492 Great Things About Being Italian by Boze Hadleigh

Author:Boze Hadleigh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2015-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

Ruggero Leoncavallo, whose surname means lion-horse, wrote his first opera at age 18 but is best known for the 1892 one-act opera I Pagliacci (The Clowns), a tale of love, jealousy, and murder performed more naturalistically than was usual. Its high point is the celebrated aria “Vesti la Giubba” (Put On the Costume), in which the bitter, cuckolded clown laughs through his tears. Enrico Caruso’s 1902 recording of the song was the first million-selling record in history.

Alas, success seldom visited the Neapolitan Leoncavallo (1858-1919), who’d planned to finance his first opera with his own savings, except that his producer fled with the funds, reducing the youth to earning his bread performing music in coffeehouses.

Later, his friend Giacomo Puccini stole Ruggero’s idea for another opera, which became the hit La Boheme. Leoncavallo’s opera of the same name opened after Puccini’s, and wilted in its shadow. With producers and friends like those. . . .

Sergio Leone was a frankly commercial director, producer and screenwriter. Most closely associated with spaghetti westerns and gangster films, the Roman (1929-1989) declined to direct The Godfather in favor of his own gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America (1984). Starring Robert De Niro, it consumed years of Leone’s time; Warner Bros. trimmed his four-hour version to two hours, but it flopped anyway.

In the 1950s, Sergio, who’d been an assistant to Vittorio de Sica, penned sword-and-sandal screenplays. His directorial bow had him replacing Mario Bonnard, who was too ill to helm The Last Days of Pompeii (1959), starring Steve “Hercules” Reeves, an American made a star in Italy.

Leone’s signature style often alternated extreme close-ups with lengthy long shots. “Subtlety,” he declared. “I can’t even pronounce it.”

The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) is known to most non-Italians only via the lavish 1963 Luchino Visconti film starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, and Alain Delon. However, in Italy the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi, Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa (1896-1957), is a national epic on a par with Gone with the Wind in the United States. Tomasi was part of the fading Sicilian aristocracy that heralded back to the Norman eleventh century and ended in 1860 when Garibaldi ejected the Bourbons from Italy. It was about this transition and these once-privileged characters trying to fit into the new order that Tomasi wrote.

As Tomasi lay on his deathbed, his manuscript was sent anonymously to a female writer-editor in Rome who didn’t read it. It then reached a Milanese publisher who passed it to a Sicilian novelist who read it, deemed it too “essayish,” and wrote to the failing Tomasi to tell him so. Tomasi died, but then a novelist-editor to whom the female writer had sent the manuscript traveled to Palermo and at the late prince’s home found another manuscript in the author’s handwriting that included important additions to the novel—and that was the version brought to light by the Feltrinelli publishing house of Milan in 1958. It became the top-selling novel in Italian history.

The English title is a misnomer. Leopard in Italian is leopardo.

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