Late-breaking news: Nanni Moretti in Scooter Accident

We interrupt our coverage of one Moretti (Luigi) to bring you this bulletin on another (Nanni - no relation).  Back to Luigi in a couple of days.

Nanni Moretti, the Italian film director and star (sometimes referred to as the Woody Allen of Italian cinema), is undoubtedly the most famous scooter-ist in Italy, maybe anywhere.  He earned the title (actually shared with Gregory Peck's fictional reporter in Roman Holiday, chauffering Audrey Hepburn around Rome) with his scootering performance in Caro Diario (1994), where he tours the city and environs in the silence of the early summer morning in Rome, on a Vespa.

The intersection where the accident occurred.
Nanni, if heading home, would have been going
 in the direction of the car, above

The myth of Nanni Moretti came up against cold reality last night (June 1) at about 10 p.m. when Nanni (just back from heading the jury at Cannes), was riding his Vespa blu in Monteverde Vecchio (about a half mile from his home and serenditipitously the apartment where we're staying).  He was struck broadside by a Fiat 600 at the intersection of  via Fratelli Bonnet and via del Vascello.  It's likely (we're piecing things together here) that Nanni had eaten at the restaurant Lumie di Sicilia ("molto frequentato" (very frequented, i.e. popular), according to the daily newspaper La Repubblica), then hopped on the scooter.  He was "investito" (hit) almost immediately.  Another word for "investito" is "travolto."

Help (soccorso) was available within minutes, and Moretti was--as the law requires--taken to the nearest hospital, a protective collar around his neck (see newspaper photo at right).  Despite the next day's headline--"Paura per Nanni Moretti" (fear for....) he was not, apparently, in any real danger.  He arrived at the nearby San Camillo hospital "code green" (which in our experience - but maybe not Moretti's - means you'll wait a long time), and a supervising physician made reassuring comments.

Nanni's Vespa, awaiting Nanni's recovery, in
ristorante Lumie di Sicilia

While on the stretcher waiting to be whisked away from the scene of the accident, Nanni was heard to have said, "tomorrow I'll return to pick up the Vespa."  We assume he did so, though when we surveyed the scene the following morning, the Vespa remained inside the closed restaurant. 

Bill

Really Roman Holiday

Rome on a long summer holiday weekend (of which there are plenty) is lovely for residents who remain in town. The tourists are locked in their itineraries that take them to the Coliseum, and most of the Romans head for the beach, a few to the mountains (hiking is too much work for most of them). We almost had the Lungotevere – the streets that run along the Tiber River – to ourselves, breezily scootering along the empty streets, feeling like Nanni Moretti in Caro Diario as he scootered through an August-empty Rome.

The holiday weekend we’re covering here was in celebration of the city’s Saints Peter and Paul. Since it fell on a Tuesday, the Romans took a “ponte” or bridge, and made a 4-6 day holiday out of it. The homage to the city’s Saints was big enough that the Pope dropped into the nearby (to us) basilica of St. Paul, complete with helicopter entourage.

We stopped by the fair that annually graces the park and streets outside of the basilica, and in the afternoon, it too seemed sleepy and empty (photos).

But by dusk, we could barely walk through the thousands of people buying everything in sight – from the newest versions of vegiamatics to roasted corn on the cob to knock-off purses sold by itinerants. For those of you familiar with the Sunday Porta Portese market, this was at least its equal. The evening view looking towards the St. Paul capanile was considerably different from day (photo). In addition to music at the bandstand (video below), including classic Roman sing-along tunes, of course the night was capped off by fireworks, which we watched as we walked through our neighborhood, now dominated by cars and trucks parked in every conceivable (and some inconceivable) place (photos). Ah, Rome. Dianne

Runaway Roman Romances

"This film was shot entirely on location on the streets of Rome, Italy." That's the intertitle of Roman Holiday (directed by William Wyler, 1952), the Audrey Hepburn/Gregory Peck classic, the first American movie made entirely abroad, from filming to the final print. A poster for the film, with Hepburn and Peck scootering around the Eternal City on a Vespa, can be found in virtually every tourist shop, telling the story of the princess's love affair with Rome. The poster at left is NOT the one found in Rome shops, and the woman Gregory Peck is kissing doesn't resemble Audrey Hepburn, but at least there's a scooter.

Wyler had less fun making the movie. "Our business here does not attract the better element," he wrote from Italy, and he described the "madhouse" that was Rome when whenever Gregory Peck was on the set. "The police are absolutely helpless," he lamented, "as the people of Rome have a very great sense of independence and will not be pushed around. They live on the streets and they own them."

Wyler's comments are from a new book by film scholar Robert R. Shandley, who sheds new light on the familiar topic: American film-making in Rome. The title, Runaway Romances: Hollywood's Postwar Tour of Europe (Temple University Press, 2009), has two meanings. On the one hand, it refers to "runaway" films--that is, films such as Roman Holiday, Ben-Hur (Wyler, 1959), Spartacus (1960), and Quo Vadis? (1961) that fled high production costs in southern California for the cheaper services and lower wages of Europe, and especially Rome, where in 1961 more films were made than in Hollywood. Most were filmed on sound stages at Cinecitta', the famous studio founded in 1937 under Fascism and located just outside the city center. The exterior of Cinecitta' is on Itinerary 1 in Rome the Second Time.

On the other hand, "runaway" refers to protagonists in a series of films set in Rome and elsewhere, 1950s women in flight from suburban boredom and uninspired marriages (or being single, or threatened with spinsterhood), hoping to find a husband, a lover, or maybe just life inspiration, in the romantic spaces of Rome or Paris or even Berlin.

Among the romantic travelogues (these films usually have at least one travelogue sequence that offers the host city's major attractions) filmed in Rome, Shandley presents The Indiscretion of An American Wife, which opens at modernistic Stazione Termini, continues at Piazza di Spagna (romantic encounter with Giovanni Doria, played by Montgomery Clift [neither Italian nor heterosexual]), and features this delightful explanation of the consequent affair: "It was you, it was Rome, and I am a housewife from Philadelphia."

The young women in the widescreen (better for the travelogue part) film, Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) are unmarried secretaries in search of Italian husbands (a volatile combination even today, we hear). The secretaries would normally have trouble meeting classy Italian men but, being from America, a classless society, they ignore the social boundaries of the Old World and get their men. Stazione Termini appears in this one, too.

Both sides of the runaway phenomenon unravel in the early 1960s. Two Weeks in Another Town (Vincente Minelli, 1962), a film about filmmaking, presents Cinecitta' as a lousy place to make a film, and Rome (quoting Shandley here) "filled with washed-up (and overweight) former Hollywood stars." The travelogue Romance turns dark, dangerous, and deadly in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), in which the Spanish Steps become a creepy place occupied by Rome's homeless and potential stalkers.

Robert Shandley's Runaway Romances explores these and other films at length and with sophistication, and it contains a chapter on Roman Holiday. It is available for purchase at amazon.com.

Bill