After all, Italy does their job for them. Today, foreign directors still flutter like moths towards Italy’s rose-coloured Mediterranean light and sublime sets, from the volcanic beaches of the Sicilian Islands to the exotic silhouette of Venice’s Basilica di San Marco. Cinema, from then onwards, framed a society both stagnant and changing. A new brand of Italian comedies depicted marriage, divorce and even the afterlife all’Italiana – in inimitable style. But these only made for a more creatively fecund land.īy the early 1960s, the world was in the feverish grip of acute Italophilia. The new Italy burned with social and moral contradictions: Pucci and the Virgin Mary, Catholicism and the LSD-popping avant-garde, a promised erotic release and Vatican censorship. Meanwhile, the burgeoning paparazzi, a term coined in Mr Fellini’s satire La Dolce Vita, disseminated the pictures. Not only that, but they also reared their own sensual native muses (Mr Marcello Mastroianni, Mr Vittorio Gassman, Ms Sophia Loren, Ms Claudia Cardinale, Ms Gina Lollobrigida) and spawned idiosyncratic prodigies in Messrs Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini. Messrs Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica, the pioneers of neorealism, mingled with the Valentino-clad Hollywood starlets of Roman Holiday, Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur and Cleopatra, and it was all filmed at the Cinecittà’s production facilities. Rome was once more the centre of the civilised world. ![]() But by the late 1950s, everyone else on the planet wanted to be made (and passionately kissed) in Italy. ![]() After the war, Italians craved the new American lifestyle, later encapsulated by Mr Renato Carosone’s song “Tu Vuó Fa’ l’Americano”. And with those came the igniting of the neorealist movement fostered by Mr Benito Mussolini’s Roman studio city, Cinecittà. In the 1950s, fuelled by the postwar “economic miracle”, a second Italian Renaissance exploded in automotive, interior and fashion design and, above all, cinema. From Roman holidays to capers on the Amalfi Coast, introducing the movies that made the country a star.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |