italiamia

(1475 - 1532) Bernardino Luini was a North Italian painter from Leonardo's circle, a conservative painter who took "as much from Leonardo as his native roots enabled him to comprehend".…

Fra Filippo Lippi work was widely respected in his time, and he is known today as an innovative and accomplished painter of the Florentine Renaissance. Lippi was born in 1406…

Giotto di Bondone, the father of modern painting and one of the greatest figures in the history of Western art, was born in a small hamlet in the valley of…

Giorgio Giorgione was born Giorgio Barbarelli in Castelfranco in 1477. Very little is known about this master who died of the plague at the age of 34, but who changed…

(1901 - 1966) Alberto Giacometti, the Surrealist sculptor known for his nervous, elongated forms, was born in Stampa, Switzerland. Giacometti started drawing at the age of nine, painting at twelve…

Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia were from the city of Pisa. Artemisia was a pioneer as a female painter of her time.

Giorgio de Chirico was born in Greece in 1888, to Italian parents. Although he was the son of a railroad worker, Chirico quickly developed an interest in art. He studied…

Leonardo da Vinci, the epitome of the Renaissance man, was born in 1452 in Vinci, a village near Florence and was brought up by his grandfather. In 1467 Leonardo entered…

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, revolutionary naturalist painter, was born in Caravaggio near Milan, the son of a mason in 1573. He showed his talent early and at the age of…

Giovanni Antonio Canale, known as Canaletto, was born in 1697 in Venice where his father was a painter of theatrical scenery. The young Canaletto studied first in his father's workshop…

Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano, called Il Bronzino, was born in 1503 in Monticello, outside Florence. He was first a student of, and then assistant to, Jacopo Pontormo, one of the…

Umberto Boccioni, Futurist theoretician, painter, and sculptor, was born in 1882 in Reggio Calabria and was a graduate of the Technical Institute of Catania when he began to study art…

Fra Angelico, a Dominican friar, was perhaps the most important painter of Renaissance Florence.

If you're in Italy and want to use a cell phone, here's how to do it Italians are known for talking and their zest for talking on their cell phone…

Is Spaghetti alla Bolognese really an Italian recipe? The sauce for sure is but the shape of the pasta is what makes it truly authentic.

The season of the white telephones lasted only for a brief period of time during the 1930s and early 1940s.

The oldest film festival in the world, the Venice Film Festival was founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica." It has taken place in…

Movies with Ugo Tognazzi Because of his father's profession, inspector of an insurance company, Ugo Tognazzi spent his childhood in various cities to return later in 1936 in his native…

Of particular interest at international level was the "cannibalistic" genre, started by Umberto Lenzi in 1972 with "Il paese del sesso selvaggio". The idea of filming horror/adventure movies in exotic…

With this definition we mean an entire series of Italian movies with a "western" setting (often filmed in Spain), not only with Italian actors, but also with famous American actors…

Alberto Sordi aka Albertone, was a beloved Italian actor and film director. He was also the voice of Oliver Hardy in the Italian version of the Laurel&Hardy

It was during those war years that a new genre was born, the so-called propaganda film: the one in which a hero, sometime a mythological character, becomes involved in war…

In this context, new directors continue and expand the work already started years before by directors like Francesco Rosi, whose film "Salvatore Giuliano" recounts the life of the famous Sicilian…

A case apart from the cultural and cinematographic landscape of the times is Pier Paolo Pasolini, director, actor and author, who in his work showed an opposition to the morals…

Ermanno Olmi is considered by many the catholic opposite of Pasolini: a rare example of poet-director but opposed to the Marxist ideology of Pasolini's movies. Since the movie debut in…

The Italian movies of the 21st century In 2001 Nanni Moretti wins the Palm D'or at the Cannes Film festival with "La stanza del figlio" while Ermanno Olmi completes one…

In this context the neorealist genre was born, an artistic and cultural movement that embraces all forms of art, but in particular cinema. The neorealist cinema has the main focus…

Marcello Mastroianni was an Italian actor made famous by the movies of Fellini such as La Dolce Vita and 8½. Mastroianni had a long acting career in Italy.

Anna Magnani was a beloved Academy Award-winning Italian actress, with stage experience. The Rose Tattoo with Burt Lancaster earned her an Oscar.

Sophia Loren is a motion picture and stage, Academy Award-winning actress, widely considered to be the most popular Italian performer.

The first pioneer movies (1896-1902) The first Italian movies were documentaries, filmed in a few seconds in which those fierce pioneers (first and foremost a former cartographer of the Military…

One of the fundamental directors of this genre was first and foremost Mario Bava, a cinematographer turned into director. Not only had he created a real starting point for the…

Those colossals were directed by Mario Caserini ("Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei", 1913), Enrico Guazzone ("Marc Anthony and Cleopatra", 1913) and most notably Giovanni Pastrone, who in 1914 directed the…

A unique combination of memory, dreams, fantasy, and desire, Fellini's films are deeply personal visions of society, often portraying people at their most bizarre. The term "felliniesque" is used to…

Vittorio De Sica was one of the world's most influential filmmakers, and as an actor he starred in 150 movies, built a career that spanned half a century.

A new physiological process is taking place and it is bound to the popularity of commercial television, with similar effect in other countries with great cinema traditions such as Japan…

Very popular now are the passion dramas, many of them inspired by classic literary works and theatre plays, directed by specialists like Roberto Roberti (father of Sergio Leone) and the…

The movie won an Oscar in 1963 for best original screenplay. In this new genre, we can recall names of the main Italian actors of the times, from Alberto Sordi…

Mussolini approved the project and an area South-East of Rome was selected and after two years of building, on April 21st 1937, he participated at the inauguration of Cinecittà, with…

Roberto Benigni is an Academy Award-winning Italian film and television actor, writer and director. He won an Oscar for Life is Beautiful (La Vita e' bella)

The Manifesto of Futuristic Cinematography dates back to 1916 (some sources say those experiments started earlier) and it was signed also by Filippo Marinetti, Armando Ginna, Bruno Corra, Giacomo Balla,…

It is useless to classify a movie genre so deeply tied to their authors, a genre that began to develop during that decade and virtually ended with the death of…

The pioneer of Italian animation has been Francesco Guido, better known as "Gibba". In 1946 he produced his first animated movies for the Italian cinema: "L'ultimo sciuscià" with neorealist undertones…

During the 1990s, with great directors gone, a weakness in commercial success and the inability to create new genres, the Italian cinema production will go on with improvisation. Unfortunately, the…

Venice The number one aim of anyone visiting Venice should be to get lost. The island is a rabbit warren with small streets haphazardly linking the beautiful architecture. Attempting to…

Our top 10 Italy destinations Italy has much history to be found in its beautiful cities and crisp green countryside, with a superb public transport system to facilitate this (particularly…

[caption id="attachment_181" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Assisi[/caption] Within its borders Umbria contains a dozen or so classic hill-towns, each resolutely individual and crammed with artistic and architectural treasures to rival bigger and…

[caption id="attachment_175" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Matera[/caption] Culturally impoverished, underdeveloped and - owing to emigration - sparsely populated, Basilicata was long considered only good for taxation, and even then it was mismanaged.…