Dear Readers,
February dates with an “Italian Connection” remembered include:Alberto Sordi, beloved Roman actor died in February 2003 at age 82. He was born in Rome (June 15, 1920) and appeared in some 150 films during his 50-year career. At least 36 of Alberto Sordi’s films were distributed in the United States.
I tracked down several on Netflix but could not find “An American in Rome”(Un Americano a Roma); “Handsome, Honest, Migrated to Australia Looking for an Italian Virgin to Marry” (Bello, onesto, emigrato in Australia sposerebbe compaesana illibata) or “The Scientific Card-Player” (Lo scopone scientifico).
In the early days of his career, he was the Italian voice of Oliver Hardy in the popular Laurel and Hardy films. His career took off when he appeared in two of Fellini’s films in the 1950s. His 1954 film “Un Americano a Roma”, in which he plays a young man who wants to live the American dream, became a cult classic and led to his Kansas City honorary citizenship.
Sordi, early in his career, and early in Fellini’s, had played leading roles in “The White Sheik” and “I Vitelloni”.
A comic actor who often played satirical versions of middle class Italians, Sordi worked with directors Fellini, Scola, Zavattini, Monicelli and Comencini. He also directed 15 films himself. He never made the crossover to international stardom, with two notable appearances in films overseas: “The Best of Enemies” (1961) and “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines” (1965).
In 1972, Bette Davis, appeared with Alberto Sordi, then one of Italy’s biggest stars in a film shot in Rome, “The Scientific Cardplayer”. During an interview Sordi laughingly recalled that American actress, Bette Davis, called him “Mr. Sordid.”
In “The Scientific Cardplayer” (Lo scopone scientifico), Bette Davis played an eccentric millionaire, addicted to playing cards and winning from players who could not afford to gamble. Every year, she visits Rome with her secretary and ex-lover, George (Joseph Cotton), to play with Peppino (Alberto Sordi), the ragman, and Antonia (Silvana Mangano), a cleaning lady who lived in a slum near her villa with their five children.
She offers the couple one million lire to gamble with her and George in a card game called “scopone”, to which she is passionately devoted and at which Antonia is a champion.
Even though they desperately need the money, the couple has always understood that they must lose in order to please the millionaire, but this year Antonia is determined to win. In spite of Peppino’s erratic playing, it appears for a while as if they will, but in the end, the millionaire wins.
They get revenge by presenting her with what may be a poisoned cake as she is leaving Rome.
...
Bocca della verita’, a medieval drain cover set into portico of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, a beautiful church built in the 6th century on the site of Rome’s food market had until February 1935, when the first lie detector’s test was taken, been the most useful and painless way of testing the faithfulness of sweethearts and spouses.
Medieval tradition had it that the jaws on the “Bocca della Verita’” (Mouth of truth) would snap shut the hand of liars....
Composer Gioacchino Rossini, was born February 1792 in Pesaro, Italy. He studied French Horn with his father and singing, harpsichord and music theory with a “Padre” in Bologna. He received a prize from the “Liceo Musicale” for a cantata, “Pianto d’armonia sulla morte di Orfeo” that led to commissions from Teatro alla Scala di Milano which included “Barbiere di Siviglia” (1816).
He served as a consultant to the “Liceo Musicale” in Bologna from 1836 to 1848, then consulted in Florence, Naples, Venice and Paris, where he died in 1868. Rossini’s operatic career was short but busy and productive. Only 19 years separated the composition of his first opera (“La cambiale di matrimonio”, 1810) to his last (“Guillaume Tell”, 1829).
His most famous overture was “The William Tell Overture” (known to most people as the lone ranger theme).
In nineteen years he saw the composition of over thirty-six operas about evenly divided between “opera buffa” and “opera seria”, however, his two greatest comic operas were “The Barber of Seville” (1816) and “La Cenerentola” (1817).
His “Tancredi” and “L’Italiana in Algeri” helped establish Rossini’s reputation as a brilliant composer of both “opera seria” and “opera buffa”....
Gian Carlo Menotti, who wrote his first opera before he was 11 and went on to become perhaps the most popular and prolific opera composer of his time, winning two Pulitzer Prizes, died February 1, 2007 in Monaco, where he had a home. He was 95.
Mr. Menotti was born in Cadegliano, Italy, a small town near Lake Lugano in Lombardy.
He was the sixth of eight children of Alfonso and Ines Menotti, a prosperous merchant family engaged in the coffee business.
His mother provided piano, violin and cello lessons for her children, and there were evening musicals in the Menotti household that left a profound impression on Gian Carlo.Mr. Menotti began writing songs when he was 5 years old, and by 11 he had written an opera, "The Death of Pierrot," which was performed as a puppet show at home.
His second opera, a version of Hans Christian Andersen's "Little Mermaid," was composed two years later.
In 1924, the family moved to Milan, where Mr. Menotti attended the Verdi Conservatory of Music for three years and deepened his interest in opera, often taking in performances at La Scala.
Menotti's works, including "The Medium", "The Consul", "The Telephone" and "The Saint of Bleecker Street", all showed that opera could sustain itself in a Broadway theatre."The Consul" ran on Broadway for 269 performances and won both the Drama Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize.
Menotti's 1951 opera, "Amahl and the Night Visitors", written for NBC, was perhaps his most popular and successful stage work. "Amahl" was inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's painting "The Adoration of the Magi" and tells of the healing of a disabled boy who offers his crutches as a gift to the Infant Jesus.
Menotti's involvement with the musical theater was complete. He composed 25 operas, almost all in English. He wrote his own librettos and usually staged his own works. He also founded the Festival of Two Worlds, the long-running summer music festival that began in 1958 in Spoleto, Italy, that he directed for some 40 years. In 1977 he helped establish an American offshoot, Spoleto Festival USA, in Charleston, S.C.
The festival has given American musicians, composers and choreographers an important forum. He withdrew from the Charleston festival in 1993 after years of wrangling with its administrators and city officials.
Much of his professional life was spent in the United States, and he usually spoke of himself as an American composer, despite retaining his Italian citizenship and later moving to an estate of baronial splendor near Edinburgh, Scotland.
His death in Monaco, at Princess Grace Hospital, was announced by his son, Francis, whom Mr. Menotti adopted in the 1970s.
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