The Adventures Of Roberto Rossellini: His Life And Films

936 Pages·1998·6.96 MB·English

by  Tag Gallagher

Revised edition, 2018.
© Tag Gallagher
[email protected]

The Adventures of
Roberto Rossellini

He could have been a minister, a cardinal, a banker…
—Sergio Amidei.
And so my brother Roberto set off on a great adventure…
—Renzo Rossellini.

1. Fantasy
2. Youth
3. Passing Time
4. Finally Working.
5. The War Trilogy: La nave bianca, Un pilota ritorna, L’uomo dalla croce.
6. World War II Comes Home.
7. RomeOpen City
8. Paisà
9. Slopes of Hope: Una voce umana, Deutschland im Jahre Null, Il miracolo.
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10. Neo-realism = mc . (Some Theory)
11. Debacles: La macchina ammazzacattivi.
12. Neo-realism = ∞. (Some More Theory)
13. Land of God.
14. God’s Jester.
15. Europe ‘51.
16. Voyage in Italy.
17. At the Stake: Giovanna d’Arco al rogo, Fear.
18. The Great Mother.
19. Bottom Up: Il generale Della Rovere.
20. Poet Laureate: Era notte a Roma, Viva l’Italia.
21. “The Cinema Is Dead”—Where Is Virtginity? Vanina Vanini, Anima Nera, The
Iron Age.
22. La Prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV.
23. A New Cinematic Language: Acts of the Apostles
24. The Death of Socrates. (Trilogy of Desiccation I.)
25. Blaise Pascal. (Trilogy of Desiccation II.)
26. The Age of the Medici.
27. Cartesius. (Trilogy of Desiccation III.)
28. Anno uno. The Messiah.
29. The End.
Acknowledgments, bibliography, notes
Filmography
Index
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Preface
In 1974, while visiting a friend in Los Gatos, California with scarcely a dime
in my pocket, I learned that Pacific Film Archives was showing Rossellini’s The
Age of the Medici over three nights in Berkeley. I walked to the interstate and
hitched a ride. My driver was a Chicano in a beat-up car. He showed me an
iron rod he kept under the seat for unruly passengers and negotiated the
jammed highway by going seventy in the service lane. As he dropped me off,
he mentioned he was checking into a psychiatric hospital.
The first segment of The Medici ended at midnight. My bed was fifty miles
away with no way to get to it. I tried sleeping across the street in a University
of California dormitory lounge, but a guard threw me out. I found a bush, and it
started to rain.
All the next day it poured. I sat in a small museum, saw the second part of
The Medici that night, got drenched afterward, and for two dollars found space
with some other strays on the floor of an apartment, where flood lights and rock
music blared through what was left of the night until we were kicked out at
seven. The rain had stopped. I waited fourteen hours and saw the third part of
The Medici.
I cannot imagine a better context for a Rossellini movie: confusion, chaos,
out-on-a-limb, obsessed. And the movie: order, but something more:
providence, amazing grace. Never have house lights coming on jarred me so
precipitously out of one world and into the next. It was devastating.
Why?

Eventually I would learn that Rossellini’s real life, outside the “new reality”
he created in his pictures, was perpetually in turmoil, and not unwittingly. Yet
the man himself had a calm about him, a confidence, charm and fascination that
everyone who knew him remarked on and that ought to be present on every
page of this book—but is not—because it explains why so many people wanted
to love, serve, and be acknowledged by him. Sooner or later, inevitably, they
would feel betrayed. The house lights would come on. Long before then
Rossellini would have gone on to new conquests, refusing to look back, “going to
meet the future,” as he would say. Part of him never left you; you did not stop
loving him.
Why did Rossellini devastate people?

I met him once, for a two-hour interview. He bought me a beer and told me
it was easy to borrow all the money I needed for anything. “People don’t try,”
he explained. I understood what people meant about him.
“These are my things,” his sister and wife Marcella both told me when I
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asked them questions, as though in the very act of speaking they would be
giving away parts of their selves. I wanted to reply that he was “my thing” too.
My experience was of a different order, however. The Rossellini I knew was an
artistic consciousness, nearly as unknown to them as the supple human being
was to me. Yet for both of us, what we knew was mystery.

Neo-realism was an effort, born in pain and confusion during the war and
Resistance, to take stock of what Italians had been through, to sift through a
mystery, to make sense. It was premised on the heady assumption that our
lives need not be ruled by fortune or evil, that, if we are willing to be intelligent,
we are capable of imposing our fantasies on History, changing the concept of
the universe, and creating a “new reality.”
This had been the message of Open City, Paisà and the other neo-realist
films. It was also the message of the Italian Renaissance depicted in The Age of
the Medici. In spite of the confusion, private and public, of the decades between
these films—the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s—Rossellini stayed loyal to the Resistance
commitment to create a new culture. This was the great adventure toward the
future, the “new.”

Gerald Mast told me when I began this book ten years ago that biography is
fiction. I did not believe him then; I do now. Everything here is based either on
my own experience of the movies or of what people have told me in a hundred
interviews. Written sources are no more reliable, often less so. Rossellini’s own
statements are the most unreliable of all, even, or particularly, in the simplest
things: indeed, defending him often entails attacking his words. Official
documents were rarely obtainable and these are notoriously unreliable in a
country that until recently has made a fine art of fictionalizing accounts. The
best I could do was to follow Croce’s advice, try to inject myself into the hearts
and minds of the real people who have become my “characters,” and hope that
they will at least agree that we saw the same movie.
1. Fantasy

At ten minutes before one on Wednesday afternoon, May 8, 1906, Roberto
Gastone Zeffiro Rossellini began a life of adventure, conveniently, in one of
Rome’s wealthier families. The Rossellinis, besides being debonair, gay and
fashionable, were bohemian, quixotic and outré, and always prodigal. It was
entirely to one person that their fortune was due: the oddly-named Zeffiro
(“zephyr”) who, having no children of his own, had taken his nephew into his
house and business, married him to his mistress’s stunningly beautiful niece,
and assumed the title of nonno (“grandfather”) to their children. Appropriately,
his name had been passed down to the first-born.
Zeffiro Rossellini had risen from poverty. Born in 1848 of peasant stock and
orphaned while young, he raised his brothers Luigi and Ferdinando while
working as a bricklayer near Pisa in his native Tuscany. Around 1870 he moved
south to Rome. The city was small then, with barely 200,000 inhabitants, and it
stank of misery, with people living ten-to-a-room in certain districts. But a
Piedmontese army, blowing a hole through the old Roman walls at Porta Pia,
had just put an end to the Popes’s thousand-year rule and announced the first
unification of Italy since the ancient empire. Since the Romans were
unenthusiastic, regarding the Piedmontese as foreign occupiers and “Italy” as
some new-fangled concoction of the devil, the new government, to win their
sympathy, began spending vast sums on spectacular buildings. Forty thousand
officials had to be housed in the new capital, a rail line was built to link Rome
with the prosperous north, and masses of immigrants poured in from the
impoverished south.
Zeffiro became a contractor, gentrified his name from Rosellini to Rossellini,
and rode the crest of the boom. In the next decades Rome’s population would
triple, land speculation would skyrocket, and new construction would bury the
old baroque city beneath a new modern one. Zeffiro built railroads in Puglia and
houses and office buildings in Rome. He was the first to stretch the city beyond
the Aurelian walls into the Parioli countryside, where most middle-class Romans
live today. He was tall, imposing, and elegant, with a florid Umbertine
mustache and terrifying authority.
But to his “grandchildren” he was sweet and indulgent. Each morning they
would troupe into his bedroom, kiss him, and get a fond smack on the cheek in
return. They were awed by him. Nonno had even been a garibaldino. True, he
had been dragged back home only a few days after running off to join Giuseppe
Garibaldi’s campaign of 1866. Yet he had worn, however briefly, the famous red
shirt that the followers of the man who “made” Italy wore, and this shirt, for
him, as later for Roberto, meant glory and freedom—Garibaldi’s republican
freedom. The “junk,” as Zeffiro called the royal arms of the House of Savoy,
1. Fantasy 5
was glaringly absent from the center of the tri-color flag he flew during World
War I—letting it wave boldly from his carriage as he rode around Rome, and
attracting not a few stares. He had gotten to know Garibaldi during the
impecunious soldier’s last years and would send him woolen socks, underwear,
and money. Befriending the sons as well, he became Menotti Garibaldi’s
executor. Garibaldi memorabilia formed a shrine in his studio—letters, pictures,
a sword, the famous boot shot through at the battle of Aspromonte, and most
sacred of all, in its small round frame, a piece of the hero’s beard. All through
their childhood this relic held Roberto and his brother Renzo in thrall: one day, if
they behaved, said Zeffiro, the beard would be theirs. Liberty was Zeffiro’s
religion and would be the leitmotif of Roberto’s films.
Zeffiro had built himself a large residence at Via Nerva, 1, in Piazza
Sallustio, where Roberto was born, followed by Renzo (February 2, 1908) and
sister Marcella (September 9, 1909). The palazzo marked the city’s farthest
limits at the time. Elegant Via Veneto lay a few blocks to the east, but a dirt
cycling course could be glimpsed to the west and, beyond that, toward Porta Pia,
vineyards and artichoke fields. “There were empty lots and gardens all around
us, and wide sections of the Aurelian wall,” Roberto recalled. “On the Pincio
there were still goat herds, vineyards, cows and dairies. The old quarters with
1
their orange and rust-colored houses hadn’t been torn down yet.” The
characteristic sound was not today’s constant revving of engines but the
occasional rhythmic clatter of horse hooves and carriage wheels along pebbled
streets. Rome was renowned for its quiet.
“Our home,” recalled Roberto, “was full of happiness. And imagination.
Unrestrained fantasy. My parents didn’t try to restrain this fantasy. They
encouraged it. Fantasy in everything, games of the wildest imagination. We
weren’t a traditional family. We didn’t try to hold on to anything, not even our
2
wealth. We spent immediately.”
Rome was a puritanically modest society. The nouveaux riches Rossellinis
were regarded as eccentric. They enjoyed showing off their wealth, flinging
their money around in a city of impoverished people. They displayed
themselves in a rotogravure where their darling children, who had won a beauty
contest, were gamboling naked on a bed. They assumed the mores of a noble
house. Breakfast, dinner, supper, they kept an open table; people of all sorts—

In the main text, bold footnote numbers designate editorial comments. Other footnotes
are purely bibliographic.
.

1. “Roberto Rossellini parla di Roberto Rossellini,” Paese Sera, June 12, 1977.
2. Rossellini nterview with Dacia Maraini, E Tu Chi Eri? (Milan: Bompiani, 1973), p.
95.
1. Fantasy 6
from Roman princes to impoverished painters—were free to drop by and eat
even when the family was away. Roberto’s father Beppino (né Angiolo
Giuseppe) often came home with a dozen unanticipated guests. Elettra,
Roberto’s mother, never knew who anyone was. “Sometimes I just couldn’t
3
stand it,” she said, “and I’d run back home to my mother.” For the children it
was great fun and wonderful training for the future. “The house was always full
of intellectuals and artists,” said Roberto. “I never saw a businessman there.
4
So I grew up in a rather special atmosphere.”
“Roberto had personality and agility,” Renzo recalled. “As first-born he also
enjoyed unconfessed but instinctive protection from our parents, especially from
mama. He was brown-haired, with eyes as sharp as pins…, all nervous, restless,
aggressive and volatile. I was just the opposite: blond, quiet, submissive, easily
contented.… For friend and plaything Roberto had me; for companion and
despot I had him.… My attachment to him was morbid.… It was as though I took
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my first steps only to run after [him].”
The boys had a battlefield in their playroom, with mountains, bridges,
tunnels, shrubbery, and a railway all around, inaugurated in 1911 when Italy
went to war against Turkey. Roberto had a wondrous sword, Renzo, twenty
months younger, just a toothpick, and he had to be a Turk. Worse, Roberto
would fire lead balls at him from a great big cannon, and Renzo had to fight
back with a popgun and cork bullets.
Roberto got what he wanted, always. For one period, he refused to go out
without wearing a leash, because he had decided he was a dog. Elettra was
helpless; the rest of the family followed in the wake of maternal submission.
Once he had a tantrum returning from a party; he went rigid, threw himself on
the street, tore his brand new clothes to shreds; and everyone stared helplessly.
(Renzo tried the same thing, but Donato the butler just picked him up and
carried him home.) On another occasion Roberto’s desire for a stupendous
rocking horse in the window of the corner toy store did require a two-month
campaign, and perhaps for this reason within hours of receiving it, he had torn
off its ears and crinnel and tail, and had turned its belly into a soup kettle.
Roberto Rossellini would owe his success to tenaciousness and charm. He

3. Quoted in Ingrid Bergman and Alan Burgess, Ingrid Bergman: My Story (New
York: Dell, 1980), p. 336. But Bergman misquotes in locating Elettra’s mother in
Venice; she lived in Rome.

4. Rossellini interview in Pio Baldelli, Roberto Rossellini (Rome: Samonà e Savelli,
1972), p. 251.

5. Renzo Rossellini, Addio del passato (Rome: Rizzoli, 1968), pp. 25-26. Details of
Rossellini’s childhood have been drawn from this collection of essays, as well as from
Renzo Rossellini’s other collection, Pagine di un musicista (Rome: Cappelli, 1963), and
from the author’s interviews with Marcella Mariani Rossellini and other members of the
family.
1. Fantasy 7
would chart the course of human history in terms of our innate impulse for
freedom.
“My mother was a housewife,” said Roberto, “very near-sighted, very timid,
6
and very funny. It was impossible not to get along with her.” Elettra was
tender but nervous, passing quickly from laughter to tears to laughter. When
provoked, she’d administer little slaps then smother them in kisses. She was
still slapping Roberto long after he reached adulthood.
“I was strongly attached to both my parents, but in different ways. Toward
my mother I felt tenderness, toward my father, deepest admiration. He was an
7
exceptional man.” .
He was the only one to interfere with Roberto’s tyranny. For example
Roberto, to get to sleep at the hunting lodge at Ladispoli, had established that
each night the carriage would be brought out and harnessed; Aunt Fortù would
mount up front beside the coachman and blow her hunting horn (ta-too, ta-too,
ta-too), and off they would gallop into the night, whereupon little Roberto, in his
mother’s arms in back, would blissfully drift off to sleep. And all went well until
the evening Beppino arrived unexpectedly, nearly rammed the horn down
Fortù’s throat and, hoisting and spanking the startled Roberto, hauled him off to
bed.
Yet, ritual morning kisses and special occasions aside, Roberto’s father was
seldom around. He had his business, a social life, and lady friends. Elettra, who
had borne Roberto at seventeen, was eight years her husband’s junior, virtually
confined to the house by the semi-cloistered mores of the day, and utterly
incapable of coping with her children. “We were all too much for her,” said
8
Marcella. Roberto agreed: “I still remember the prayer she used to have us
children recite with her in chorus. She’d say, ‘Those mothers, those wives, who
have suffered so many torments, Jesus, you who love them, help them in your
9
mercy.’”
Their daily care was relegated to Donato, the dozen servants, and a
succession of governesses. Only at Sunday supper did the children eat with
their parents, until they were ten or eleven. The father so admired was thus
somewhat distant, and the mother so tender was slightly withheld.
The result, in a child as demanding and undisciplined as Roberto, was
insecurity and guilt. At six, he agreed to wear an angel costume he loathed in a
church procession, on condition that he not be seen in it by his mother, but

6. Maraini interview, p. 96.
7. Maraini interview, p. 96.
8. Marcella Mariani Rossellini to TG.

9. Roberto Rossellini, Fragments d’une autobiographie (Paris: Éditions Ramsay,
1987), p. 110.
1. Fantasy 8
when he spotted her hiding behind a column, he ran sobbing to clutch her, then
erupted in fury. He tore off his wings, kicked everyone within reach, shrieked
and shouted, and had to be dragged outside. But he wasn’t punished. Elettra
blamed herself for breaking her word. At seven he was still wetting his bed (“I
perspired,” he would explain).
Even when he was thirteen: “I have a vivid memory of the traumatic
reaction I had the day my mother, a very gentle person, came home with her
10
[lovely, long] hair bobbed.” He cried for hours. Gentle Elettra had been
caught up by the suffragette movement. She had a healthy, ironic wit, would
eventually find a life outside the family cloister, and would leave her husband in
1926.
The children, unaware of any unquenched needs, would recall their
childhoods in heavenly terms. They themselves would become parents
conspicuous for spasmodic eruptions into, but general absence from, their
children’s lives.
The governesses represented a tapestry of languages. The first governess
was French, Léontine Niaudeaux, and for this reason French, not Italian, was the
first language the children learned and the language that was spoken in the
family. “Allez, mes enfants,” Léontine would say. Although she used the
elevator herself, she insisted that the children walk. (In contrast to everyone
else in Rome the eccentric Rossellinis lived on the top floors of their huge
palazzo and rented out the lower ones.)
Then came Margaretha, a German. Beppino admired German culture and
literature; but the language was quickly forgotten when the First World War
began. “Mademoiselle,” a Frenchwoman, came next; then an English
governess, pale and terribly thin after her six-month escape from Russia’s
revolution; then soon after another English girl, Mabel, who so quickly
succumbed to Roberto’s charms that she learned Italian, but no one learned
English. Among themselves, the children had their “secret” language.
The butler Donato, an ex-soldier from Tuscany, personified professional
pride and total dedication, according to Renzo. No Rossellini would ever expect
anything less. Donato was paid 25 lire a month (four dollars in 1918) and never
took an hour off. In white tie he served the elegant evening meal, then sat
upright and impeccable in the hallway until Beppino or Zeffiro came home—
often at two or three in the morning. Otherwise he devoted his time to the
children. He took the boys to Villa Borghese where he taught them to ride
bicycle and race hard; he gave them their baths, walked them home from the
Regina Elena school on Via Puglie, told them stories, defended them against

10. Ibid.
1. Fantasy 9
their parents’ (often justified) anger, and, above all, taught them not to take
life’s difficulties too heavily to heart—though here, again, the judgment is
Renzo’s: others would say the Rossellinis took life’s difficulties with inveterate
hysteria.
Donato’s good humor left him prey to the boys’ exuberance, but he never
lost patience—except once. That occasion was the Royal Derby, the year’s
social highlight, which was all the more special in that the cloistered ladies of
those days had few opportunities to sport themselves. Elettra decided to go by
car—a show-offy display indeed. Cars were expensive: a good auto worker
might earn 1500 lire a year but a car cost 15,000 to buy and 10,000 a year to
maintain. Only 7000 cars were to be found in all of Italy. Of course the
Rossellinis were among the first to have one in Rome, which had been Beppino’s
idea. Elettra preferred the carriage with its coachman and lackey, but for Derby
Day it occurred to her that dignity might be maintained by placing Donato in the
coachman’s livery beside the uniformed chauffeur. The coachman was a small
man, alas, and Donato, after squeezing into the livery, scarcely dared move lest
he burst out of it. Roberto and Renzo teased him mercilessly at the track,
pulling his tails and knocking off his top hat and kicking it around like a ball, and
Donato, running after the hat, split open his pants. Still he clung to the dignity
of his profession and, home at last, opened the door for Elettra with customary
reserve. The boys merrily snatched apart his tails to show the burst pants and
Donato, mortified to tears, ripped off the top hat, the white cotton gloves, and
the liveried tail coat, and bashed them to the ground with blasphemy. The boys
went into hysterics. Elettra, proper, refined, yet nearsightedly oblivious to all
that had transpired, demanded, “Donato! Explain your vulgar behavior!”
Even getting the car started was an adventure. Its chain transmission so
wore out Fernando the chauffeur that a muscle-bound mason had to traipse
over every morning from Beppino’s workyard to give the “Fides” its morning
crank up. For the 25-mile drive to Ladispoli milk cans full of gasoline had to be
loaded onto the rear—none would be found en route—and a good supply of
spare tires as well. Astride this mountain perched Donato, a rifle slung on his
shoulder. Elettra, her maid, Renzo, and Marcella sat on the back seats, Roberto
up front. “Faster! Faster!” he’d shout every time they encountered a horse and
gig. “Slowly, Fernando, go slowly!” Elettra would admonish from the back. Rare
was the trip without a flat tire or two or three; replacing them was a dirty,
exhausting job, for wheels could not be removed as today: tire and tube had to
be manipulated directly on the chassis, after which the air pump, leaking
everywhere when it worked at all, required four or five hands to operate. The
Fides would boil over on steep hills, and everyone except Elettra would get out
and walk behind. They wore raincoat-like coveralls, so dusty were the roads,
1. Fantasy 10
and rubber goggles that left black residue on their faces for days afterward.
Tasty snacks, when tires were being changed or the radiator cooling, made the
long waits more endurable. Donato, with his gun, stood guard by the roadside
for, in Elettra’s opinion, it was at such moments that the brigands were mostly
likely to attack.
In reality no brigands existed. But Elettra—timid in any case and inspired in
this instance by a Bartolomeo Pinelli print, The Brigands of the Roman
Countryside, that hung at home—had convinced herself and her children that
attack was imminent. She had heard a noise one night at Ladispoli when
everyone was asleep. Tiptoeing to the window, she fired a hunting gun into the
air and screamed, “Donato! Donato! To arms! The brigands are here!” Dogs,
hens, and ducks awoke for miles around. A candle was found, guns were
distributed to young and old, and an armed vigil was maintained till dawn.
This small house near the beach of Ladispoli, to which Zeffiro’s bizarre
mistress Fortù had been exiled by universal decree, was the least of the family
properties. A little south of Anzio was Circeo, an entire peninsula complete with
a papal title, “Baron of San Felice Circeo,” which Zeffiro had contemptuously
bestowed on his dog. Then there were blocks of land in central Rome, including
a palazzo on Via Boncompagni where Elettra had lived before her marriage, and
various three- or four-storied villas. The one at Ardenza, a fashionable sea
resort, had a sober elegance. Another just south of Rome between Frascati and
Grottaferrata so enchanted the children with its three acres of gardens, lake,
and cane forest that Renzo named it The Garden of Klingsor and Roberto forty
years later would try to lure Marcella to India by telling her it was “another
Grottaferrata.” Zeffiro liked to wheel and deal. He would build a new villa with
great enthusiasm, then quickly get bored, sell it, and start another. In design,
however, each was unremarkable as the next.
The children were aware of their advantages. From the top floor at Piazza
Sallustio they looked down on the little paint store where their actual
grandfather, Beppino’s father Luigi, made a modest living selling paint to Zeffiro,
his brother and only customer. Luigi lived a few blocks away, across Via XX
Settembre, in a sad, dark, fifth-floor apartment with no elevator, no radiators,
and a tin bathtub that had to be filled by hand. It was a typical middle-class
home of the time, but it contrasted badly with Zeffiro’s lordly splendor and
modern conveniences. Luigi was a true bohemian; he asked little of life and
enjoyed himself to the hilt. With easel, paints, and brushes, he would wander
out into the countryside and lose himself staring at dawns, noons, and evenings.
He painted for the love of it, in the bright, contrasty style of the macchiaioli,
always landscapes with colorful birds in them, because Luigi was a passionate
hunter and carried a gun along with his easel. Between shots, he would sketch