Author Archives: simona.campobasso

Marcello Mastroianni was one of the best known and most appreciated Italian actors in the world. Among his masterpieces were the films which paired him with Sophia Loren and his leading roles for Fellini. Talent and charm. And above all, he was a star who refused to be one.

Fellini’s favourite actor, interpreter of 160 films during a very long career in which he worked with the greatest Italian directors. From Scola to Germi via De Sica, Monicelli, Risi, Antonioni, Ferreri, giving us cult interpretations as in “La dolce vita “,” I soliti ignoti “,” 8 ½ “. Very classic and experimenter, shy and friend of the people, melodramatic and comic, loved by the most popular and the most intellectual cinema. Mastroianni was a commoner who moved like an aristocrat. They say about him that he didn’t read the scripts, but when he entered the scene he seemed to have rehearsed hundreds of times.

Marcello Mastroianni brought man to the set, and in his most disparate characteristics: from a fragile existence to subtle humor. He was able to merge himself with the character and vice versa, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.
«In each of his films he entered the scene giving the impression of not knowing who or what he was. He he tried to understand each other little by little as he became his character and his character became him. But, even in the end, he left us with a still questioning look» (Umberto Eco). Perhaps for this reason, Fellini, filming of La dolce vita, nicknamed him Snaporaz, a comic nickname taken from one of the director’s works. Mastroianni not only embodied for Fellini the ideal of a trusted friend: he was. Even if, as the director admitted, they saw each other little, their bond went far beyond just a professional relationship. Part of a friendship without boundaries, their complicity managed to go beyond the constant need for confirmation. We could say, a bit like the characters of Snàporaz and Mollica.

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Born on the 14th of August 1926 in Rome, into an aristocratic family. Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spanol von Braueich was a screenwriter and filmmaker of Swiss origin.
After being in a troupe of puppeteers and actress, she founded, at age 24, an avant-garde theatrical troupe, making her debut as a director.

Her film career began in 1963 under the impulse of her meeting with Federico Fellini. She worked as an assistant director on Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece 8 ½. A springboard that allowed her to realize her first film “The Basilisks”. A slow-paced portrait of life in a southern Italian town, and which was scored by Ennio Morricone.
After “The Basilisks” she directed a series of films, including the spaghetti western “The Belle Star Story”. Film which she co-directed with Piero Cristofani, under the joint name Nathan Wich.
As a committed and feminist filmmaker, through her comedies she wanted to liberate the film from social constraints of a society driven by good conscience. Lina’s more directly political films principally featured the great actor Giancarlo Giannini . The 70s marked the Wertmüller’s golden age: “The Seduction of Mimi” (1972), ” Love and Anarchy” (1973), “and Swept Away” (1974). Film afterwards remade by Madonna and Guy Ritchie – about a rich woman stuck on a desert island with a member of her boat crew.

“Seven Beauties”, which again features Giannini in the lead role, pushes Wertmüller’s specific brand of tragic comedy to its limits. Giannini is an Italian mobster who ends up in a Nazi concentration camp. Subsequently the movie won a clutch of Oscar nominations. Wertmüller was nominated for best director, best original screenplay and best foreign language film, and Giannini for best actor.

As Giancarlo Giannini said during an interview “Lina was a volcano. She knew everything, knew dance, acting, the camera, lighting, writing, editing. She had been Fellini’s assistant director; her imagination was boundless and she opened my mind”

Lina Wertmuller was the first woman to be nominated for the best director Oscar and was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2019. She died aged 93 but her legacy will never end as a testament of inestimable value for the new generations.

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Montedoro is based on the true story of its lead actress, Pia Marie Ann. A middle-aged American woman who unexpectedly discovers her true origins only after the death of her parents. Deeply shaken, and in the grip of a real identity crisis, she decides to travel hoping to embrace her natural mother never known. She arrives in a small and remote village in southern Italy, Montedoro, where she is surprised by an apocalyptic scenario. The village, lying on a majestic hill, is completely abandoned and it seems there is no one left.

The central character and true protagonist of the movie is the ghost town of Craco, an Italian town in the province of Matera. Abandoned by its inhabitants in 1963 following a large-scale landslide by what was thought to be faulty pipe work.

Because it is dominated by the castle, Craco is an extraordinary place and a choice location for many filmmakers, including Rosi and Mel Gibson. The new center, Craco Peschiera, was built downstream. However, people of Craco, a ‘resilient community’, have moved to the other side of the mountain: a dozen houses gathered under the name of Craco. As a result, in 2007, the descendants of the emigrants of Craco formed the “Craco Society”. A non-profit organization, in the United States, which preserves the culture, traditions, and history of the place. Eventually, in 2010, Craco was included in the watch list of the World Monuments Fund.

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