Rome Travel Guide

Rome Architecture, History, Art, Museums, Galleries, Fashion, Music, Photos, Walking and Hiking Itineraries, Neighborhoods, News and Social Commentary, Politics, Things to Do in Rome and Environs. Over 900 posts

Sunday, November 24, 2024

Piazza Socrate gets a Makeover. Too bad.

Piazza Socrate has been remodeled. Unfortunately

One of Rome's lesser known piazzas, Socrate juts out on the south flank of Monte Mario, at the confluence of via Fedro and via Cornelio Nipote. It has a commanding view of Vatican City. 

Dianne, enjoying the view, 2018

It's always been a scruffy, inelegant place.

Piazza Socrate, as it appeared 6 years ago

But its elevation, and its location in proximity to St. Peter's, made it a place to stop and look. It was also, so we heard and (likely) observed--a hangout for gay men. The large tree at the edge of the piazza, at the edge of a steep embankment, was a meeting place (below). 

St. Peter's, far right. 2018

That tree is now essentially inaccessible, as is the promontory, now situated behind a substantial fence. All that remains of the piazza--a small piece of isolated green space surrounded by something resembling a traffic circle--is both unappealing and highly public. 

The new fence

No one would ever meet in that space. One can imagine a car now and then pulling over to check out the view. But that's about it.

The traffic circle

With its sharp drop-off near the tree, the pizza's old configuration was not the safest, and likely that's why the city spent thousands to reconfigure it. And maybe the neighbors complained about gay men. As we said at the top. Too bad.

Bill 


Saturday, November 9, 2024

San Lorenzo: Where Maria Montessori Got Her Start

One of the surprises of the San Lorenzo neighborhood we inhabited this year is its discrete harboring of the birthplace of Maria Montessori's Casa dei bambini ("Children's house"), where she developed and put in practice her early childhood educational theories.

At right, the brightly polished brass door marker for Maria Montessori's first casa dei bambini.


San Lorenzo is an appropriate locale for Montessori's then-experimentation because it was one of the poorest and most degraded areas of Rome, home--at the turn of the last century--to the crowded and woefully underserved Italian working class. As we have noted in other posts, San Lorenzo, sometimes called the "most Roman of neighborhoods" outside the Roman walls, is almost an urban island, hemmed in by an enormous cemetery (Verano), multiple-track trainyards, and those ancient Roman walls. The end of the 19th century saw a building boom in Rome, but it was a boom insufficient to house the thousands of workers pouring into the city from the countryside. There was "deep social distress," explains one of the placards on the walls of the still-standing building that housed Montessori's first casa, resulting from illegal crowding and poverty. 


Left, the unassuming building at via dei Marsi 58, in San Lorenzo, where in 1907 the first casa moderna was built (there would be more than 400 within a couple years), part of an attempt to clear slums and provide "socialization." Today, not even this historical building is free from tags and other graffiti that mark the San Lorenzo area.



A senator and engineer, Edoardo Talamo, was put in charge of the new Istituto Romano dei Beni Stabili (The Roman Institute for Public Buildings might be a decent translation), established in 1904 to produce new buildings, case moderne ("modern houses"). And this unassuming building, at via dei Marsi 58, in San Lorenzo, was one of the first, with plans for it made as early as 1905. Talamo and his colleagues at the Institute wanted more than providing "a roof over the head of the neediest," as one description of the "modern houses" read. Jane Addams-like, they wanted "a social transformation of the inhabitants" through "common spaces with various advantages and facilities in each building." The children's space was a kind of early day-care for working parents (such as I attended in Seattle during the World War II years), with mothers helping to implement the plan. 


Right, an interior wall, with the first casa labeled, now with Maria Montessori's name.

In the early 1900s (after receiving multiple degrees that were highly unusual for women, including a medical doctorate), Montessori was a professor of pedagogy at Rome's La Sapienza university, working on her theories. Talamo engaged her to develop the "children's houses" within the "modern houses." She credits him with "the brilliant idea" (maybe the brilliant idea was hiring her) "of welcoming tenants--young children between 3 and 7--to gather in one room under the direction of a teacher who would live in the same building. Each building would have its own school." The Institute by 1907 owned more than 400 buildings in Rome, and so the project had great potential for development, an ideal incubator for the innovative Montessori.

The courtyard, left, where the children tended their own vegetable garden, one of the Montessori educational tasks. One of our friends recalls attending a Montessori school in the 1950s, but he didn't recall the place, only that "I barfed in the courtyard."


That first casa dei bambini is still there, almost 120 years later, in the building on via dei Marsi. It was turned over to the city of Rome in 1938, operated through World War II (the Fascists no doubt salivated over this ready-made educational plant), then was completely abandoned. It was reopened in 1966 by Associazione opera Montessori (Association of Montessori work). Under various organizations, the basic educational structure, with several schools, continues to this day. The casa dei bambini in San Lorenzo remains as a kind of in-place Montessori museum, that, along with the educational institution, "preserves the initial spirit and methodological tradition theorized" by her.

Dianne

Educational panels in Italian and English inside the building complex explain the casa, Montessori's role, and the specific layout.


Right, the memorial plaque from 2007, commemorating the centennial of the casa. It says (as I would translate it) it's the centenary of her birth, but it isn't. It's the centenary of the birth of her educational system. The plaque loftily states: "here, the first casa dei bambini was created January 6, 1907, initiating the rich and productive work of the great educator in service to infancy for the freedom of man."




Sunday, October 20, 2024

A Day on the Periphery: Torre di Righetti, and the Pleasures of Trullo

There's a plan afoot--it's even been funded--to repristinare (redo, clean up, refurbish) Torre di Righetti, a mid-19th-century tower, constructed for hunting (so we read), and the hill on which it sits: Monte Cucco. We had heard of Monte dei Cocci (another name for Monte Testaccio) and Monte Ciocci (Valle Aurelia, a flank of Monte Mario), but Monte Cucco remained a mystery. We found it on the outskirts of Trullo, one of our favorite near-in towns/suburbs, which is located south of long and winding via Portuense and west of the totally unwalkable viale Isacco Newton. Too far to walk, and not easy to get to.

Transportation Czar Dianne figured it out. Train from Stazione Tiburtina to the Magliana stop. Up the stairs to the bus stop, 719 bus 7 stops to the base of Monte Cucco. Perfect.

A few missteps up the hill, then asked a guy driving out of the only farmhouse (well fenced in) where the "Torre" was, then back down and up the only real "road."

Up the road. Nothing in sight yet. 

And there it was, virtually alone on the barren hilltop. In two years (or never) it will be rebuilt and, so we've read, will host art shows. We'll believe that when we see it. The Monte is to have bike paths and benches. The time to see the torre, and the monte, is now, in its evocative "ruins" state, as it's been for decades.


Dianne refused to enter Torre Righetti (fearing for her safety - crumbling buildings and all) until I mentioned that the hole in the center reminded me of the "light artist" James Turrell. 


To one side, superb views of two of EUR's most prominent buildings: the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (aka the Square Coliseum, now owned by Fendi) and the Basilica dei Santi Pietro e Paolo. They look closer than they are in the photo below.

As we learned from a small mural later that day in downtown Trullo, the hilltop was the site of a 1966 film by Pier Paolo Pasolini: "Uccellacci e Uccellini" ("Hawks and Sparrows"), starring Toto and Ninetto Davoli. (All our Roman friends knew the film and the locale, though they hadn't been there.)  A tree depicted in the mural (and presumably in the film) no longer exists. The Basilica appears in the mural.

Monte Cucco is also home to other ruins: a substantial villa/farmhouse, near a clump of trees. These are the ruins of early-19th-century Villa Baccelli, which belonged to  Guido Baccelli, Minister of Education several times in the early years of the State of Italy and, later, his son Alfredo. Higher up the hill we found what appears to have been a facility for animals (maybe feeding troughs). The farmhouse ruins include a long, steep, and deep tunnel (the opening to it freaked out Dianne too). We read the tunnel accesses what are known as Fairy Grottoes (le grotte delle fate), an underground quarry and caves, dating to the 6th century BCE and understood to be the residence of the God Silvanus (for the Latins) and Selvans (for the Etruscans). In the early 20th century the caves were used as an aircraft shelter.  

What's left of Villa Baccelli 


Tunnel to the "Fairy Grottoes," dating to the 6th century BCE 
 

What we thought were feeding troughs in an out-building.

It's just a 10-minute walk from the Torre to downtown Trullo (backtracking on the 719 bus route) and well worth the journey. Trullo is full of exceptional outdoor wall art, often presented with prose and poetry, and much of it on the sides of buildings that compose a 1940-era public housing project, still in decent shape and illustrative of an era when public authorities in the West still built housing for those with modest incomes. Just a sample or two to follow--don't want to spoil the experience. 



At the town's main intersection there's a substantial interior market and a couple of nice bars. That's Dianne enjoying a cafe Americano with a mural behind her.  The barista, who at first greeted us coolly, was very excited and voluble when he found we were not immediately going back to the United States but spent months in Rome.  After initially "overcharging" us, he gave us the locals' price, and free chocolate.


And, up a broad stair, what once was the city hall, now covered, in rather spectacular fashion, by leftist graffiti, wall art, and prose. For some years the building was occupied by leftist organizations, but at the moment it appears to be empty and closed. Enjoy the exterior before it, too, is "repristinatoed." 

A painting--and a poem--on the facade of what once was Trullo's city hall. Some of the writing here celebrates 30 years of "occupation" of the building (1987-2017), and the graffiti "spray artist" is writing "I hate prison. I love liberty."

As you walk around you may (or may not) see giant electrical towers. One by one they're being removed; those that remain are no longer functioning. 

To return to Rome: follow the main road (via del Trullo - not too pedestrian friendly, but walkable) south (retracing the bus route), then west to the frequent train at the Magliana stop, below.


Bill 

Sunday, October 6, 2024

Dreaming--ala Romana

 

Sognare: to dream. Sogno: a dream

Everyone dreams. But it's also possible that cultures dream differently, or think differently about what it means to "dream." More concretely--and based only on a few weeks of walking Rome's streets and reading the newspapers--it seems to us that the word "dream," and variations on it, is used more frequently in Rome than it would be in an American city and, arguably, that it's used differently.

One Sunday morning this year, looking for an open newsstand in the neighborhood of San Lorenzo, we came upon this piece of shutter art. "Who is keeping us from dreaming," it asks, as if the act of dreaming was somehow being frustrated, by someone, or some entity, or some condition.

In nearby Piazza dei Sanniti, where Pier Paolo Pasolini ate his last meal, the words "Balla, Sogna, Lotta"--Dance, Dream, Struggle--beneath an artwork by Sten and Lex, suggest something similar: not only the need to dream, but the difficulty of doing so in a world--and a society--that challenges the dream.

In this case, the dream is particularly intense because the message is affixed to one of San Lorenzo's most contested structures, a building that is a symbol of community, creativity, and social commitment and, during covid, a place where one could find food. Once the home of a movie theater, it was occupied by progressives in 2011, to prevent it from becoming a casino. A decade later, the authorities kicked everyone out. In this case, to "dream" means to hold onto the idea of what the building once was--maybe even hold onto the building--while opposing the plans of developers. A photo of the buildings in Piazza dei Sanniti is at the end of this post. 

"Dance, dream, struggle. Even now, in the cold. Look at us. I love flowers"

This last-minute addition, by way of "The King," was found in Ostiense: "Follow the dream, wherever it may take you."

The newspapers present different varieties of dreaming. A travel article describes the beaches of the Marche region as "un mare da sogno"--a sea to dream about. The Roma soccer club, having tied a crucial match only to lose on an "own goal," earns the headline: "Paredes fa sognare la Roma, poi la beffa" (Paredes [who had two goals, both on penalty kicks] allows Rome to dream, then the mockery)--again, the dream as frustration. 


And the "sogno" of having 24-hour Metro service in Rome, as cities in the United States do:

Just days before that Sunday morning, some 1400 people signed up to take the exam to fill 439 positions driving a bus. Among the applicants were women and many young people with Bachelor's degrees. "Molti sognano," reads the newspaper account, "di fare l'autista di bus" (many dream of being a bus driver). Maybe ironic--and maybe not. 


This window advertisement by BNL Bank appears to use a Bassett Hound [could be a Dachshund] (and a pun involving the word Bassotta [a combination of two words meaning low: basso and sotto]) to announce "low" rates that will help you achieve your Roman dreams:

And this bit of graffiti, on the wall of a prominent San Lorenzo park, fronting on via Tiburtina: "Solo sognare ci terra' svegli." Our Roman friend M., a skilled translator, helped us with this one: "Only dreaming will keep us awake." "The apparent contradiction" (between dreaming and waking), he noted, "makes me think of the necessity and constant effort of keeping dreams alive. And I guess here the writer was thinking of the great dreams of humankind, such as love, peace, and equality." 


Thanks so much, M., for your translation and thoughtful elaboration. Perfect.

Bill 

Nuovo Cinema Palazzo is at left. The restaurant frequented by Pasolini is at right. 

Friday, September 20, 2024

INTERVIEW with Virginia Jewiss, an American Dante scholar who internationalizes Italian cinema, or “How I Made Sean Penn Cry”

[This post appeared first on 2 Film Critics' website here.]

If you stayed for the credits of this year’s Oscar-nominated Italian film, Io Capitano, you would have seen an American name, Virginia Jewiss, listed under “translation by….”  Jewiss acknowledges that “adaptation” is a more accurate description of the multi-faceted work of those who, by translating materials from the original language, help attract international audiences and obtain distribution for a foreign film. It’s a profession that by necessity has expanded in recent years as more films are made for the worldwide public, very different from the tasks of the person who simply dubs or provides subtitles (though neither of those is a “simple” task) for a strictly foreign film.

For Jewiss, it all started with a request that she make Sean Penn cry.

I recently interviewed Virginia Jewiss (right, with Matteo Garrone), a friend of ours whose career we have followed for years, about this evolving field and about language in film.

Dianne

Let’s start with what to call your work on film. Should I always look for you under “translation by…” or “translator,” even though you prefer “adaptation”? There’s no consistency as to how that screen credit is given. It’s not even on the official credit list of the so-called “universal standard” of IMDb [the online Internet Movie Database, now owned by Amazon]. Translation is what I do when I bring a book across from Italian into English. When I translate literature, the original work already exists—the translator gives it a new voice, in my case, English, but the translation does not alter or erase the original. In film, translation happens before the film is made and is an essential step in getting the work to the screen. So in the film world I prefer the term “adaptation.”

It seems as though the industry does not entirely understand the role of this work. The film industry is still very much in the infancy stage of recognizing the true value of the work of adaptation at various stages of the production process. I’d like to think that the recent boom of highly celebrated films dealing with language will lead to a deeper appreciation of the role of the translator.

Maybe we should start even earlier in the process and ask what IS a foreign film; in your case, what’s an Italian film these days? You began by working with the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino on This Must Be the Place, a 2011 Palme d’Or-nominated film in English, starring Sean Penn. It also won Best Screenplay at the 2012 David di Donatello awards, given for Italian films, I note. In the past, there was a lot of resistance to the idea that an Italian film could be made in English. Even Sorrentino was criticized for making a film in English. So, what does this criticism mean? What does it say about our idea of national cinema, our expectations for a “foreign” film? Sorrentino’s response was to say, “okay, you want an Italian film?” Here it is: La Grande Bellezza [“The Great Beauty,” which won the Oscar in 2014 for what was then called Best Foreign Language Film]. It’s in Italian, smack in Rome, a Fellini-esque film, as if Sorrentino was saying, “I can still do this.” And then his next move was to make Youth, starring Harvey Keitel and Michael Caine, set in Switzerland but filmed in English [another of Jewiss’s adaptations]. I think a lot was happening in those early years of Sorrentino moving back and forth between English and Italian. He carved out a creative space for directors to make films in languages other than their own.

Left, Jewiss with Paolo Sorrentino.


Yet all of the awards in the film industry operate along national lines. Yes. At the Academy Awards, there’s the French entry, the German entry, the Italian entry. The question then becomes, what makes a film Italian? And at the moment, the answer to that is, it’s an Italian director and an Italian lead production company. But the film can be made in any language. I’m hoping that scholars’ and viewers’ expectations that the language of the film has to be the same as the country of origin has shifted because of Sorrentino’s works like Youth and [TV’s] The Young Pope, [Matteo Garrone’s] Tale of Tales and Io Capitano, and other films that are coming out, not just in Italy, but in other countries too. Directors in many countries are asking “what is the language—or languages—in which this particular story should be told?”

You brought up Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best International Feature from Italy, yet, in its tale of two young cousins emigrating from Senegal across Africa to—they hope—Europe, the production does not set foot on Italian soil, features no Italian actors, and has very few Italian words. “Io capitano” [“I, captain!”—perhaps better translated as “I’m the captain!”] are two of those few words. Talk about your experience with that film. First let me say that Garrone spent a long time gathering material. He interviewed people in refugee camps and migrants who had made their way to Italy. Garrone is a kind of a neo-neorealist in that he often combines elements of true stories from which he crafts the fictional narrative, but every episode of Io Capitano is in some way true. As he listened to people’s stories, he came to realize the kind of story he wanted to tell.

Okay. Where do you come in? Garrone wrote an initial screenplay in Italian, but he knew the film would be made in some combination of other languages. He wasn’t sure exactly which languages those would be at first—that would depend on where the boys’ journey would start, the route they would take, the people they would meet. But he needed an English script before the location could be selected or actors cast. I usually come into the process very early—as soon as a first full Italian screenplay is ready—because the English version is what gets circulated in order to obtain funding and secure co-producers, which is what allows the project to move forward. Until Garrone charted their journey, I couldn’t introduce linguistic nuances that would locate the story in a specific geography. I used a fairly standard yet emotionally charged English. So my process on that film was very different from my work on This Must Be the Place, where the dialogue had to convey the various Englishes of Dublin, New York, and beyond.

So you are writing a screenplay in English even when the film ultimately might not be filmed in English. Yes, English is the language you need to get everyone on-board. If we are hoping for backing from a French or a German or an Irish production company, they are reading that screenplay and evaluating whether they’re going to invest in it. They read the script or synopsis in English. When Sorrentino made The Hand of God [E’ stata la mano di Dio, his 2021 film set in Naples], he knew from the get-go that it was going to be filmed not only in Italian but in Neapolitan. There’s no English in it. Yet he still needed an eloquent, convincing English-language screenplay to send around. That is how you get your funding, and also how you begin to negotiate world distribution rights. Even for a film that is going to be filmed in Italian, which is the language of the original screenplay, English plays a crucial role in the creation of the project—even if once the money comes in, that script is set aside. It will come back in a strange way later, though, because I usually end up curating [not initially writing] subtitles if the film or TV series is going to be taken to international festivals where a lot rests on those subtitles.

Let’s return to Garrone’s Io Capitano. You did an English version, which, as you indicate, in some ways doesn’t exist in the final version of the film. The English version continued to evolve as Garrone’s thought process evolved. That original Italian script was turned into English, became the basis for some of his exploration of which languages to use, and was further revised once the casting was done. Garrone invited people in Senegal, the characters, the actors he had cast, as well as many other people involved in the project, including refugee-consultants whom he had on the project, to stand with him behind the camera, to make sure that the story he was telling was true to their experience. The co-producers need to be kept abreast of the changes that are happening, so the English screenplay gets continuously updated as the project evolves over the life of the making of the film.

Above, the two young cousins in their trek across the desert, speaking and picking up different languages. Left, Seydou Sarr as Seydou and Moustapha Fall as Moustapha.

Io Capitano, as you’ve indicated, is a complex film in terms of multiple languages, of the language of the film evolving. Beyond the English script, how did that work? Garrone continued to talk with migrants as he and his team began focusing on Senegal. The narrative starts in Senegal, and the script is clever in that it has the boys speak Wolof at home with their families, but then when they’re walking to school, they start speaking French, because that’s how they’re doing their schooling. It is a beautiful expression of their linguistic mobility. But that’s not all. As they make their way east and north to the coast of Libya, other languages are added in to reflect the places and people they encounter. A linguistic odyssey.

Was there a similar process with Garrone’s earlier film, Gomorra [in English, “Gomorrah”—a “true crime” drama based on a best-selling Roberto Saviano exposé of gangs in and around Naples]? I translated Saviano’s book, but I didn’t work on the film, so I can’t speak to that. I will say that Gomorra is set in that southern Italian city and uses such a thick Neapolitan dialect that some scenes were subtitled into Italian when it was screened in Italy. Garrone has been thinking for a long time in a very sophisticated way about the power of language. All of that accumulated experience also informed the language choices and the language sensitivity that came into lo Capitano.

Another aspect of this internationalization of films is the use of language itself almost as a character in a film, or at least as a point of reference for identity and emotion. You’ve mentioned the “boom in highly celebrated films about language.” What are you seeing in these films? Several films nominated for Oscars this year foreground language in innovative ways. Anatomy of a Fall [a French production which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay this year and was nominated for Best Picture, but not for Best International Feature] unfolds around the very question of language. In this courtroom drama, a fascinating blend of French, German and English, the wife [the protagonist, Sandra, a native German speaker] is forced to testify in French, and she keeps saying, “I can’t express myself in French.” One of the problems in their marriage is that the husband [Samuel, who is French] feels that it’s an imposition that they speak in English at home. But she says, “No, English is the place that we meet. I’m living in your country, so when I go outside, I have to speak your language. But what about me? What about my language?” Language becomes, in many ways, the emblem of their marital crisis.

The year 2023 might be seen as a breakthrough year for language in film. You mention other foreign film nominations for that year. Let me mention another Oscar nominee, Past Lives. The main character is a Korean woman who now lives in Brooklyn and is married to an American. A childhood friend from Korea comes back into her life and unsettles her marriage and her sense of self when he asks, “Do you dream in Korean? Who do you speak your native language to?” These two films offer fascinating studies of how you construct—and alter, evolve—your identity through language.

Above, In "Past Lives," Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Nora (Greta Lee)
speak Korean while her husband Arthur (John Magaro) is left out.

Io Capitano seems to bring it all together for you. Filmmakers need to think daringly about language, to recognize all that is at stake with language and dialect choices. And to me, this journey of Io Capitano, where the languages shift and meet other languages, captures the epic quality of the boys’ journey of education. Their delight in learning Italian and their excitement from time to time in the prospect of going to Italy—in addition to everything else the film does—is a powerful reflection on the power of language in storytelling.

What else does the “translator” or “adapter” do with English? I often also will translate into English a soggetto, that is, a synopsis, and then in addition a longer treatment. Standard “intro to film writing” textbooks teach that “first what happens is somebody writes a subject and then they write the treatment, which is longer, and then they write the screenplay.” I’ve been on many projects where a screenplay gets greenlighted and then you back-write the rest of the material that’s supposed to go with it. The Academy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, they have strict rules for entering a film for competition—that artfully crafted paragraph that’s going to get your film entered into a festival—so we might do 20 rewrites of that back and forth. I am often drawn into that kind of activity too.

What’s your relationship to the writing of subtitles? You mentioned earlier that you might “curate” them. I curate, but do not write, subtitles. Let me praise the subtitlers who have an incredibly hard job, and who—similarly to what I do—perform a challenging sort of translation/adaptation/interpretation. We’ve all watched subtitled films where the characters talk for five minutes, and the subtitle is just one line. It’s a very difficult art and science that has to take into consideration how many milliseconds a shot lasts, what you need your audience to hear and what they need to see. One rule is that on a closeup of a face, only one line. You never want to distract the eye from the actor’s face—when so much is conveyed through expression. In a shot with several people, you can have two lines, but you are always making tough choices about which pieces of the conversation to highlight. Another rule: never put a punctuation mark in the middle of a line, because it stops the eye, and you can’t afford the delay of that split. You need to keep the viewer’s eye moving. That’s why questions we can hear on the screen are often turned into affirmative statements in the subtitle.

When do the subtitlers come into the project? Subtitling is one of the last post-production steps. The subtitler is given the whole film and has very little turnaround time. I’ve been brought in several times to curate some of the subtitles, not because the subtitler hasn’t done a good job—on the contrary—but because I’ve been living with the story from the very early stages of the project. So it makes sense that, once the subtitles are done, the film will come back to me, and I add nuance to some of the dialogue. I can bring that perspective because I’ve carried those characters around with me sometimes for a year or two. The subtitler who has to turn around the film in a week doesn’t have time to really internalize the story in the same way.

You’ve said what the subtitlers do is similar to what you do. Is it translation? Subtitling is a particular form of translation. I think of it as a distillation, because you have to choose short words, you have to choose uncomplicated words. You have to think about punctuation along with all the other rhythms of the ear and eye. It’s an essential activity, often very misunderstood and maligned, when instead it’s bridging vast linguistic and cultural distances, allowing us to experience films in languages we don’t understand. [2 Film Critics’ post “To Dub or Not To Dub: Rethinking the Cineaste's Aversion to Dubbing” deals with these issues.]

I’ve saved the personal for the end. Having followed your career, we were around when you first got into the “business,” as it’s called in Los Angeles. Your entire professional life you’ve been a scholar of Italian literature, with a focus on Dante. Where did you veer off? I did a PhD in Italian, taught Dante at Dartmouth, Humanities at Yale, and am currently Director of Public Engagement for the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins, where I also teach Italian and film. The first novel I translated was Vita by Melania Mazzucco, an extraordinary and partly true story of her ancestors who migrated to the US. I was fortunate to work with Jonathan Galassi, the publisher at Farrar Strauss and Giroux, who then asked me to read a new book I had never heard of, tucked way in the back of a bookstore in my neighborhood in Rome, that was Saviano’s Gomorra. A few weeks later that same book was in the window of every single bookstore in Italy. Things exploded when Saviano began receiving death threats for his daring exposé of the mafia—the book became an overnight sensation. I began working on it before this dramatic shift. Saviano was going to drive me around Naples, on the back of his Vespa, so that I could see the neighborhoods that he talked about in Gomorra. The night before our day in Naples, he called me from the Police Headquarters and said, “we’re not going. It’s not going to happen. I’m under police protection.” I did see him in Rome, though, and worked with him closely on Gomorra and then later on Zero, Zero, Zero, his book about the cocaine industry. He would come to dinner at my apartment, his police escort sitting outside my building the whole evening.

That’s your foray into translating not just Dante, but popular books. It’s still not screenwriting. Your first “adaptation gig,” let’s call it, was, as we’ve discussed, with Sorrentino on his first English-language film This Must Be the Place, with Penn. Sorrentino had written the screen play specifically for Sean Penn and said he would only make the film if Sean Penn said yes. But Sean Penn doesn’t speak Italian. And at the time Paolo didn’t speak much English. The producers contacted Rosaria Carpinelli, Melania Mazzucco’s literary agent and asked, “What do we do with an Italian screenplay that needs to make its way into English in a convincing enough way that someone like Sean Penn will accept this role?” Rosaria gave them my name. I am eternally grateful to her.

That was your opening, and you took it? Not so fast! One of producers called me and asked if I would translate the screenplay. I said no! I didn’t know anything about screenplays. I’d never even read one. I had no idea what was involved, and I was afraid it would be quite technical. Being Italian, the producer said, “Come on, meet me for a cup of coffee.” So we met in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, had a coffee, and he explained: “We have this screenplay, we think it’s really good, we want Sean Penn to star in it. We have no money. But if we can get Sean Penn to read the screenplay in English, and it moves him so much that he cries, he’ll say ‘I want to be this character.’ If he says yes, we can then go to other production companies and say, ‘we have Sean Penn, please give us millions of dollars,’ and they will because everyone wants to work with Sean Penn, and we will make the movie. So all we’re really asking is that you make Sean Penn cry. Do you think that you could do that?”

Don’t keep me in suspense. Did you make Penn cry? Yes! I read the screenplay, and it made me cry. So I knew Penn would too, once I moved it into English for him. I worked with Sorrentino and his producers to come up with a screen-ready script in English, which is what they used to shoot the film.

Has signing on to do a film changed for you much since then? Today when anybody wants to bring me on to a film project, I first sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and then a 10- to 20-page contract. But my first film started with a coffee in Trastevere and a handshake. Tha