria Callas during a run of operas in 1956.

In 1958, Giulini conducted a highly acclaimed production of Verdi's Don Carlos at the Royal Opera House in London - directed by Luchino Visconti - and although he returned to Covent Garden several more times, and to other venues in Europe, he became so disillusioned with some of the modern visual interpretations of classic works that he effectively quit opera in 1965 to concentrate on orchestral works. Even the Metropolitan Opera in New York could not persuade him to change his mind.

Giulini, who worked into his 80s, had a long association with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Giulini, who worked into his 80s, had a long association
with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
In 1955 he made his American debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, leading to a 23-year association with the orchestra, of which he was principal guest conductor from 1969 to 1972 and continued to appear with them regularly until 1978. In 1956, he began his association with the Philharmonia of London.

In addition to his role in Chicago, he was music director of the Vienna Symphony from 1973 to 1976. From 1978 to 1984, he served as principal conductor and music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, launching his tenure there with performances of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

In addition to being in great demand as a guest conductor of major orchestras around the world, Giulini made numerous recordings with the Philharmonia in London.

Two Mozart recordings, Don Giovanni and Le Nozze Di Figaro, brilliantly produced by Walter Legge, were recalled as exceptional. The recordings that followed during the early 1960s reflected a London concert repertory that included music by Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Debussy and Ravel, as well as brilliant Rossini overtures and memorable performances of the Verdi Requiem.

Giulini often said that he found the public role of being a conductor uncomfortable and that ideally he would prefer to do no publicity at all. Yet he had an eccentric side that appeared to enjoy fame, to the extent that during his time in Los Angeles he would sometimes be spotted driving around in an open-top Mercedes, wearing sunglasses, a flowing scarf and a large hat that could scarcely fail to get him noticed.

His later years in America were marred somewhat by the ill health and eventual death of his wife in 1995, not long after which, in 1998, he announced his retirement, returning to Italy and living in the area around Brescia in Lombardy, where he died in 2005 at the age of 91.

The city of Bolzano is set against a backdrop of  stunning Alpine views
The city of Bolzano is set against a backdrop of
 stunning Alpine views
Travel tip:

Bolzano, where Giulini grew up, is a city in the South Tyrol province of northern Italy, also known as Alto Adige. It is in a valley amid hilly vineyards. A gateway to the Dolomites mountain range in the Italian Alps, it has a medieval city centre, where can be found wooden market stalls are laid out with Alpine cheese, ham and dark, seeded loaves. Bolzano us the home of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, which features a Neolithic mummy called Ötzi the Iceman. Nearby is the imposing 13th-century Mareccio Castle, and the Duomo di Bolzano with its Romanesque and Gothic architecture.

The beautiful 14th century Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Barletta
The beautiful 14th century Basilica di Santa
Maria Maggiore in Barletta
Travel tip:

Giulini’s home town of Barletta is a working port with modern suburbs and an attractive historic centre, where one of the most famous sights is an ancient bronze 'Colossus', thought to be the oldest surviving bronze Roman statue. The identity of the figure the statue represents is not clear but one theory is that it is the Byzantine Emperor Marcian and that the statue’s original home was in Constantinople.  Barletta has a beautiful 12th century cathedral, renovated in the 14th century, the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.

More reading:

How a chance opportunity changed conductor Arturo Toscanini's life

The life of the passionate maestro Riccardo Muti

Why Luchino Visconti was known as the aristocrat of Italian cinema

Also on this day:

1740: The birth of composer Giovanni Paisello

1946: Italy's King Victor Emmanuel III abdicates

2013: The death of fashion designer Ottavio Missoni


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1 May 2019

Uberto Pasolini - film producer and director

Roman count who found unexpected fame with The Full Monty


Uberto Pasolini worked for 12 years as a banker before finding work in the film industry
Uberto Pasolini worked for 12 years as a banker
before finding work in the film industry
The film director and producer Uberto Pasolini, who gained international recognition when his British comedy The Full Monty became a one of UK cinema’s biggest commercial success stories in 1997, was born on this day in 1957 in Rome.

A nephew of the great Italian director Luchino Visconti, Pasolini worked for 12 years as an investment banker in England before following his dream to work in the film industry, abandoning his career to work, initially without pay, on the set of the David Puttnam-Roland Joffé film, The Killing Fields, in Thailand.

Puttnam took him on, at first as a location scout, before Pasolini moved to America to become part of Puttnam’s production team in Los Angeles. He set up his own company in London in 1994 and went on to direct some of his own productions, including the critically acclaimed 2008 movie Machan, based on a true story about a group of would-be immigrants from Sri Lanka who overcome visa problems stopping them from moving to the West by pretending to be their country’s national handball team.

Like Luchino Visconti, who was a descendant of the same Visconti family that ruled Milan between the 13th and 15th centuries, Pasolini was from a noble background. Indeed, he was born Count Uberto Pasolini dell’Onda.

Pasolini had always dreamed of emulating his uncle, the director Luchino Visconti
Pasolini had always dreamed of emulating his uncle,
the director Luchino Visconti
He met Visconti on only a handful of occasions but admits he was to a degree inspired by his uncle’s films, particularly the early ones, made in the era of neorealism, which provided a window into a world and social circumstances very different from his own life of privilege, which he ultimately found uninspiring.

Pasolini left Italy as a teenager, first to attend an obscure college in Wales and then the London School of Economics, where he embraced the 1970s punk movement, but in time followed a natural progression into the City of London, where his talent enabled him quickly to climb the banking ladder.

After 12 years, however, his desire to emulate his uncle Luchino became too powerful. He obtained an interview with Puttnam, who was recruiting candidates to work on his production team for The Killing Fields. He was rejected but travelled to Bangkok anyway, at his own expense, and turned up on the set, willing to do nothing more testing than make tea if it meant being involved. In the event, Puttnam was impressed with Pasolini’s persistence and took him on as a runner.

It was not long before he was working as a location scout, which he did not only on The Killing Fields but on two others Joffé films, The Frog Prince and his 1986 hit The Mission, starring Robert De Niro, for which he was also named as assistant producer.

The unexpected success of The Full Monty made Pasolini's name in the movie business
The unexpected success of The Full Monty made
Pasolini's name in the movie business
After following Puttnam to Colombia Pictures in Los Angeles, where he worked on a number of productions, Pasolini returned to London in 1988, first to work for Enigma Films, before launching his own production company, Redwave Films.

He threw himself into learning all he could about working class Britain, drawing on the fascination instilled in him by Luchino Visconti’s early films about the less privileged levels of society.  After receiving some acclaim for Palookaville, a comedy caper about three burglars, he came up with the idea for The Full Monty, about six unemployed men in Sheffield, four of them former steelworkers, who decide to form a striptease act.

The comedy, directed by Peter Cattaneo, explored subjects such as unemployment, fathers' rights, homosexuality, body image and working class culture, even suicide. It was a major success with the critics and at the box office, grossing more than $250 million from a budget of only $3.5 million and for a time was the highest-grossing film in UK history. It won the BAFTA Award for Best Film, and was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Musical or Comedy Score, winning the last.

Pasolini went on to have more success with The Closer You Get (2000) and The Emperor’s New Clothes (2001) before throwing himself into another major project, a story inspired by a real event in 2004, when 23 Sri Lankan men convinced immigration authorities in Germany that they were members of the non-existent Sri Lanka national handball team, were granted visas, played in a tournament, in which unsurprisingly they lost every match, and then disappeared.

The result was a 2008 movie, Machan, which he directed as well as produced. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it received a 10-minute standing ovation.

Pasolini, married to the film music composer Rachel Portman, enjoyed further acclaim for his 2013 movie Still Life, his second as director, which won him a best director award at the Venice Film Festival and a number of other awards.

Luchino Visconti's family lived in the 16th century  Palazzo Visconti di Modrone in Milan
Luchino Visconti's family lived in the 16th century
Palazzo Visconti di Modrone in Milan 
Travel tip:

Pasolini’s uncle, Luchino Visconti, grew up in the Palazzo Visconti di Modrone, a 16th century palace that can be found in Via Cino del Duca, about one kilometre from the centre of Milan.  It came into the possession of the modern Visconti family in the 19th century, when it changed hands for 750,000 lire Milanese.  The building, spread over three floors, is one of the richest examples of Milanese rococo.

The elegant Palazzo Santacroce in Rome, which  became the Pasolini dall'Onda residence
The elegant Palazzo Santacroce in Rome, which
became the Pasolini dall'Onda residence
Travel tip:

The family seat of the Pasolini dall’Onda family in Rome was at one stage the monumental Palazzo Santacroce in Piazza Benedetto Cairoli. Commissioned by Onofrio Santacroce and designed by Carlo Maderno between 1598 and 1602, it was modified by Francesco Peparelli in 1630 and underwent further changes during the 19th century. Once the home of a valuable paintings collection, Palazzo Santacroce is nowadays home to the Italian Latin American Institute. A beautiful fountain featuring Venus, winged angels and dolphins embellishes the former garden.

More reading:

Luchino Visconti, the aristocrat of Italian cinema

The enigma that was Michelangelo Antonioni

How pasta seller Dino De Laurentiis put Italian cinema on the map worldwide

Also on this day:

1908: The birth of writer Giovanni Guareschi

1927: The birth of actress and jazz singer Laura Betti

1947: The Portella della Ginestra massacre


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12 February 2019

Claudia Mori - actress and singer

Film star who married pop icon Adriano Celentano



Claudia Mori was half of what was at one time Italy's golden celebrity couple
Claudia Mori is half of what was at one time
Italy's golden celebrity couple
The actress, singer and later television producer Claudia Mori, married for more than half a century to Italy’s all-time biggest-selling recording artist, Adriano Celentano, was born on this day in 1944 in Rome.

She and Celentano met in 1963 on the set of Uno strano tipo (A Strange Type) a comedy film in which they were both starring. The two were married the following year at the Church of San Francesco in Grosseto in Tuscany, having kept their intentions secret to avoid publicity.

Mori was only 20 when she and Celentano - six years her senior - were married but she had already made several films.

Born Claudia Moroni, she made her film debut in Raffaello Matarazzo’s romantic comedy Cerasella at the age of just 15 in 1959, featuring as the title character opposite Mario Girotti, the actor who would later change his name to Terence Hill and become famous as the parish priest Don Matteo in the long-running television series of the same name.

The following year she had a supporting part a laundry worker colleague of Alain Delon in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) and over the next two years played another supporting part in the Robert Aldrich’s biblical epic Sodom and Gomorrah, starring Stewart Granger and Pier Angeli, as well as co-starring as a beautiful princess in Giorgio Simonelli’s Ursus nella terra di fuoco (Ursus in the Land of Fire). 

A 15-year-old Mori on the beach at Vietri-sul-Mare with co-star Mario Girotti during her movie debut in 1959
A 15-year-old Mori on the beach at Vietri-sul-Mare with
co-star Mario Girotti during her movie debut in 1959
In 1964, she co-starred with her new husband in Super rapina a Milano (Super-robbery in Milan), the first film Celentano also directed.

At the same time, she was developing a singing career, releasing her first record - Non guardarmi (Don’t look at me) - in 1964.  Her career was boosted by teaming up with Celentano in a number of duets, notably with Chi non-lavora non-fa l'amore (Those who don't work don't make love), with which they won the 1970 Sanremo Festival.

In the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Mori alternated between acting and singing. More movie success came with Rugantino, L’emigrante (The Emigrant) and Culastrisce Nobile Veneziano (released in the United States as Lunatics and Lovers), in which she starred opposite Marcello Mastroianni

All were comedies, as was Yuppi Du, the 1975 movie in which she again starred with Celentano, who also directed the film. The English actress Charlotte Rampling was among her co-stars and the film was an Italian entry at the Cannes Film Festival.

Claudia Mori and Adriano Celentano celebrate their 1970 Sanremo victory
Claudia Mori and Adriano Celentano
celebrate their 1970 Sanremo victory
During the same decade, Mori enjoyed her biggest solo recording success with Buonasera Dottore.  She became CEO of her husband’s record label, Clan Celentano, producing her husband's celebrated album of duets with Mina, Italy’s all-time biggest selling female artist, which sold more than two million copies.

Celentano himself - now 81 - can look back on a career in which he has sold in excess of 200 million records, well ahead of any other Italian recording artist.

More recently, Mori developed a television career. She was a judge on the Italian version of The X-Factor and her television production company Ciao ragazzi (Hello Boys) has turned out several successful mini-series of drama and drama-documentary films.

She and Celentano are still together, although they separated for a period in the 1980s following Celentano’s affair with another actress.  They had three children, Rosita, Giacomo and Rosalinda. Rosita is a television presenter, Rosalinda an actress.

Positano, with its dramatic cliffside setting, is one of the jewels of the Amalfi Coast
Positano, with its dramatic cliffside setting, is one of
the jewels of the Amalfi Coast
Travel tip:

Claudia Mori’s debut movie Cerasella was filmed on location in Naples and on the Amalfi Coast, the 50km (31 miles) stretch of Campania coastline between the southern side of the Sorrentine Peninsula and Vietri-sul-Mare, the resort just outside Salerno. Notable for its steep cliffs and rocky inlets and coves, with a winding road that seems to cling to the cliff face, the area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site comprising a string of villages and towns, the most famous of which are Positano, Amalfi and Ravello. The town of Amalfi, which occupies a dramatic setting at the foot of the cliffs, attracts huge numbers of visitors each year. Its ninth-century Duomo dominates the town's central piazza, sitting at the top of a wide flight of steps.

Find accommodation in Amalfi with Booking.com


Galbiate, where Claudia Mori and Adriano Celentano have a house, has views over Lago di Annone
Galbiate, where Claudia Mori and Adriano Celentano have
a house, has views over Lago di Annone
Travel tip:

Mori and Celentano’s main home is in Galbiate, a small town in Lombardy about 50km (31 miles) northeast of Celentano’s home city of Milan and close to the small lakeside city of Lecco. Galbiate is close to Lago di Annone and Lago di Garlate, two small lakes to the south of Lake Como.  The area between the lakes includes the Natural Park of Monte Barro, which is the home of more than 1,000 varieties of plants in a climate of biodiversity probably unique in Lombardy. The area is also the habitat of birds of prey such as the the kestrel, buzzard, brown kite and peregrine falcon and the rare royal albanella.


3 December 2018

Angela Luce – actress

Film star and singer was born in Spaccanapoli


The actress Angela Luce has worked with some of Italy's leading directors
The actress Angela Luce has worked with
some of Italy's leading directors
Neapolitan actress and singer Angela Luce was born Angela Savino on this day in 1937 in Naples.

She has worked for the theatre, cinema and television, is well-known for singing Neapolitan songs, and has written poetry and song lyrics.

At 14 years old, Angela took her first steps toward stardom when she took part in the annual music festival held at Piedigrotta in the Chiaia district of Naples, singing the Neapolitan song, Zi Carmeli.

Her cinema career began in 1956, when she was only 19, when she appeared in Ricordati di Napoli, directed by Pino Mercanti. Since then she has appeared in more than 80 films and has worked for directors including Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mario Amendola, Luigi Zampa and Pupi Avati.

Angela won a David Donatello award for L’amore molesto directed by Mario Martone and was also nominated for the Palma d’Oro at Cannes.

She has acted opposite such illustrious names as Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi, Vittorio de Sica and Totò.

Angela Luce (right) in a scene from Franco Rossi's
1960 film Morte di un amico
Her voice has been recorded in the historic archives of Neapolitan songs and she has won prizes for her singing. She wrote the lyric for the song Voglia, which, set to the music of Angelo Fiore, was awarded the Premio Unicef in 1984.

Angela has been quoted as saying she was ‘discovered’ by the Neapolitan dramatist Eduardo De Filippo. She has interpreted many significant roles from his plays in the theatre and appeared with him on Italian television in his play, Il contratto.

During a newspaper interview given last year on her 80th birthday, Angela said the occasion was a good opportunity to ‘thank God for giving her strength and health and a loud, clear voice’, so that she was able to sing without a microphone and, in church, without an orchestra.

The colourful street known as Spaccanapoli is close to where Angela Luce was born
The colourful street known as Spaccanapoli is close
to where Angela Luce was born
Travel tip:

Angela was born in Via Mezzocannone in the part of Naples known as Spaccanapoli, a lively area, rich with churches, historic buildings and bars. Close to her home is the main building of the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, known as Gesu Vecchio, which was built in the 16th century as a Jesuit College and became home to the University in the 18th century.


The church of Santa Maria di Piedigrotta is in the fashionable Chiaia district of Naples
The church of Santa Maria di Piedigrotta
is in the fashionable Chiaia district of Naples
Travel tip:

Angela made her first appearance as a singer at the annual song-writing competition the Festival of Piedigrotta, held near the Church of Santa Maria di Piedigrotta in the Chiaia neighbourhood on the seafront of Naples. The competition was held to judge songs written in Neapolitan dialect and over the years inspired such classics as O sole mio, Funiculi, Funicula, Torna a Surriento and Santa Lucia.


More reading:

What made Vittorio de Sica a maestro of Italian cinema

How Vittorio Gassman was once called 'the Olivier of Italian actors'

Eduardo De Filippo and the 'essence' of Naples

Also on this day:

1596: The birth of violin maker Nicolò Amati

1911: The birth of film music composer Nino Rota

1947: The birth of controversial Lega Nord politician Mario Borghezio


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1 September 2018

Vittorio Gassman - actor

Stage and screen star once dubbed ‘Italy’s Olivier’


Vittorio Gassman in the 1948 movie Riso amaro, which provided him with his breakthrough as a screen actor
Vittorio Gassman in the 1948 movie Riso amaro, which
provided him with his breakthrough as a screen actor
Vittorio Gassman, who is regarded as one of the finest actors in the history of Italian theatre and cinema, was born on this day in 1922 in Genoa.

Tall, dark and handsome in a way that made him a Hollywood producer’s dream, Gassman appeared in almost 150 movies but he was no mere matinée idol.

A highly respected stage actor, he possessed a mellifluous speaking voice, a magisterial presence and such range and versatility in his acting talent that the Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham once called him ‘the Lawrence Olivier of Italy’.

He enjoyed a career that spanned five decades. Inevitably, he is best remembered for his screen roles, although by the time he made his movie debut in 1945, he had appeared in more than 40 productions of classic plays by Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, and others.

On screen, his major successes included his portrayal of the handsome scoundrel Walter opposite Silvana Mangano in Giuseppe De Santis's neorealist melodrama Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1948), and several Commedia all’Italiana classics, including Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal On Madonna Street, 1958), La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959) and L'armata brancaleone (1965), and Dino Risi's Il sorpasso (1962).

With Silvana Mangano and Alberto Sordi (right), his co-stars in the comedy classic La grande guerra (1959)
With Silvana Mangano and Alberto Sordi (right), his co-stars
in the comedy classic La grande guerra (1959)
At this time, his popularity was rivalled only by Alberto Sordi, his co-star in La grande guerra, which shared the Golden Lion prize at Venice in 1959 with a Rossellini film.

Gassman’s portrayal of a blind military man in Risi’s 1974 film Profumo di donna received the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. Al Pacino played the same part and won an Oscar in the 1992 remake, Scent of a Woman.

His flirtation with Hollywood came after he met and fell in love with the American actress Shelley Winters while she was touring Europe.

When Winters returned to Hollywood because of contractual obligations, he followed her there and married her. With his natural charisma and fluency in English he landed a number of roles in Hollywood, including Charles Vidor’s Rhapsody opposite Elizabeth Taylor, and with Gloria Grahame in Maxwell Shane’s film noir The Glass Wall.

He was the only Italian star in the cast of King Vidor's epic War And Peace (1956), produced by Dino De Laurentiis in Rome and for which the Italian composer Nino Rota wrote the music score. Later, Gassman gave distinguished performances in the Robert Altman films A Wedding (1978) and Quintet (1979).

Gassman was the only Italian cast in the 1956 epic War and Peace, in which he is pictured with Audrey Hepburn
Gassman was the only Italian cast in the 1956 epic War and
Peace,
in which he is pictured with Audrey Hepburn
Born to a German father and a Jewish Italian mother, Gassman had aspirations to be a lawyer. But his mother encouraged him to pursue his interest in acting and he remained devoted to his first love, theatre, throughout his career.

A student at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica in Rome, he made his stage debut in Milan in 1942 before moving back to Rome to work at the Teatro Eliseo.

Even after his film debut in 1946 was followed by his breakthrough role in Bitter Rice two years later, he devoted much energy to Luchino Visconti's theatre company in productions such as Tennessee Williams' Un tram che si chiama desiderio (A Streetcar Named Desire) and Come vi piace (As You Like It) by Shakespeare.

In 1952 he co-founded and co-directed the Teatro d'Arte Italiano, which produced the first complete version of Hamlet in Italy.  Later in his career, he created his own company, Teatro Popolare Itinerante, with which he toured Italy staging the works of 20th century authors and playwrights as well as the classics of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and the Greek tragicians. He also founded a theatre school in Florence.

For a while he was the star of a popular TV series, Il Mattatore, which was later turned into a movie.

Married three times - to actresses Nora Ricci, Shelley Winters and Diletta D'Andrea - he also had numerous affairs.  The father of two daughters and two sons - one of whom, Alessandro, became a film actor - Gassman died in June 2000, in Rome, following a heart attack.

The Piazza de Ferrari in the centre of Genoa
The Piazza de Ferrari in the centre of Genoa
Travel tip:

Gassman’s home city of Genoa boasts Italy's largest sea port, its maritime power going back to the 12th and 13th centuries, when the Republic of Genoa ruled the Mediterranean. The old city is fascinating for its large maze of narrow caruggi (streets), opening out occasionally into grand squares such as Piazza de Ferrari, site of an iconic bronze fountain and Teatro Carlo Felice opera house. There is a Romanesque duomo, the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, recognisable for its black-and-white-striped facade and frescoed interior.

The Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatic in Rome
The Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatic in Rome
Travel tip:

The Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica "Silvio d'Amico", the dramatic arts academy where Gassman trained as an actor, can be found in Via Bellini, between Villa Borghese and the Parioli district, in an elegant four-storey building. Founded in 1936 by the critic and theatrical theorist Silvio D'Amico, in addition to Gassman it has seen students such as Rossella Falk, Anna Magnani, Paolo Stoppa, Nino Manfredi, Gian Maria Volonté, Monica Vitti, Michele Placido, Nicoletta Braschi and Luca Zingaretti attend lectures and workshops there.

More reading:

Mario Monicelli - the father of Commedia all'Italiana

The genius of Alberto Sordi

How Silvano Mangano's acting talents overcame her critics

Also on this day:

1878: The birth of conductor Tullio Serafin

1886: The birth of vaudeville star Guido Deiro


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30 July 2018

Michelangelo Antonioni - film director

Enigmatic artist often remembered for 1966 movie Blowup


Michelangelo Antonioni was described as one of Italian cinema's 'last greats'
Michelangelo Antonioni was described
as one of Italian cinema's 'last greats'
The movie director Michelangelo Antonioni, sometimes described as “the last great” of Italian cinema’s post-war golden era, died on this day in 2007 at his home in Rome.

Antonioni, who was 94 years old when he passed away, was a contemporary of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti.

Remarkably, three of that trio’s most acclaimed works - Fellini’s La dolce vita, Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers and Antonioni’s L’avventura - appeared within a few months of one another.

Antonioni’s genius lay in the way he challenged traditional approaches to storytelling and drama and the way people viewed the world in general.

His characters were often intentionally vague, his most favoured themes being social alienation and bourgeois ennui, reflecting his view that life left many people emotionally adrift and unable to find their bearings.  His movies often had no strong plot in a conventional sense, were dotted with unfinished conversations and seemingly disconnected incidents. His style was seen as a rejection of neorealism, his films more a metaphor for human experience, rather than a record of it.

He divided opinions. At the Cannes Film Festival in 1960, when L’avventura was shown, half the audience booed and jeered. But Antonioni’s fellow director Roberto Rossellini sprang to his defence, hailing the movie, about a young woman's disappearance during a boating trip and how her lover and her best friend join forces to search for her but eventually begin having an affair, as a work of genius.

The actress Monica Vitti in a scene from L'eclisse (1962)
The actress Monica Vitti in a scene from L'eclisse (1962)
L’avventura (1960) was the first of three films, with Le notte (1961) and L’eclisse (1962), that were described as his “trilogy on modernity and its discontents”. All starred a young Roman actress called Monica Vitti, who was at the time Antonioni’s lover.  Some critics argue that the exquisite, mysterious qualities that Vitti brought to her acting were the key to the trilogy’s success and Antonioni’s breakthrough with large international audiences. His first film in colour, The Red Desert (1964) explored similar themes.

He and Vitti stayed together for 10 years, their relationship falling between his two marriages. His third wife, Enrica Fico, was also a director.

Antonioni made a number of films in English, the most famous of which were Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975) and, above all, Blowup (1966), a movie starring David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave that was shocking at the time for its sex scenes, which was loosely based on the life of David Bailey, the photographer who captured the Swinging Sixties with more style and impact than any of his contemporaries.

Antonioni was honoured with numerous awards for his films
Antonioni was honoured with numerous
awards for his films
Born in Ferrara, in the Po valley, Antonioni came from a family that enjoyed largely self-made prosperity thanks to his father’s efforts, though taking evening classes alongside his day job, to establish a career that was paid well enough for him to rise above his working-class roots.

Growing up, Antonioni loved music and drawing, with a fascination for architecture, and had he not fallen in love with the cinema he might have been an accomplished violinist. He went to university in Bologna, where he obtained a degree in economics, before beginning work for Il Corriere Padano, a newspaper based in Ferrara, where he wrote film reviews.

In his 20s he played tennis, winning amateur championships in northern Italy, and moved to Rome. During the Second World War he fought against the Fascists as a member of the Italian Resistance.

In 1942, Antonioni ventured into film-making for the first time, co-writing A Pilot Returns with Roberto Rossellini. He made his own debut with Gente del Po (1943), a short film about poor fishermen in the Po valley. His earliest feature films, many of which were lost after Rome was liberated by the Allies, were neorealist in style, before he broke away from that genre in the 1950s to make films with the theme of social alienation that would become common in his work.

Antonioni received numerous film festival awards and nominations throughout his career. He is one of only three directors to have won the Palme d'Or (Cannes), the Golden Lion (Venice) and the Golden Bear (Berlin), and the only director to have won these three and the Golden Leopard (Locarno). He received an honorary Academy Award in 1995.

The Este Castle dominates the centre of Ferrara
The Este Castle dominates the centre of Ferrara
Travel tip:

The city of Ferrara in Emilia-Romagna is about 50km (31 miles) northeast of Bologna. It was ruled by the Este family between 1240 and 1598. Building work on the magnificent Este Castle 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. Apart from the castle, the city has other architectural gems, including many the striking Renaissance building Palazzo dei Diamanti, so-called because the stone blocks of its facade are cut into the shape of diamonds.

The Archiginnasio is the oldest part of Bologna University
The Archiginnasio is the oldest part of Bologna University
Travel tip:

Bologna University, where Antonioni studied, was founded in 1088 and is the oldest university in the world. The oldest surviving building, the Archiginnasio, is now a library and is open Monday to Friday from 9 am to 7 pm, and on Saturdays from 9 am to 2 pm. It is a short walk away from Piazza Maggiore and the Basilica di San Petronio in the centre of the city.

More reading:

Fellini's legacy to Italian cinema

Luchino Visconti - the aristocrat of Italian cinema

Why Roberto Rossellini is known as the 'father of neorealism'

Also on this day:

1626: The Naples earthquake that killed 70,000 people

1909: The birth of chemist Vittorio Erspamer, the scientist who discovered serotonin



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