On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. The UN denounced the serious fact. The world, just five years after the end of the tragic Second World War, with atomic radiation still active in Japan, was on the verge of another war that saw China (supported by the USSR) and the US and the West. A third world war was risked. Her mother, the literature teacher Rossana Schiavina , had little Carlo in her womb who would be born on November 17, 1950.
Photo Archive Carlo Verdone How her mother told her about that delicate historical period
You can extrapolate, from your private mental film library, a memory of his mother, among other things an expert in opera music
The 1950s must have been a good decade. Italy that was restarting itself from the rubble of the war and a great spirit of collaboration eventually united all Italians. By now it was known that my birth was to take place in November, but everyone was very afraid that it would happen on the 17th which was a Friday. Month of the dead in addition 17, nefarious number, plus Friday, the day of Christ’s death. The odds are slim said the midwife, Signora Pazzaglini. And instead, twist, I was born on the day they didn’t want. And so it was that there was a family reunion to sweeten that “negativity”. My grandmother Fernanda recommend adding Gregorio to Carlo. So, my real name is Carlo Gregorio Verdone. And this is because in popular Rome the name Gregory is associated with the butt. Who “has a seat” is obviously lucky. In the end I believe that my grandmother’s intuition has really benefited me, up to now, in life. This was told to me by my mother. My mother and she was the most loving woman that could happen to me. Although I sent her, as she told me, in a nervous breakdown after my birth. I didn’t sleep for eight months, not letting her or my father sleep. My father changed room, my mother changed city. She ended up protected in Anzio by friends where she slept for a whole month, leaving me with my grandparents and a housekeeper. But she was going crazy poor thing.His father, Professor Mario Verdone *, director of the Experimental Center of Cinematography, in 1948 as a journalist, after the lukewarm reception of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), organized a screening of the film in Paris, through his critical friends French cinema (Jean Jacques Auriol). Men of cinema and intellectuals go to see it, Rene Clair, Jean Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, Georges Sadoul, etc. Applause on your feet. Positive boomerang in Italy, then global success. Also in 1948, his father, in Rome, and the first to give lessons in “History of cinema” in an Italian university. When she, when she grows up, discovers that her father Mario was so active in the cultural and artistic world from a young age, what did I think I
succeed like him ?
I understood that my parents had many cultural interests. They frequented important people in the fields of art, film criticism, music, but until I was 18 I didn’t really get interested in cinema. For me it was entertainment. Only when my father gave me a Filmstudio card (a famous Roman cineclub) did I get closer and closer to the cinema. To the point that I started making experimental super 8 movies. And little by little, cinema became a huge passion of mine. Even if we are “grown up” we always miss our parents. Under what circumstances would you like to have mum Rossana and papa Mario next to you for a minute
? To ask them what
I ask them only one thing, often in the silence that precedes sleep, to be close to my children, to my family. To protect her. Only this I ask. Her childhood memories, the 1950s…
Photo Carlo Verdone Archive
The nursery school, elementary school at the Sisters of Nevers, the basket prepared by my mother for lunch in the refectory. The cats I had to bring food to at the Theater of Marcellus, the Janiculum with the Pulcinella theater, the shots with the ball at Villa Sciarra. The races on the beautiful Roman terrace in my paternal house. Indelible black and white images. Wonderful. Early sixties. TV has arrived in our homes. But the living room of professors Verdone and Schiavina is full of artists and intellectuals.
My mother frequented many musicians and orchestra conductors, having graduated in piano in Santa Cecilia. There were often Severino Gazzelloni , Silvano Bussotti , Franco Ferrara , Pierluigi Urbini and many others. In the cinema sector, many critics such as Ugo Casiraghi , Luigi Chiarini , Glauco Viazzi , Guglielmo Biraghi and others. Not to mention Federico Fellini , Alessandro Blasetti , Ettore Scola, Alberto Lattuada , Roberto Rossellini. It was the era of the living rooms and in our home the living room was very important. All this helped me to get closer to culture in a very broad sense. Free time and games with his parents and siblings.
Those who really played were my parents. They often did one-act theatrical acts written by my father. And together with friends they imagined a single act between D’Annunzio and Duse or “Assunta Spina”. Obviously in a comic key. It was a lot of fun to see parents almost become kids. And for us children it was comforting to have a family who loved having fun in an intelligent and crazy way at the same time. Here is the commitment of high school. High school, joys and small sorrows.(Teachers and companions source of inspiration for the imitations …).
Maybe I realized I had a comic talent right at school. I perfectly imitated professors and classmates. And I was so successful that I even managed to skip the hours of physics and chemistry, so much fun did the professors of those subjects themselves. But I wasn’t good in high school. I was immediately rejected for distraction and indiscipline. My father punished me severely. Then forgive me and even buy me a battery, an instrument that I loved so much. In the middle of the decade of the Sixties the Beatles arrive for a concert at the Adriano cinema in Rome. The only time in Italy. And the professor pope, amazes you …
One afternoon in June my father walked into my room. I was studying and it struck me because in an authoritative tone he told me that he had bought two tickets for Adriano where the Beatles would perform on June 27, 1965. I couldn’t believe it. It was my favorite band. Solemnly he said to me: “I got two tickets for the Beatles. We have to go there because it is a very important cultural and social event. We have to realize what is happening in the musical world of young people ”. I jumped for joy. And that evening was unforgettable. The show lasts for forty minutes but will remain in my memory for a lifetime. My father taking me to Adriano made me understand what an extraordinary person he was. A mature man who lines up to get two Beatles tickets for him and his sonand a man not only intelligent, but also a great, single parent. Always curious about everything in the cultural world.
Photo Archive Carlo Verdone We are around twenty years old. You make experimental shorts. Tell us where those shorts led you then.
When I attended the Filmstudio in Rome I was very attracted to underground, experimental cinema. And so I bought a Bolex camera with macro zoom from Isabella Rossellini . I made three visual poems made of psychedelic images and electronic music. With one of these entitled “Night Elegy” I won an important prize in Tokyo. It was thanks to this award that my father pushed me to show Roberto Rossellinithis short for judgment. Rossellini was amazed and I urge me to apply for admission to the directing course at the Centro Sperimentale. I passed the exam and in 1974 I did the diploma essay taken from a short story by Anton Chekhov , “Anjuta”. However, the directing diploma at the Experimental Center of Cinematography does not guarantee work in professional cinema, a hard career. In the eighties the commercial genre triumphed, the cinema of commitment of the sixties and seventies had finished its innovative role; humorous cinema no longer scratched like the Italian comedy of the boom. Difficult to renew a genre. But she, perhaps unwittingly, succeeded. Looking around, with curiosity and sociological attention, especially observing the new generations …
When I was successful as an actor of monologues and skits on TV with “No Stop”, Sergio Leone wanted to meet me. And he realized that I could also have a talent in cinema. He took me under his protection and helped me edit a film that I was supposed to think, direct and interpret. I owe everything to Sergio Leone. “Un Sacco Bello” in the subject and mine. Everything that Rome had inspired me in my youth with its poetry, with its types, with its atmosphere I transferred to “Un Sacco Bello”. In the film there was, I think, a new way of looking at reality and of stopping its poetry. It was a great performance as an actor and I think also as a director. It was the end of male-dominated comedies and object women. And the triumph of a solitude full of poetry. How his cultural background was formed
From her mother, I believe, she got her love for opera and for Greek and Latin authors. From your father, your love for cinema, theater, figurative art… Correct me.
My mother helped me to understand well the human apparatus that revolved around our neighborhood, near Campo de ‘Fiori. You have infected me with the use of irony and comic detail observed in the most banal people. But she especially she was a great supporter of mine. She knew I was going to be an actor. And that I would do it for my entire life. She also introduced me to classical music in the best directions and performances. So if today I love music at 360 degrees I owe it to her teaching. My father educated me in the amazement of beauty that I learned about thanks to him.I would like you to tell the readers, and aspiring film writers, who are those directors from whom you have taken style suggestions.
I don’t know how to answer because now one director and now another have given me immense emotions. There are many such authors and perhaps, unconsciously, with someone there is a small reference. There is Germi , the first Fellini , Pietrangeli , some films by Risi … You can define his cinema as
Tic, defects, mythomanias, megalomanias, inadequacies, fragility of ordinary people. Forced to take only three films with him, which ones he would choose and why
“La dolce vita”, because it was an authentic and courageous fresco of a historical and social period in great change. “Ordet”, because it was a film of unparalleled spiritual charge. Austere, rigorous and mysterious. “The last show”, for the immense poetry of the loneliness of an America desperate in boredom, without true values. In the juries of the great festivals, in which he took part in his long career, he met and worked alongside great names in the cinema. Who fondly remembers
David Lynch. Absolute genius. An artist who has touched all the arts, not just cinema. The power of him in the image is absolutely unique and very original. Plus he’s very nice. What are the joys that her children, Paolo and Giulia have given her
They have great ethics, a great sense of duty and a great respect for others. I know you are a believer. Tell us what, if I am not indiscreet, God’s place in his daily life.
God is constantly approaching and distancing himself from my life. Sometimes I feel it strong. Other times he seems to me to have disappeared. But in reality it is I who appear and disappear from him. There is only one way to hear it and that is in prayer. There are no other ways. Several times he has publicly suggested that he would like a Rome, and an Italy, more safeguarded in its artistic assets by the political class and by the rules. But also less aggressive citizens towards the city and the environment in general …
We need good examples. If good examples disappear, citizens will always drift into chaos. Politicians should go to philosophy school and philosophers should rule. But beware, even among philosophers there are many dangerous scoundrels. At the age of seventy, advice can be offered to young people. Imagine spending a day in a high school class. And then another day with college kids. What would he tell them
To join honest people who are willing to take risks. To believe it. Unity is strength. Let’s suppose that in some time you get tired of acting and directing for the cinema. You have to take up another job in order not to get bored. What would she like to do
[writer, university professor, opera director, poet, photographer]
Without a doubt the writer. I know that she was a friend of Manoel de Oliveira, introduced to her by her father Mario. I ask you for a small souvenir of the great Portuguese master.
A big man though small in stature. Very intelligent, younger than many young people, revolutionary in many respects, courageous in imposing his ideas for cinema. Humble, generous. He will always remain in history as a person to be admired. Thank you for her and I hope to be able to interview her when she is 100 and, like De Oliveira, she will certainly be on set.
You will be very difficult. But you never know…
(Cover photo Umberto Pizzi)
* We present an unpublished work by Mario Verdone, from 1956, discreet witness of a meeting between the child Carlo , at that time five and a half years old, and Alberto Sordi , in Valle d’Aosta. Carlo Verdone has always said that he used to call Alberto Sordi from his home as a child. Here we have a “philological” confirmation of this. The short story and a travel note by the scholar Mario Verdone who with two brushstrokes gives us the scene as if we were seeing it on the screen. We have always been convinced that Carlo Verdone’s capacity for observation and knowing how to tell with subtle humor are, in large part, inherited from his father Mario, playwright, poet and writer, not yet fully re-evaluated. (EC) LA PICCOZZA (unpublished) by Mario Verdone
My son Carlo comes out cautiously on the forecourt of the Hotel Billia, brandishing his cane, almost considering it an Alpenstock. “But I go with the ice ax
“, Alberto Sordi tells him, intimidating him.
And he is an admirer of him, but he fears he has been recognized. He often calls him, in Via delle Zoccolette, from our terrace opposite, so that he looks out the window: “Alberto Sordi!”. Saint-Vincent – July 1956
