Actors From Italy

"Having him as a father is a blessing, but at the same time it casts a long shadow that is difficult to escape. He is everywhere."

"I really like Totti: he is an extraordinary player who deserved the Ballon d'Or. It's also great that he wanted to stay with Roma for his entire career: anyone who loves soccer cannot help but love Totti."

"It's hard for me to talk about him (Lucio Dalla), every corner of Bologna I turn, there's a memory of him. Just think, the last thing he did was Sanremo, he didn't want to, I almost blackmailed him. And then, 15 days later, he died."

"When we played with Led Zeppelin in Milan, on that disastrous evening, I felt like I was a hundred years old, surrounded by all those shirtless young guys who saw me as a wreck."

"Tognazzi always told me: Germi only made two bad films in his life: mine [‘'L'immotale’'] and yours [‘'Le castagne sono buone’']."

"Everyone, young and old, still sings ‘'C'era un ragazzo’' (There was a boy), they know all the words. So, I relive my life and there are moments of great emotion, I find them again."

"I like Renato Zero because he's talented, beyond all appearances, which are only superficial. Behind his slightly crazy persona are beautiful songs, which he sings well. My children are crazy about him, as all children are, and I think that's right, because Renato is ‘real’, he's ‘right’. I've known him for many years and he's always been like that."

"(With the sick in Lourdes) I felt very fragile and also stupid, full of useless vices."

"I took a tour of the city. Maybe I've already said this, but I'll say it again: Palermo is magnificent, surprising, full of art and history; it's a city unlike any other in the world."

"I must say that there, in front of the grotto (of Lourdes), you feel something that I don't quite know how to define, something great, mysterious, indescribable."

"He is the man of clean soccer, of soccer where the best player wins and not those who use other means. This is precisely why he arouses so much interest. Celentano causes quite a stir with his outbursts, a bit like Zeman. I don't know which of the two took after the other! Anyway, yes, they are two characters who can be compared, two people who stand out from the crowd, difficult to imitate and match. I'm happy to see Zeman back in Serie A, he plays good soccer: to think that a few years ago they wanted him for the Bologna bench, but then nothing came of it."

"(Speaking of Giorgio Gaber) I could have stolen his place when Mina's manager suggested I do a theater season with her. But he did that tour, and that's where he decided to devote himself to theater. I also tried my hand at theater in the early 1970s with ‘'Jacopone’', a rock opera that turned out to be a bit of a disaster. But Giorgio helped me out on that occasion too, telling me how to streamline the show. However, his shows were something else. I was amazed, noticing that he was growing more and more, becoming a true man of the theater. And watching people go crazy for him, even when he was alone on stage for two hours, was a lesson for me. Because he had clearly found the right key to success: with content, but not only that."

"Mina has gone through these forty years with a soundtrack that has accompanied the changes in customs and history of our country, almost like a continuous reference, like a positive Italy that comes through music."

"I hardly knew my mother. And I will always miss her, even though I can find her again in the eyes of a woman."

"My mother was very authoritarian. A woman of rare beauty. I am a sick aesthete, I fight with Oscar Wilde and this mother who is so beautiful and so distant. My mother is my lost bride."

"I love Adriano very much. I love and respect him. And he still makes me laugh. No one can speak ill of Adriano. He is deeply good, honest and consistent."

"(About Rino Gaetano) His biography is emblematic, beautiful, interesting to tell. Everything about him deserves attention. Even the car accident that caused his death."

"Sanremo is never completely independent. Otherwise, certain appearances and certain exclusions cannot be justified. And it does not represent Italian music."

"My father and mother remain a mystery to me. I left home at 18, not because I hated them, but because they were too young to have three children, and artists are too self-absorbed."

"I would abolish all those fake, phoney do-gooder programmes that are mainly broadcast in the afternoon. I would work to bring back children's television. Then I would eliminate those programmes where you can win lots of money just by opening a package or making a phone call."

"Every now and then I look at my children and other young people and I feel guilty: we have destroyed the environment and ideals. And even if we try to repair the damage, it remains."

"(About the song Ma il cielo è sempre più blu) I had had this subject in mind for some time. I knew Rino Gaetano well because, as a young girl, I was friends with his sister Anna, and we used to hang out together in Rome. I liked his music and I liked him, a deeply intelligent young man. His is the story of a modern-day hero, as relevant today as his songs are. Stories about young people are rarely told on television: this one aims to be just that."

"It's easy to crucify people. We all know that drugs are bad. Even those who use them know it. But since so many people take drugs, we have to ask ourselves whether it is society that is creating the problem. Apart from what he said about cocaine, which I don't agree with even if it refers to the past, I appreciated Morgan's comments about hypocritical and evil society. I don't take drugs and I agree with him. And you can't condemn someone who said something in a moment of weakness. I don't think there are more drug addicts in this world than in others. However, the world of artists is easier to target. Artists have no power. In fact, they have the power to hurt themselves."

"When I saw the pain of the people who were there in Lourdes, even my rock bottom seemed like paradise, because when you say “I've hit rock bottom,” you don't really realize what rock bottom really is!"

"There is no greater equation than the stupidity of men, especially when those men are in power."

"When you put on a mask, you cannot lie. The mask is born with man because the mask and the party ensure that everything is a joke, everything is for laughter. Long live the mask that gives everyone the chance for another life, within parentheses of freedom without paying taxes. Satire is the most effective weapon against power: power cannot tolerate humor, not even rulers who call themselves democrats, because laughter frees man from his fears."

"Men are lying when they say they are terrified of blood."

"Our homeland is the whole world. Our law is freedom. We have only one idea: revolution in our hearts."

"A great crime film, which is very difficult to achieve. [...] you can cling to all the clichés, but it's a great crime film that's very difficult to make. Well, we read crime novels, we talk about them, but we read them and there's nothing there, you know what I mean? It's thin, you can't attract people with that kind of thing anymore, you need something massive and compact that carries weight."

"Ventura refused to wear make-up: a man does not wear make-up. He turned down a film with Jack Nicholson after the American had the terrible idea of offering him cocaine during lunch. He refused the part of a man who falls in love with a prostitute. He refused to work with Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind because he did not believe in extraterrestrials. He refused to kiss actresses even if the script required it (and this included Brigitte Bardot and Mireille Darc), out of respect for his wife and children. May Lino Ventura be reborn, an actor who was first and foremost an admirable man."

"'What is cinema today? It's something that's changing [...] and it definitely needs to change, perhaps in relation to new audiences. A new generation is coming up, one that has been educated and raised with computers and a whole new set of standards."

"The editor of Il Foglio, [Giuliano Ferrara], is so blinded by his neoconservative ideology that he fails to realise that by promoting Oriana Fallaci's crude anti-Islamic racism, he is paving the way for all other forms of racism and, sooner or later, for a resurgence of anti-Semitism, which will be very difficult to combat if anti-Islamic racism has been endorsed."

"The day of the Big Bang is not far off. Money, in its extreme essence, is the future, a representation of the future, a bet on the future, an inexhaustible relaunch of the future, a simulation of the future for use in the present. If the future is not eternal but has its own finitude, we, at the speed we are going thanks to money, are shortening it vertiginously. We are racing headlong towards our death as a species. If the future is infinite and unlimited, we have mortgaged it to temporal regions so far away as to render it virtually non-existent. The impression, in fact, is that no matter how fast we go, or rather precisely because of this, this orgiastic future constantly recedes before us. Or perhaps, in a circular motion, Nician, Einsteinian, typical of money, it is coming up behind us, laden with the immense debt we have burdened it with. If, as we believe, the future is a non-existent time, a figment of our imagination, as is money, then we have staked our existence on something that does not exist, on nothing, on Nothingness. In any case, this future, whether real or imaginary, expanded to monstrous and dreamlike dimensions by our imagination and our madness, will one day fall upon us as a dramatic present. On that day, money will no longer exist. Because we will no longer have a future, not even one to imagine. We will have devoured it."

"In the 1950s and early 1960s, Christmas was still a holiday that had something to do with the spirit and the soul. You didn't have to be Christian to believe that something extraordinary was happening on that night, which for believers was the birth of Jesus, and for others (for me, for example, who am from Russia, where we celebrate not Christ but “Father Frost”) it was something magical and enchanted, irrational and incomprehensible. We seriously believed that on Christmas Day, people were all a little bit kinder."

"The fate of the West seems to be condemned to turn, in a painful twist of fate, the line that Goethe puts into Mephistopheles' mouth in Faust: ‘I am the spirit that eternally wants evil and eternally does good.’ The paradox of the West is to believe itself to be Good, to eternally desire Good and to eternally do, in a sort of heterogenesis of ends, Evil. And the fundamental flaw lies precisely in this Manichean distinction between Good and Evil and in the Promethean claim to increase Good at the expense of Evil, wiping it off the face of the earth, when in reality Good and Evil are two sides of the same coin and grow together, the greater the Good, the greater the Evil."

"Yet war has played a decisive role in human history. Both from a political and social point of view and, perhaps above all, from an existential point of view. It satisfies deep urges and needs that are generally sacrificed in times of peace. War allows us to legitimately release the natural and vital aggression that is in all of us. It is an escape from the frustrating daily grind, from boredom, from the sense of futility and emptiness that, especially in affluent societies, takes hold of us. It is adventure. War evokes and strengthens group and team solidarity. We feel, and are, less alone in war. War blurs the differences in class, social status and economic status, which lose their importance. We are all a little more equal in war. War, like military service, university and regulated games, has the quality of waiting time, of suspended time, the end of which does not depend on us, to which we surrender ourselves totally and which frees us from all personal responsibility. War brings everything, starting with feelings, back to the essential. It frees us from trappings, from the superfluous, from the useless. It makes us all, in every sense, leaner. War gives enormous value to life. For the simple reason that it is death that gives value to life. The real, close, imminent risk of death makes every moment of our existence, even the most trivial, intensely precious. Although it is painful to say, war is a unique and invaluable opportunity to learn to love and appreciate life."

"In fifty years' time, books such as The Force of Reason will be viewed with the same horror with which we view Mein Kampf today, and we will wonder how it was possible."

"The political power of a TV network does not lie solely or primarily in the information it provides directly about politics, but in the culture it disseminates through its entire programming schedule. If in 1994 the entrepreneur Berlusconi, despite running for office for the first time and being a political novice, was able to win the elections with percentages similar to those of a large mass party such as the Christian Democrats, it was not because his three networks campaigned for him (at that time, his opponent also controlled three networks), but because for a dozen years, owning the entire private national television system, he had been able to educate Italians in his culture and preferences."

"Theologians, both Christian and Muslim, especially in the Middle Ages, have always been struck by the power of money and the devastation it can wreak on the human soul. More secularly, orthodox Marxists have condemned it as a “means of appropriating other people's money”. Psychoanalysts liken it to excrement, because of the pleasure derived from both expelling it and retaining it."

"Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner, has stated that he ‘does not rule out a military strike against Iran’. Israeli President Shimon Peres, Nobel Peace Prize winner, has said: ‘An attack on Iran is getting closer’. Why don't we also give a Nobel Peace Prize, posthumously, to old Adolf Hitler?"

"Bruno Vespa was a journalist who served the First Republic completely and utterly; as the bard of the Christian Democrats, rewarded with the position of director of TG1, he was subservient to his masters and real employers, namely the various secretaries of Biancofiore, and whose only act of courage in a life spent as a servant was to admit that he was one when (but it was already the last days of Saigon) he said, “My reference publisher is the DC”. Bruno Vespa is to the First Republic what Mario Appelius is to Fascism. admitting that he was when (but it was already the last days of Saigon) he said, “My editor is the Christian Democrats”. Bruno Vespa is to the First Republic what Mario Appelius is to Fascism."

"In reality, no representative democracy is a democracy, but rather a system of organised minorities that prevail over the majority of citizens taken individually, suffocating them by severely limiting their freedom and keeping them in a state of minority. It is a system of oligarchies or polyarchies."

"There is a man in Italy, w:Adriano Sofri, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for the murder of a police commissioner outside his home, after nine trials, one of which, in a case that is extremely rare in Italy, was reviewed, thus enjoying the maximum guarantees that a state can offer one of its citizens. Yet Sofri served only seven years in prison and, without being able to take advantage of the normal benefits of the law, which do not kick in after only seven years out of twenty-two, he has been free for some time and writes in the most important left-wing newspaper, La Repubblica, and in the best-selling right-wing weekly, Panorama, and from those columns he lectures us daily and is honoured and paid homage to by the entire intelligentsia who, despite all the court rulings, considers him, a priori and by divine right, innocent."

"Fallaci is a great journalist for the same reason she is a mediocre novelist. She is an enormous, protruding uterus that embraces a wide swath of reality. But what she gains in breadth when she writes articles, she loses in depth when she writes books."

"The certainty of punishment is not undermined, or even almost nullified for some crimes, by these general, fair, just and humane principles, but by the abnormal length of our trials, which means that the majority of crimes (especially financial, economic and those against the public administration, in short, the crimes of “the powers that be”, politicians and privileged citizens) fall under the axe of the statute of limitations. This already unsustainable duration has been exacerbated in the last fifteen years, after Mani Pulite, by a series of so-called “guarantee” laws with which the Code of Criminal Procedure has been crammed and which, in reality, by ensuring the statute of limitations, only guarantee the impunity of the aforementioned gentlemen."

"The certainty of the law is not called into question by the fact that Valerio Fioravanti, after paying his heavy debts to justice, is out, but by the certainty that countless other criminals will never pay their debts, albeit less heavy ones."

"If there is one case in which the sentence has been served in full, it is that of Fioravanti. He was 23, little more than a teenager, when he was arrested and imprisoned, and he is now 51, a mature man approaching old age. He spent the best years of his life in prison, which no one can give him back, just as no one can give back the lives of his victims. It was a fair and sufficient punishment, at least according to the principles of our Constitution. Having declared himself neither repentant nor dissociated from his terrorist past, which includes other murders, which he admitted [...] Fioravanti did not benefit from the substantial reductions granted by the infamous 'reward legislation' that released murderers who were certainly much worse than him from a moral point of view after only a few years in prison, but he was released only in accordance with the general principles of our legal system."

"The judiciary is like the referee in a football match. You can say that the referee makes mistakes, that he is unprepared, that he doesn't see, but if some players claim that he is corrupt and refuse to accept his decisions when they are against them but demand that they be upheld when they are in their favour, the game quickly ends in a brawl because, sooner or later, all the other players will behave in the same way. Metaphor aside, the social contract that holds us together is broken and we descend the steep slope of anarchy and civil war."

"The Constitution establishes that punishment must aim at the re-education of the convicted person and their reintegration into society. This is clearly not possible if they remain in prison until their death. This is why even life prisoners can be released from prison if they have served 28 years, behaved well and “in such a way as to make their repentance credible”."

"In any case, if there were any doubts about the “line of firmness” at the time the events took place, today there can be none. It is no coincidence that terrorism began to lose momentum after the Moro case and dissolved within a few years. This proves that the line of firmness was right not only from an ethical and legal point of view but also from a practical one. If we had listened to Craxi, Mancini, Signorile, Pace, Liguori and Deaglio, that is, the entire area that flirted with terrorism, today Renato Curcio would be the master of the country."