Puglia by Rudolph Valentino
Of the three regions, it is the least represented on screen. However, Alessandro Piva puts it in the spotlight in La Capa Gira (1999), shot in the city of Bari. The film follows their adventures through the labyrinthine streets of this city marked by all kinds of trafficking, where an ancestral dialect is still spoken, giving it its musicality. Bari is also the setting for Edoardo Ponti's La vie devant soi (2020), a film adaptation of Romain Gary's novel of the same name, starring Sophia Loren as an elderly Jewish woman who takes a young Senegalese immigrant under her wing.
Lionello de Felice's L'Âge de l'amour (1953), a classic in terms of its period and style, tells the story of adolescent love in a small town in this poor region. Also worth mentioning is Il racconto dei racconti (2015), a fantasy film by Matteo Garrone partly shot in Puglia, with Salma Hayek in the lead role. The film was in official selection at Cannes when it was released. A radical change of register for the director of Gomorra (2008).
Silent film star Rudolph Valentino hails from Puglia and has the longest name in cinema history (Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antoguolla!). He was born in Castellaneta in 1895, the very year in which the seventh art was invented. In 1913, he left Italy for the United States. It was actor Norman Kerry who persuaded him to try his luck in the cinema. After a few big-screen appearances, his first big success, in 1921, was The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, whose screenwriter, June Mathis, had spotted him in The Eyes of Youth (1919). A star was born, a fact confirmed by his role in The Sheik the same year. In Blood and Sand(Arènes sanglantes, 1922), he played alongside another silent film star, Nita Naldi.
1925 saw the release of his two biggest hits: The Eagle and The Son of the Sheik. Long criticized in the U.S. for feminizing the American male, he nonetheless retained the allure of an androgynous sex symbol.
Dark Calabria
Alberto Lattuada's La Lupa (The She-Wolf of Calabria , 1953), the region's most legendary film, set in the mountains of Calabria, evokes the superstitions of the Mezzogiorno while recounting the drama of jealousy between mother and daughter. The film is adapted from a late 19th-century story by Giovanni Verga.
Luigi Comencini's film Un enfant de Calabre (1987) was a great success. It narrates the sporting adventure of a young runner who wishes to become a marathon runner, and who strives to realize his dream against the advice of his family.
More recently, Matteo Garrone's Gomorra (2008) was a resounding success. It is an adaptation of the book of the same name by Neapolitan Roberto Saviano, published by Gallimard in 2007. Some scenes from this explosive investigation into the violence of southern Italy's mafia were shot in the magnificent panoramas of Reggio Calabria, near the Strait of Messina. In the same vein, in 2013, Fabio Mollo used southern Italy and Reggio Calabria as the backdrop for his film Il Sud è niente. A world that shows that the Calabrian mafia's law of silence, the infamous 'Ndrangheta, still reigns in the region's culture.
There are also a number of documentaries, such asUn village de Calabre (2016), by Shu Aiello and Catherine Catella. The action takes place in Riace, at the time of the municipal elections. It was one of the first villages to welcome refugees, thanks to social housing introduced by a committed mayor's office. But the xenophobic shadow of the opposition looms over this pivotal moment, and the filmmakers endeavor to portray everyday village life with humanity. The film won several awards, notably at the Visions du Réel festival in Nyon, Switzerland, internationally renowned for creative documentaries. Also worth mentioning is Calabria (2016) by Pierre-François Sauter. Following the death of a Calabrian worker in Switzerland, his two friends and colleagues decide to drive his body back to his native province. An atypical road-trip from the north to the south of Italy.
Basilicata, sacred land
In 1960, in his masterpiece Rocco and His Brothers, Luchino Visconti describes the harsh acclimatization to cold urban life of a poor Basilicata family emigrating to Milan. But what does the region look like today? Basilicata Coast to Coast (2013), by Rocco Papaleo and starring Max Gazze, is an original road movie on foot through the region. A small group of friends decide to reassemble the orchestra of their youth to take part in a festival. Departing from the port town of Maratea, they decide to walk to Scanzano Jonico. Their journey gives the viewer a fine regional portrait, from the Tyrrhenian coast in the west to the Ionian Sea in the east. They pass through the towns of Trecchina, Lauria, Tramutola, Aliano and Craco. Craco, a ghost town perched on the cliffs, has been the setting for several blockbuster sequences, including Quantum of Solace (2008) and Wonder Woman (2017). Christ Stopped at Eboli was also filmed here in 1979 by Francesco Rosi, adapting Carlo Levi's novel of the same name.
Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004), filmed in Matera, is not to be forgotten, and has even given rise to tourist tours of the region to visit the filming locations. Just outside Matera, Craco was the setting for Judas' hanging scene. Pier Paolo Pasolini's L'Evangile selon saint Matthieu (1964) was also shot in the troglodyte town, which acts as Jerusalem for the purposes of the film. Catherine Hardwicke also chose Matera as the setting for her Nativity, as did an MGM remake of Ben Hur. In a completely different genre, Matera became the setting for some of the action scenes in a James Bond opus, Dying Can Wait (2021).
Basilicata is the ancestral home of the Coppola family, left by the famous director's grandfather who left Bernalda to try his luck in America. Francis Ford Coppola recently returned to the family land and inaugurated his Palazzo Margherita, a palace with a family, gastronomic and, of course, cinematic theme.
