Ennio Flaiano

Biography

Flaiano wrote for Cineillustrato, Oggi, Il Mondo, Il Corriere della Sera and other prominent Italian newspapers and magazines.

In 1947, he won the Strega Prize for his novel, Tempo di uccidere (variously translated as Miriam, A Time to Kill, and The Short Cut). Set in Ethiopia during the Italian invasion (1935–36), the novel tells the story of an Italian officer who accidentally kills an Ethiopian woman and is ravaged by the memory of his act. The barren landscape around the protagonist hints at an interior emptiness and meaninglessness. This is one of the few Italian literary works dealing with the misdeeds of Italian colonialism in Eastern Africa. The novel has been continually in print for sixty years. A movie adaptation with the same title, directed by Giuliano Montaldo and starring Nicolas Cage, was released in 1989.

In 1971 Flaiano suffered a first heart-attack. "All will have to change", he wrote in his notes. He put his many papers in order and published them, although the major part of his memoirs were published posthumously. In November 1972 he began writing various autobiographical pieces for Corriere della Sera.

On November 20 of the same year, while at a clinic for a check-up, he suffered a second cardiac arrest and died. His daughter Lelè, after a long illness, died at age 40 in 1992. His wife Rosetta Rota, aunt of the mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota, died at the end of 2003. The entire family is buried together at the Maccarese Cemetery, near Rome.

Flaiano's Rome

Flaiano's name is indissolubly tied to Rome, a city he loved and hated, as he was a caustic witness to its urban evolutions and debacles, its vices and its virtues. In La Solitudine del Satiro, Flaiano left numerous passages relating to his Rome.

In the Montesacro quarter of Rome, the LABit theatre company placed a commemorative plaque on the facade of the house where he lived from 1952.

Critic Richard Eder wrote in Newsday: "To read the late Ennio Flaiano is to imagine a bust of Ovid or Martial, placed in a piazza in Rome and smiling above a traffic jam. In his antic, melancholy irony, Flaiano wrote as if he were time itself, satirizing the present moment."

Literary Style

A fine and ironic moralist, at once tragic and bitter, Flaiano produced narrative works and other prose writings permeated by an original satiric vein and by a vivid sense of the grotesque through which he stigmatised the paradoxical aspects of contemporary reality. He introduced the expression saltare sul carro del vincitore ("to jump on the winner's chariot") into the Italian language.

In the last section of his book, The Via Veneto Papers, journalist Giulio Villa Santa included an interview with Flaiano for Swiss-Italian Radio, two weeks before his death. The interview concluded as follows:

Villa Santa: This evening it seems to me, Flaiano, that you have opened yourself up as perhaps you have never done before, that you have revealed an anguish and above all a faith behind your humour. But this gives rise to the suspicion in me that at bottom you are a man from another period if not from another age altogether; is that an unfounded suspicion?

Flaiano Prize

In 1975, the Flaiano Prize was created in his honour. Recognizing achievement in cinema, theater, creative writing, and literary criticism, the international prize is awarded annually in Flaiano's hometown of Pescara.

Quotations

Filmography

Flaiano was a successful screenwriter and collaborated on several notable films, including Roma città libera (1946), Guardie e ladri (1951), The Woman of Rome (1954), Peccato che sia una canaglia (1955), La notte (1961), Fantasmi a Roma (1961), La decima vittima (1965), La cagna (1972). With Tullio Pinelli, he co-wrote the screenplays for ten films by Federico Fellini: Variety Lights (1950), The White Sheik (1952), I vitelloni (1953), La strada (1954), Il bidone (1955), Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), The Temptations of Doctor Antonio episode in Boccaccio '70 (1962), 8½ (1963), and Juliet of the Spirits (1965).