Gillo Pontecorvo - film director

Most famous film was banned in France

Gillo Pontecorvo was a journalist before being inspired
to make a career as a film director

The film director Gillo Pontecorvo, whose best known film, La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers) won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1966 and was nominated for three Academy Awards, died on this day in 2006 in Rome, aged 86.

A former journalist who had been an Italian Resistance volunteer and a member of the Italian Communist Party, Pontecorvo had been in declining health for some years, although he continued to make documentary films and commercials until shortly before his death.

Although it was made a decade or so after the peak years of the movement, La battaglia di Algeri is in the tradition of Italian neorealism, with newsreel style footage and mainly non-professional actors.

Pontecorvo also won acclaim for his 1960 film Kapò, set in a Second World War concentration camp, and Burn! (1969) - titled Queimada in Italy - which was about the creation of a so-called banana republic on the fictitious Caribbean island of Queimada, starring Marlon Brando and loosely based on the failed slave revolution in Guadeloupe.

A poster for the US release of the
film La battaglia di algeri

Kapò, which was also was nominated for an Oscar, won a Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Silver Ribbon award for Didi Perego as best supporting actress, and the Mar del Plata Film Festival award for Susan Strasberg for best actress.

La battaglia di Algeri, which focussed on the Algerian War of Independence against the occupying French, caused great controversy in France, where it was banned for five years after the government objected to its sympathetic treatment of the Algerian rebels. Its co-star and joint producer, Saadi Yacef, was one of the leaders of the Algerian Liberation Front.

Pontecorvo was born in November 1919, in Pisa, into a high-achieving family. His father, Massimo, owned three textile factories employing more than 1,000 people. His eldest brother among seven siblings, Guido, later became an eminent geneticist, his second brother, Paolo, an engineer who worked on radar during the Second World War II and his third brother, Bruno, a renowned nuclear physicist.

Gillo enrolled at the University of Pisa to study chemistry but dropped out, taking the decision when Mussolini’s race laws came into force in 1938 to follow Bruno in fleeing to Paris, where he found work as a journalist.

When the German Army closed in on Paris, in June 1940, Pontecorvo and Bruno, along with their cousin Emilio Sereni, their friend, the future Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist Salvador Luria, and Pontecorvo’s future wife, Henrietta, fled the city on bicycles.

Marlon Brando played the lead character
in Pontecorvo's film Burn!

Pontecorvo reached St Tropez, where he earned money by drawing on his talent as a tennis player, providing lessons for rich residents.

By 1941, he had secretly joined the Italian Communist Party, and began to make regular trips to Italy to help organize anti-Fascist partisans.  Going by the pseudonym Barnaba, he spent the summer of 1943 working for his party’s underground newspaper, L'Unità, in Milan. From there he moved to Turin, where he began to organise factory workers.

After the war, he returned to Paris as the representative of Italy in the Youth World Federation and the Communist-backed World Federation of Democratic Youth.  Although his political philosophy remained Marxist, he broke his ties with the Communist party in 1956 after the Soviet intervention to suppress the Hungarian Revolution.

By then, his career as a filmmaker was established.  Although for many years an enthusiast for the cinema, it was after seeing Roberto Rossellini’s film, Paisà, that he gave up journalism and, using his own money and a 16mm camera, began to shoot political documentaries.

In 1957 he directed his first full-length film, La grande strada azzurra (The Wide Blue Road), which explored the life of a fisherman and his family facing hard times on a small island off the Dalmatian coast of Italy. The film won a prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Pontecorvo was director of
the Venice Film Festival 

Pontecorvo’s output was relatively small, largely because he spent months and sometimes years in research as he sought to produce authentic portrayals of events.

His last full-length feature film was Ogro (1979), which was inspired by the car bomb murder by ETA terrorists of Carrerro Blanco, the prime minister of Spain under Franco in 1973.  The film brought Pontecorvo his second David di Donatello award for Best Director, which he had also won for Burn! (Queimada).

Director of the Venice Film Festival from 1992 to 1994, Pontecorvo was married twice. His second wife, Teresa Ricci, bore him three sons - Ludovico, Marco and Simone.  Marco Pontecorvo followed his father’s footstep and became a filmmaker.

The Campo dei Miracoli in Pisa, with the baptistery in the
foreground and the Leaning Tower beyond the cathedral

Travel tip:

Pisa used to be one of Italy’s major maritime powers, rivalling Genoa and Venice, until silt deposits from the Arno river gradually changed the landscape and ultimately cut the city off from the sea in the 15th century. Nowadays, almost 15km (9 miles) inland, it is a university city renowned for its art and architectural treasures with a 10.5km (7 miles) circuit of 12th century walls. The Campo dei Miracoli, formerly known as Piazza del Duomo, located at the northwestern end of the city, contains the cathedral (Duomo), baptistery and famously the tilting campanile known as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, all built in black and white marble between the 11th and 14th centuries.

Giorgio Vasari's Palazzo della Carovana used to be the
headquarters of a Medici military order

Travel tip:

In the centre of Pisa, the elegant Piazza dei Cavalieri is dominated by Palazzo della Carovana, built and lavishly decorated by Giorgio Vasari between 1562 and 1564. Originally the headquarters of the Knights of St. Stephen, a Roman Catholic dynastic military order founded in 1561 by Cosimo I de' Medici, first Grand Duke of Tuscany, it is now the main building of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, one of three universities in Pisa, the others being the University of Pisa and the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna.

More reading:

How Roberto Rossellini changed Italian cinema

Francesco Rosi - master of neorealism

The brilliance of Oscar-winner Vittorio de Sica

Also on this day:

1492: The death of Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca

1935: The birth of tenor Luciano Pavarotti


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Anita Cerquetti – soprano

Performer with a powerful voice had brief moment in the spotlight

Anita Cerquetti commuted between Naples and Rome
to perform on alternate nights

Anita Cerquetti, the singer whose remarkable voice received widespread praise when she stood in for a temperamental Maria Callas in Rome, died on this day in 2014 in Perugia.

Cerquetti had been singing the title role in Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma at Teatro San Carlo in Naples in 1958 when Callas, who had been singing the same part in Rome, walked out after the first act on the opening night.

Despite Callas claiming that her voice was troubling her, the incident, in front of Italian President Giovanni Gronchi, created a major scandal.

Fortunately the performances in Rome and Naples were on alternate days and so for several weeks Cerquetti travelled back and forth between the two opera houses, which were 225km (140 miles) apart. The achievement left her exhausted and three years later she retired from singing and her magnificent voice was heard no more.

Cerquetti was born in Montecosaro near Macerata in the Marche. She studied the violin, but after a music professor heard her singing at a wedding she was persuaded to switch to vocal studies. After just one year she made her debut singing Aida in Spoleto in 1951.

A publicity shot of Anita Cerquetti
taken in the 1950s

She sang all over Italy and made her debut at La Scala in 1958 as Abigaille in Nabucco. She also sang on RAI in a variety of roles.  She had sung in the United States at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1955, as Amelia in Un ballo in maschera opposite Jussi Björling, under Tullio Serafin, but returned infrequently.

When she replaced Callas at the Rome Opera House, it meant she had to commute between the two cities for several weeks. It was thought the effort affected her health because shortly afterwards she started withdrawing from stage appearances until she retired completely in 1961 at just 30 years of age.

Cerquetti was due to have made her debut at the Royal Opera House in London in the title role of Aida in July 1958, but withdrew following an appendectomy the month before and was replaced by Leontyne Price, so she was never heard at Covent Garden.

Her final appearance was in a concert in Amsterdam in 1961.

She made two recordings for Decca, including a complete version of Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda with Mario Del Monaco, and many of her live performances were recorded and have now been issued on CD.

Cerquetti was married to the baritone Edo Feretti with whom she had one daughter. After her retirement she went to live in Rome. Her husband predeceased her and the soprano died in Perugia from cardiovascular disease at the age of 83.

The hilltop town of Montecosaro in Marche

Travel tip:

Montecosaro, where Anita Cerquetti was born in 1931, is a hilltop town in Marche, about 35km (22 miles) southeast of Ancona and about 15km (9 miles)east of Macerata. Just outside the town is the Abbazia di Santa Maria a Pie’ di Chienti, also known as the Santissima Annunziata. Documents refer to an abbey being there in 936 but the Romanesque stone building that can be seen on the site today was built in 1125.

The Teatro San Carlo is close to the centre of
Naples, near Piazza Plebiscito

Travel tip:

Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, where Cerquetti was singing when she got the call asking her to replace Callas, is in Via San Carlo close to Piazza Plebiscito, the main square in Naples. The theatre was designed by Giovanni Antonio Medrano for the Bourbon King of Naples, Charles I, and opened in 1737, some 41 years before La Scala and 55 years before La Fenice. San Carlo is now believed to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest, remaining opera houses in the world. Both Gaetano Donizetti and Gioachino Rossini served as artistic directors at San Carlo and the world premieres of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Rossini’s Mosè were performed there.

More reading:

The mezzo-soprano at the centre of an on-stage spat with Maria Callas

The short but eventful career of Norma composer Vincenzo Bellini

When fire engulfed the Teatro San Carlo

Also on this day:

1815: The birth of controversial Prince Pierre-Napoleon Bonaparte

1896: The birth of Neapolitan songwriter Cesare Andrea Bixio


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Andrea Zanzotto - poet

Writer drew inspiration from landscapes of Veneto

Andrea Zanzotto wrote 15 volumes of poetry
during his active career, while also teaching

Andrea Zanzotto, who was regarded as one of Italy’s greatest 20th century poets, was born on this day in 1921 in Pieve di Soligo, the village near Treviso where he lived almost all of his life. 

Zanzotto, who spent 40 years as a secondary school teacher, wrote 15 books of poetry, two prose works, two volumes of critical articles and translations of French philosophers such as Michaux, Leiris and Bataille.

His first book of poetry, Dietro il paesaggio (1951), won a literary award judged by several noteworthy Italian poets. Critics reserved their greatest acclaim for his sixth volume, La beltà (1968), in which he questioned the ability of words to reflect truth.

Zanzotto, whose verse was consistently erudite and creative, was known for his innovative engagement with language and his fascination with the rugged landscapes of the Veneto, from which he drew inspiration and provided him with much symbolism.

His upbringing was difficult at times because his father, Giovanni Zanzotto, a painter who has trained at the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts, was a committed supporter of the Socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti, who was murdered by Fascist thugs in 1924 a few days after accusing Mussolini’s party of electoral fraud.

Zanzotto had a difficult upbringing in the
Fascist Italy of the 1920s and 1930s

Fearing for his own safety, Giovanni fled to France in 1925. He returned to the Veneto, taking a job as a teacher in Santo Stefano di Cadore, about 100km (62 miles) north of Pieve di Soligo, not far from the border with Austria, in 1927 and the family reunited there in 1928.

Giovanni, in fact, painted some frescoes in a church in nearby Costalissoio but his campaigning against the Fascists and the collapse of a co-operative that was providing financial support for his family, forced him into exile again in 1931.

Andrea, who had been deeply affected by the death of his younger sister, Marina, became close to his maternal grandmother and an aunt, and began to develop his love of writing. They helped him to see his first work published in 1936.

After completing school, Zanzotto began to focus on a career in teaching but suffered another loss in 1937 when his other sister, Angela, died of typhus. The grief, combined with the fatigue of commuting to college in Treviso, took a toll on his health, yet he obtained his teaching credentials.

Zanzotto enrolled at the University of Padua, where he received his diploma in literature in 1942, with a thesis on the work of the Italian Nobel Prize winner Grazia Deledda, after which he began teaching in Valdobbiadene and then Treviso.

Andrea Zanzotto spent the majority of
his 90-year life in Pieve di Solito

In the meantime, having avoided conscription because of severe asthma, he participated in the Italian Resistance, working largely on propaganda publications, and after the war spent some time travelling in Switzerland, France and Spain before returning to Pieve di Soligo where he resumed his work as a teacher.

Zanzotto’s poetry was influenced by his study of European intellectual thought and became notable for his of divergent language, from the lofty lingua aulica of the great poets of the past, notably Petrarch and Dante, to the language of pop songs and advertising slogans.

Dialect was one of Zanzotto’s favourite linguistic registers. Section one of Filò (1976) was written in a pseudo-archaic Venetian dialect. It was composed at the request of Federico Fellini for his film Casanova. Section two, in fact, included a diatribe against the film industry.

Dialectal words and phrases reoccurred in Il Galateo in bosco (1978), the first book of a trilogy completed by Fosfeni (1983) and Idioma (1986), which are regarded among his finest works.

Although a lot of his writing suggested nostalgia for disappearing landscapes, languages and cultures, Zanzotto never lost sight of the present and its possible effects on the future. His later works were increasingly engaged with topical issues such as the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the war in Bosnia, and local environmental changes.

He died in October 2011 at the age of 90, survived by his wife, Marisa, to whom he had been married for 52 years, and their children.

The neighbourhood of Cal Santa in Pieve di Solito, where
Zanzotto lived for many years in his childhood

Travel tip:

Pieve di Soligo is a town of some 12,000 inhabitants a little more than 30km (19 miles) north of Treviso, in a plain bordered to the north by the Belluno Prealps. At the heart of the town is the cathedral dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta, a neo-Romanesque monument built in the early 20th century by the architect Domenico Rupolo, who is well known for having designed the fish market by the Rialto bridge in Venice. Along the banks of the Soligo river are two of the oldest parts of the town, including Cal Santa, where Zanzotto spent much of his formative years.

The vine-clad hills around Valdobbiadene, home of Italy's
finest Prosecco wines

Travel tip:

The picturesque hills around Valdobbiadene, where Zanzotto briefly worked as a supply teacher, are famous for the production of what is generally regarded as the best Prosecco in Italy. It is largely made from Glera grapes and though the name comes from that of the village of Prosecco near Trieste, where the grape and wine originated, the only Prosecco granted DOCG status - the classification granted to superior Italian wines - is produced from grapes grown on the hills between the towns of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, or from a smaller area around the town of Asolo, a few kilometres south of Valdobbiadene.

More reading:

How Grazia Deledda became the first Italian woman to win a Nobel Prize

The tragic brilliance of Giacomo Leopardi

What the Italian language owes to Petrarch

Also on this day:

1881: The death of missionary Saint Daniele Comboni

1891: The birth of Mafia boss Stefano Magaddino


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Salimbene di Adam – historian

Friar's records provided important information on history of Italy

Fra Salimbene travelled across Italy
and beyond in a nomadic career

Salimbene di Adam, a Franciscan friar, whose yearly chronicles became a valued source for historians, was born on this day in 1221 in Parma in Emilia-Romagna.

Sometimes also referred to as Salimbene di Parma, he was the son of Guido di Adam, a wealthy Parma citizen. Salimbene entered the Franciscan Order in 1238 and served his novitiate in the Monastery of Fano on the Adriatic coast.

As Fra Salimbene, he led a wandering existence and never held any office in his order. He transferred from one monastery to another, meeting notable people and becoming an eye witness to historic events.

In the 1240s he travelled to Lucca, Pisa and Cremona, and also visited France.

On his return to Italy in 1248 he went to Ferrarra where he stayed for several years. But he then went on his travels again, staying in Franciscan convents in northern Italy.

Fra Salimbene began to write his Chronicles (Cronica) in 1282 and continued to work on them until his death.

A plaque marks the house in Parma where Salimbene
lived as a young man

Organised as yearly records, the Chronicles cover the years 1168 to 1288 starting with the founding of the city of Alessandria to the south of Milan by the Lombard league.

Salimbene described his travels, experiences and meetings with famous people, who included Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, Louis IX of France and Pope Innocent IV.

He provides a vivid picture of the ordinary life of his time but he also wrote about contemporary Italian politics and spirituality.

In about 1248 he wrote The Twelve Calamities of Emperor Frederick II, but other historical and religious works by him have been sadly lost.

Salimbene is believed to have died in about 1290 at a friary near San Polo d’Enza in Emilia-Romagna.

The Teatro Regio in Parma is one of Italy's most
prestigious opera houses

Travel tip:

Parma, where Salimbene was born, is an historic city in the Emilia-Romagna region, famous for its Prosciutto di Parma ham and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, the true ‘parmesan’. In 1545 the city was given as a duchy to the illegitimate son of Pope Paul III, whose descendants ruled Parma till 1731. The composer, Verdi, was born near Parma at Bussetto and the city has a prestigious opera house, the Teatro Regio.

The beach at Fano is a popular attraction with visitors
to the province of Pesaro and Urbino

Travel tip:

Fano, where Salimbene was a novice friar, is a town in the province of Pesaro and Urbino in the Marche region. It is a beach resort, about 12km (8 miles) southeast of Pesaro, where the Via Flaminia reaches the Adriatic Sea. It is the third largest town in the province after Ancona and Pesaro.

More reading:

The moment that inspired historian Edward Gibbon

Giorgio Vasari - the first historian of Italian art

The historian whose tongue-in-cheek book became a bestseller

Also on this day:

1562: The death of anatomist Gabriele Falloppio

1963: The Vajont Dam disaster


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