The last years of Totò, the sad prince who had three funerals

Once upon a time there was a prince. It had many names, starting from Antonio Curtisbut everyone knew him as Toto. A prince with a real coat of arms, but also a prince (or perhaps a king) of comedy. First in the theater and then at cinema. A puppet, a very famous mask but also a schizophrenic character, in which the prince lived with Totò in private, with the king of comedy, with the mask that made all of Italy laugh.

This dualism, this painful coexistence, the ambition of the prince and the decline of the ‘king’ are told in an intense and moving, at times even painful, volume by Francesco Piccolo‘What are clouds. The last years of Totò‘ (Ed. Einaudi, 110 pages – 16 euros) which explores the complex final phase of Antonio De Curtis’ life and career. In this biographical essay the author draws an intimate portrait of artistic twilight of the big Neapolitan comedianhighlighting the regrets and the intellectual consecration posthumously. Piccolo delves into the profound vulnerability of the man who aspired to be recognized for his artistic value and who, now elderly, blind and perhaps surpassed by the new generations of comedians (Sordi, Tognazzi, Chiari) still has the opportunity to demonstrate his value when he is called by the greatest Italian intellectual, poet and director, Pier Paolo Pasolinito a leading role alongside the newcomer Ninetto Davoliof whom he will become a great friend, almost a father, in ‘Birds and birds’.

A personal success – special mention to Cannes, Silver Ribbon in Italy – which only fuels the regret of not having chosen the path of auteur cinema. And with Pasolini the partnership is also repeated in Totò’s last film, ‘Italian whim‘, an episodic film directed by Steno (‘The Sunday Monster’, with Ugo Tognazzi) and precisely by Pasolini, with Totò and Ninetto Davoli, ‘What are clouds?‘. And the last cinematographic short film shot byNeapolitan actor it is erected as a poetic testament of a genius capable of building his own immortality without his knowledge.

The painful fracture between icon and man

In his essay Piccolo gives back a deliberately melancholy image and at times disturbing by Antonio De Curtis alias Totò in an agile and passionate text that investigates the painful fracture between the icon venerated by the general public and the private man, constantly afflicted by the fear of having wasted his talent on films snubbed by criticism. From the narrative emerges the figure of a artist tired and now almost blind, who nevertheless miraculously regained his strength and creative inspiration at the moment of cheep sul set.

Bigoted Italy and censorship on TV

Among little-known anecdotes (such as the punch during a boxing match who moved his jaw “creating” Totò’s mask), some narrative license (the chats with the driver Cafiero) and a lot of melancholy, Piccolo quasi en-passant also tells of aBigoted Italy and retrograde in which the Rai creates ‘Tutto Totò‘, a special in ten episodes (which later became nine because one was censored) of the sketch of the great comedian ‘purged’ so as not to offend politicians, right-thinking people and even the “hairdressers named Attilio”. And so a wonderful idea produces a mediocre result: the scenes – some very famous, like that of the sleeping car with Castellani – they lose bite, are deprived of double meanings and are flat and very weak (Roberto Gervaso he wrote that “the censors have reduced the sketches to unstitched and inanimate meatloaves”).

The three funerals of the prince of laughter

But it is also an Italy in which the ‘traditional’ family is inviolable and accepts only one man lives with a woman out of marriage, therefore Franca Faldiniwith Totò for fifteen years, cannot attend (in his home) the blessing of the actor’s body, killed by a heart attackon 15 April 1967. And it is precisely the last farewell to Totò, with which Piccolo’s book ends, that establishes the greatness of the actor and clarify how wrong he was in thinking, in the last years of his life, that he had wasted his talent in films that they are “worth nothing”.

For Totò, in fact, despite having thought about his own funeral as something modest (“I would like to go quietly”) to be buried in the chapel built in 1951 at the Pianto Cemetery in Naplesin reality it was the occasion of a crowd bathing incredible, a sign of the Italians’ love for that exceptional mask. But it wasn’t just one ‘bath’, there were actually three. Two the April 17: in Rome with the entire world of cinema, culture and institutions; then in the afternoon in the Basilica del Carmine in Naples with ‘his’ people. But there was also one, with only the coffin without a body, obviously, the May 22ndl Health district where he was born. And so the prince who wanted a modest funeral actually had three.