Il sorpasso - commedia all’italiana classic

Film regarded as director Dino Risi’s masterpiece

Jean-Louis Trintignant (left) and Vittorio Gassman
driving along Via Aurelia in Il sorpasso

Il sorpasso, which has come to be seen as one of the most influential Italian films of the 20th century and a defining example of the commedia all’italiana genre, was released for Italian cinema audiences on this day in 1962.

Directed by Dino Risi, produced by Mario Cecchi Gori and with Vittorio Gassman outstanding as one of the film’s male lead characters, made its debut in the United States in December of the following year under the title The Easy Life. It was also a pioneer for the so-called “road movie” in Italy.

It has been judged as such a significant contribution to Italian culture that in 2008, Il sorpasso - 'Overtaking' in Italian - was included in the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage's 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978."

Its inclusion put it in the company of Bicycle Thieves, La strada, La dolce vita, Divorce Italian Style, Rocco and his Brothers and The Leopard among those movies to have made a lasting mark on the minds of Italian audiences.

Il sorpasso tells the story of two strangers - 36-year-old Bruno, a brash, carefree extrovert played by Gassman, and Roberto, a shy law student - who meet in Rome during a holiday and set off in a flashy Lancia Aurelia sports car on a spontaneous road trip through the city and the countryside of Lazio and Tuscany. 

Bruno’s reckless charm and devil-may-care approach to life draws Roberto into a whirlwind of fast cars, flirtations and impulsive adventures, sharply at odds with his own cautious nature. 

A publicity poster for Dino Risi's
Il sorpasso, released in 1962

In time, Roberto wishes he were more like Bruno, yet learns that his new friend has a broken marriage, a daughter whom he never sees and is running out of money, despised by his estranged wife for the shallowness of his character.

As they travel, the film highlights Italy’s booming consumer culture and generational tensions. What begins as a comic journey gradually darkens, culminating in a sudden, tragic accident as Bruno, addicted to il sorpasso - overtaking - inevitably attempts one risky manoeuvre too many.

Dino Risi directed more than 50 films over the course of a career spanning half a century but Il sorpasso is considered to be his greatest work and a cornerstone of commedia all’italiana, a genre that blended traditional comedy with biting satire on the contradictions of contemporary Italian society.

Risi, who collaborated with Ettore Scola and Ruggero Maccari on the screenplay, made Il sorpasso as a critique of Italy’s postwar so-called "economic miracle".

Releasing the movie during a period of rapid modernisation and consumerism, Risi’s aim with its themes was to highlight the emptiness behind material prosperity and the reckless pursuit of pleasure.

The two main characters - the impulsive Bruno and the reserved Roberto, played by the French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant - embody the clashing values of postwar Italy: exuberant modern life versus cautious tradition. 

The road trip is seen as a metaphor for self-discovery and societal change, with the title itself chosen to reflect what Risi saw as Italy’s rapid, sometimes reckless overtaking of tradition in pursuit of modernity, its tragic conclusion designed to symbolise the fragility of life and the risks of seeking change with too little pause for reflection.

Dino Risi directed more than 50 movies
in a career spanning half a century

Italy’s "economic miracle” was the period of unprecedented growth it experienced between about 1958 and 1963, a time of industrial expansion and rising wages, when mass consumer goods such as cars and televisions became symbols of prosperity.

Bruno’s Lancia Aurelia convertible was not just a car but a metaphor for speed, freedom, and the allure of modern Italy. It represented both the excitement of progress and the dangers of reckless living.

Il sorpasso was at first largely ignored by Italian film critics, yet became a hit with cinemagoers, who made it one of the two highest-grossing Italian-made films in Italy for the year ended June 30, 1963.

Those critics warmed to it in time, however. The country’s National Union of Film Journalists handed Gassman their coveted Nastro d’Argento award for Best Actor and the film is now generally considered an undisputed classic, mentioned in the same breath as the work of directors as revered as Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti. 

It came to be seen as particularly significant among social commentators who see the years of the “economic miracle” in a rather less positive light. While it was a period that saw prosperity and living standards rise after the bleak aftermath of World War Two, it can also be interpreted as the start of Italy’s transformation from a traditionally agricultural and family-centred society into a shallower, individualistic one driven by consumerism.

Il sorpasso influenced many later directors in their work, among them Martin Scorsese, the brilliant American director of Sicilian descent, who cited Il sorpasso as "the model" for his 1986 hit The Color of Money, which starred Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. 

Parioli is known for its
elegant tree-lined streets

Travel tip:

Though born in Milan, Dino Risi lived in Rome, including the last 30 years of his life in an apartment in the Aldrovandi Residence in the Parioli district, one of the Italian capital’s most elegant residential areas, renowned for its leafy boulevards, refined atmosphere and cultural landmarks. Nestled between the Villa Borghese gardens and the curve of the Tiber, Parioli developed in the early 20th century as a haven for Rome’s elite. Its name derives from the Monti Parioli hills, once dotted with pear orchards, now home to stately villas, Art Nouveau palazzi, and spacious apartments. The neighbourhood, favoured by diplomats, professionals and artists, is dotted with chic cafés, gourmet restaurants and tranquil parks such as Villa Ada, one of Rome’s largest green spaces and once the Rome residence of the Italian Royal family. Parioli is also the home of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna and the Auditorium Parco della Musica, which hosts major concerts and events. As well as a number of elegant hotels, Parioli has many luxury apartments to rent, which make it popular with well-heeled visitors to the capital.

Parioli, Rome hotels from Hotels.com

The modern Strada Statale I follows the coastal
route of the ancient Via Aurelia

Travel tip:

In Il sorpasso, the road trip embarked upon by Bruno and Roberto largely follows the course of the ancient Via Aurelia, which was originally built in 241BC by consul Gaius Aurelius Cotta, with the aim of connecting Rome with the colonies along the Tyrrhenian coast, ending in Pisa but linking with the Via Aemilia Scaura, which led from Pisa to Genoa. Combined with the Via Appia, which led from Rome to Apulia, it meant the Romans had use of a continuous route from the Ligurian coast in the northwest to the port city of Brindisi in the southeast. The Roman road stretched over 1,000km, with about 700km of the Via Aurelia’s route still in use as a paved road, incorporated into the Strada Statale 1, also known as SS1 Aurelia, which runs from Rome to the French border near Ventimiglia. The adaptation of the ancient road for modern use was helped by the way it was built. The Via Aurelia, like other Roman roads at the time, was paved at a width of approximately 4.6 metres (15 feet), to allow standard size chariots to pass each other comfortably.  The Romans, ever inventive, could be said to have been the pioneers of modern service areas in that every 15 miles or so along Via Aurelia, a ‘statio’ would be constructed to provide travellers with food, shelter, stables and a means to buy horses or other travel equipment for their journey.

Search Pisa hotels with Expedia

More reading:

How Dino Risi saw the potential in future stars such as Sophia Loren and Alberto Sordi

Otto e mezzo - the Fellini masterpiece hailed as ‘better’ than La dolce vita

Michelangelo Antonioni - the last great of Italian cinema’s post-war golden era

Also on this day:

343: The death of Saint Nicholas of Bari

1478: The birth of courtier and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione

1586: The birth of astronomer Niccolò Zucchi

1794: The birth of opera star and Royal voice coach Luigi Lablache

1921: The birth of lawyer and composer Piero Piccione

1975: The birth of businessman Andrea Agnelli

Home

Clara Calamai - actress

Star remembered for groundbreaking moments in Italian cinema history

Clara Calamai enjoyed huge popularity with
Italian cinema audiences in the '30s and '40s

The actress Clara Calamai, best known for two Italian cinema classics of the 1940s and for a cult 1970s horror film, died in the Adriatic resort of Rimini on this day in 1998, at the age of 89.

Calamai’s career is generally seen to have peaked with her appearances in Luchino Visconti’s 1943 crime drama Ossessione and, three years later, in Duilio Coletti’s melodrama L’adultera, for which she won a Nastro d’Argento award as best actress.

She scaled down her career drastically after marriage but won fresh acclaim three decades later for her role as Marta, a murderous ageing actress in ‘Master of Horror’ Dario Argento’s box office smash Profondo Rosso.

For many years, Calamai was also known as the first woman to bare her breasts in Italian cinema - in a 1942 movie that not surprisingly caused scandal at the time - although it was later accepted that another actress, Vittoria Carpi, had beaten her to that claim to fame. 

Calamai, sometimes known as Clara Mais, was born in the Tuscany city of Prato, about 25km (16 miles) northwest of Florence, in 1909. She had two sisters, Vittorina and Paola, yet little is known about her early life before her big screen debut in Aldo Vergano’s 1938 historical epic, Pietro Micca.

She made a good living by accepting multiple parts in what then was a somewhat sanitised Italian film industry, which was regulated so tightly within the guidelines set by the Fascist authorities that approved film-makers were limited mainly to lightweight comedies and heroic costume dramas. 

Calamai in La Cena delle Beffe, a film
largely remembered for her 'nude' scene

Her ‘nude’ scene came relatively early in her career, although it scarcely constituted a scene, occupying just 18 frames of Alessandro Blasetti’s La Cena delle Beffe, a drama set in Renaissance Florence starring Amedeo Nazzari. Although it was so brief that an audience member could literally blink and miss it, the outrage provoked was such that minors under the age of 16 were not permitted to watch.

Despite the furore, the episode did no harm to Calamai’s career and her popularity maintained its upwards trajectory, putting her on a par with actresses such as Alida Valli and Valentina Cortese. It later transpired that Blasetti had already shown Vittoria Carpi's naked breast the previous year in La corona di ferro, although because Carpi was a young comparatively unknown actress, it attracted much less attention.

Indeed, the publicity generated may have helped Calamai land her most famous role, in 1943, when Visconti chose her to replace Anna Magnani, who was pregnant, in Ossessione, his debut film.

Co-written as well as directed by Visconti, the film was an adaptation of the 1934 novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, by the American author, James M Cain. It was the second of seven adaptations of Cain’s novel, although Visconti’s - controversially - was not authorised or even credited.

The film was condemned by the Fascist regime for its unvarnished depictions of Italy’s working class population. But Calamai’s performance as Giovanna, who embarks on an affair with a young hobo and is eventually persuaded to murder her husband, was outstanding and the film is regarded today as a pioneering work of Italian cinema, perhaps the first neorealist film.

Calamai and co-star Massimo Girotti in a scene
from Luchino Visconti's 1943 drama Ossessione

Three years later, in Coletti’s L'adultera, her performance as Velca, a peasant woman who marries a wealthy but elderly landowner and goes on to be the adulteress of the title, resulted in Calamai winning a Nastro d’Argento - silver ribbon - award from Italian film critics as best actress of 1946.

The year before L’adultera’s success, Calamai had married Leonardo Bonzi, a former Italian tennis champion who also competed in bobsleigh at the Olympics. A qualified pilot, Bonzi was from noble stock and could call himself a count, if he so wished. They met when he embarked on a career in film directing and producing.

With the arrival of the first of their two children, Calamai severely limited her acting commitments, taking  parts only sporadically. She and Bonzi divorced in 1961, after which she began to accept invitations from directors she favoured. Her playing of a prostitute in Visconti’s Le notti bianchi reminded cinemagoers of her acting ability. She appeared on television, too, in a Rai adaptation of Henry Fielding’s 18th century novel, Tom Jones.

What turned out to be her final film was hailed as one of her finest. Cast as Marta, an eccentric multiple killer, Calamai’s performance in Dario Argento’s 1975 hit Profondo Rosso - Deep Red - turned her into something of a cult figure among fans of the director’s work. Argento would later describe the film, which starred David Hemmings as the musician who ultimately identified Marta as the murderer, as his greatest work.

Profondo Rosso kept Calamai in the public eye for a number of years but eventually she disappeared from view. After living alone in her home in Rome not far from Termini station, she spent her final years in Rimini, where her sister, Vittorina, had lived since starting a family.

She died there at the age of 89, reportedly following a heart attack. She is buried at the Cimitero Monumentale di Rimini, where the Emilia-Romagna resort’s greatest cinema icon, Federico Fellini, was laid to rest alongside his wife, the actress Giulietta Masina.

The Palazzo Pretorio is one
of Prato's notable buildings

Travel tip:

Prato, a city of just under 200,000 inhabitants, is less than 20 minutes by train from Florence, yet Clara Calamain’s home city is something of an overlooked gem among Tuscany's many attractions. Prato is the home of the Datini archives, a significant collection of late mediaeval documents concerning economic and trade history, produced between 1363 and 1410, as well as many artistic treasures, including frescoes by Filippo Lippi, Paolo Uccello and Agnolo Gaddi inside its Duomo, which has an external pulpit by built by Michelozzo and decorated by Donatello. The Palazzo Pretorio is a building of great beauty, situated in the pretty Piazza del Comune, and there are the ruins of the castle built for the mediaeval emperor and King of Sicily Frederick II.  Prato’s commercial heritage is founded on the textile industry and its growth in the 19th century earned it the nickname the "Manchester of Tuscany".

Rimini's Tempio Malatestiano has frescoes by
Piero della Francesca and paintings by Giotto

Travel tip:

Rimini has become one of the most popular seaside resorts in Europe, with wide sandy beaches and plenty of hotels and restaurants. But it is also a historic town with many interesting things to see. One of Rimini’s most famous sights is the Tempio Malatestiano, a 13th century Gothic church originally built for the Franciscans but which was transformed on the outside in the 15th century and decorated inside with frescoes by Piero della Francesca and works by Giotto and many other artists. Rimini had a role in the unification of Italy in the 19th century. It was there that Joachim Murat, the brother-in-law of Napoleon and King of Naples, issued his Proclamation in 1815, calling for all Italians to unite into a single people and drive out foreigners, namely the Austrians, who occupied large parts of northern Italy at the time. Although Murat was almost certainly acting out of self-interest at the time - he had just declared war on Austria and desperately needed support - the Proclamation is often seen as the opening statement of the Risorgimento.

Also on this day:

1559: The birth of painter and architect Cigoli

1744: The birth of architect Giacamo Quarenghi

1960: The birth of controversial conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan

Home

The night Maria Callas made an audience weep

La Scala witnesses a stunning performance

Maria Callas's interpretation of Violetta was
seen as the finest performance of her stage career

Maria Callas gave a stunning performance that has gone down in history as her greatest ever portrayal of Violetta in La traviata on this day in 1955 at Teatro alla Scala opera house in Milan.

After the opening night of the production on May 28, it was reported in the press that Callas had driven the audience into a frenzy with her wonderful singing and powerful acting as she played the part of Giuseppe Verdi’s doomed heroine, who was a beautiful courtesan.

The character of Violetta is considered by opera experts to be one of the three finest roles ever portrayed by Callas and it is ranked alongside her performances in Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma and Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.  

The staging by director Luchino Visconti for the 1955 production of La traviata provided the perfect setting for Callas with its ornate décor and costumes.

The conductor, Carlo Maria Giulini, later confessed that he had wept in the orchestra pit as she had sung.

At the end members of the audience cried out Callas’s name, sobbed uncontrollably and showered the stage with red roses, which the tearful singer picked up as she took a solo bow.

Callas shone in Visconti's lavish
Belle Époque stage settings

This gesture proved too much for tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano, who felt she was monopolising the attention of the audience. He stormed off the stage at the end of the performance and left the show for good that night.

Callas had moved the audience to tears in the scene where Violetta agrees to renounce Alfredo, the man she loves, to avoid spoiling the wedding prospects of his sister.

Sadly, Callas had only a few years of her career left ahead of her. After she left her husband for shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in 1959, she hardly ever performed on stage again. Onassis subsequently left her to marry Jackie Kennedy and Callas died in 1977, aged just 53. 

Thankfully, her performance on that memorable night was recorded and the complete May 28 production can still be listened to on CD, MP3 and streaming platforms.

Verdi’s opera La traviata had premiered at La Fenice opera house in Venice about 100 years earlier. It was based on the 1852 novel by Alexander Dumas, La dame aux camelias.

La traviata means ‘fallen woman’ and refers to the main character, Violetta, who is a courtesan. The opera featured some of the most challenging and revered music in the entire soprano repertoire.

Milan's Teatro alla Scala, opened in 1778, is the
most famous opera house in the world

Travel tip:

Teatro alla Scala in Milan is Italy’s most famous opera house and Maria Callas made her debut there in 1950 as Aida.  The theatre, known to Italians simply as La Scala, is the leading opera house in the world. It opened in 1778 after fire had destroyed the Teatro Regio Ducale, which had previously been the home of opera in Milan. A new theatre for the city was built on the site of the former Church of Santa Maria alla Scala, which is how the theatre got its name. It was designed by neoclassical architect Giuseppe Piermarini. The world’s finest singers have appeared at La Scala during the last 240 years and the theatre has hosted the premieres of operas by Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, and Puccini. La Scala’s original 18th century structure was renovated in 1907 and, after bomb damage during World War II, it was rebuilt and reopened in 1946.

The mediaeval Rocca Scaligera castle is the
dominant feature of the Sirmione skyline

Travel tip:

Maria Callas spent some happy years living in Sirmione, a resort on Lake Garda in Italy, after she married her first husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, an Italian businessman.  Villa Callas, which is still privately owned today, looks the same as it did when it was first purchased by Meneghini in the 1950s as a holiday home for the couple. There is a plaque outside the villa recording the dates when Maria Callas lived there. Sirmione, the historic centre of which is on a peninsula that divides the southern part of Lake Garda, is known for its thermal baths and Rocca Scaligera, a mediaeval castle overlooking the lake. Visitors can look round a museum dedicated to the life and performances of Maria Callas. At the the tip of the peninsula is the archaeological site of Grotte di Catullo, which encompasses a Roman villa, a museum and olive trees. 

Also on this day:

1369: The bith of condottiero Muzio Attendolo Sforza

1606: Caravaggio attacks and kills a man in Rome

1692: The birth of opera composer Geminiano Giacomelli

1839: The birth of author and journalist Luigi Capuana

1987: The birth of cricketer Leandro Jayarajah

1999: Da Vinci’s Last Supper goes back on display in Milan after 20 years of restoration

Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

Home

Laura Antonelli - actress

Pin-up star of 1970s sex-comedies

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

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, 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

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

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


Home

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

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

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 

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

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

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

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


Home

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

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

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

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 

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

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


Home