Mario Soldati
Turin-born writer, film director and television author (1906-1999): author of Piccolo mondo antico, Le lettere da Capri, Le due città and the television series Viaggio nella valle del Po.
Mario Soldati (Turin, 17 November 1906 – Tellaro, 19 June 1999) was a writer, film director and screenwriter, and one of the first great authors of Italian television. Turin-born and Turin-raised, he left the city early for Rome, New York, Milan and Liguria, but returned to it in his novels, starting with Le due città; he rests in the Monumental Cemetery of Turin.[1][2]
A Turin youth
He was born at via Ospedale 20, today's via Giolitti, the son of Umberto, a silk merchant, and of Barbara Bargilli; he had a younger sister, Dolores, known as Lola. The family lived on the second floor, next to the flat of the lawyer Piero Richelmy, brother of the cardinal archbishop of the Turin diocese.[1] He studied with the Jesuits at the Istituto Sociale, where he took his classical school-leaving exam in 1923, and then enrolled in Letters at the University of Turin.[1]
In 1922 he threw himself into the waters of the Po to save Lello Richelmy from drowning and was awarded the silver medal for civil valour. In those same years he wrote for the theatre: La madre di Giuda (1923) and Pilato (1924), which won the competition of the Catholic university federation.[1] During a holiday in Bardonecchia in 1923 he caught a glimpse of Benedetto Croce, who from then on became his intellectual point of reference:[1]
"The only one I acknowledge as having had a certain influence on me is Benedetto Croce."
He graduated in 1927 with an art-history thesis on the Cremonese painter Boccaccio Boccaccino and won a three-year advanced scholarship at the Istituto superiore di storia dell'arte in Rome, where he studied under Adolfo Venturi and Pietro Toesca; of the art historian Roberto Longhi he said he had learned "a great deal", "from a human and artistic point of view".[1]
America and his debut
In 1929 he published his first collection of stories, Salmace, favourably reviewed by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese in the Corriere della Sera. That same year, during the third year of his scholarship, he gave up the Rome grant for another one in art history at Columbia University in New York; there he met his student Marion Rieckelman, whom he married in 1931, and he returned to Italy in January of that year, after a month's voyage by ship from New York to Trieste.[1] Out of that experience came America primo amore, written in October 1934 at Corconio, on Lake Orta, and published in 1935 with a cover by Carlo Levi.[1] In 1937 the novella La verità sul caso Motta ran in instalments in the magazine Omnibus.[1]
Cinema
In Rome, thanks to Guido Artom, he was taken on by Cines-Pittaluga and started from the bottom, as a "clapper boy".[1] He worked on the screenplays of Mario Camerini, from Gli uomini, che mascalzoni… (1932) to Il cappello a tre punte (1935), and on those of Acciaio (1933) and La contessa di Parma (1937).[3] The latter film, directed by Alessandro Blasetti, was shot largely in Turin: at the racecourse and the Mirafiori airport, in Parco del Valentino, at Porta Nuova station, at the municipal stadium, on corso Agnelli and via Viotti; Soldati worked on the treatment and was assistant director.[4]
He made his directorial debut with Dora Nelson (1939) and found success with Piccolo mondo antico (1941), from Antonio Fogazzaro, starring Alida Valli, followed by Malombra (1942) with Isa Miranda.[1][3] In 1945 he brought to the screen Le miserie del signor Travet, from the comedy by Vittorio Bersezio, a portrait of the impoverishment of the middle class: the screenplay had been rejected in 1943 by the Ministry of Popular Culture.[3] Then came Eugenia Grandet (1946), Daniele Cortis (1947), Fuga in Francia (1948) — inspired by a real news story and among the few of his films not drawn from a literary work — La provinciale (1953), from Alberto Moravia, and La donna del fiume (1954), set in the river landscape of the Po, with Sophia Loren as a mondina (rice-field worker).[3] The Enciclopedia del Cinema credits him with a "love for landscape vistas, and above all for those of the Piedmont of his origins".[3] His last film, Policarpo, ufficiale di scrittura, starring Renato Rascel, won the award for best comedy at Cannes and effectively closed his career as a director.[1][5]
The writer
His fiction ran parallel to his cinema work: L'amico gesuita (1943), A cena col commendatore (1951), La confessione (1955), Il vero Silvestri (1957), La messa dei villeggianti (1959).[1] In 1954 he won the Strega Prize with Le lettere da Capri; that same year he began writing for the Corriere della Sera.[1] In 1964 came Le due città, his most expansive novel, which sets his Turin youth against his years in Roman cinema:[1] in it Turin appears, in the words of the Enciclopedia Italiana, as "the austere city of his moral and civic formation", Rome as "the city of cinema".[5] There followed the stories of Storie di spettri (1962) and I racconti del maresciallo (1967), and the novels L'attore (1970), Lo smeraldo (1974) and La sposa americana (1977).[1][5]
Television and wine
From 1956 he worked for the newly born medium of television, preparing the programme that in 1957 launched his documentary inquiries: Viaggio nella valle del Po alla ricerca dei cibi genuini (so the Enciclopedia Italiana; "of genuine wines" according to the Dizionario Biografico), followed in 1960 by Chi legge? Viaggio lungo le rive del Tirreno.[1][5] From 1969 the weekly magazine Grazia published in instalments Vino al vino. Viaggio alla ricerca dei vini genuini, a wine-themed reportage that proved very successful.[1]
The final years
In 1960 he moved to Milan; in 1967 he bought the villa Le Rocce at Tellaro, in the Gulf of La Spezia, where he settled from 1973.[1] In 1983 he was president of the Italian section of the PEN Club and a Senate candidate for the Italian Socialist Party.[1] He went on to write L'architetto (1985), L'avventura in Valtellina (1985) and El Paseo de Gracia (1987); with Regione regina (1987), a collection of his writings on Liguria, he won the Viareggio-Versilia Prize.[1][5] He died at Tellaro on 19 June 1999 according to the Dizionario Biografico;[1] the Enciclopedia Italiana gives the date as 18 June.[5]
He is buried in the Monumental Cemetery of Turin, where guides to its illustrious tombs recall him alongside Edmondo De Amicis, Primo Levi and Cesare Lombroso.[2][6]
Pages linking here
Sources
- Treccani – Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani —
- Mole24 — 1 November 2013
- Treccani – Enciclopedia del Cinema —
- Mole24 — 9 September 2025
- Treccani – Enciclopedia Italiana, VI Appendice —
- TorinoClick — 28 October 2016