Claudia Cardinale's smile under the Towers

Bologna, September 24, 2025 – That 2017 edition of Biografilm was truly sensational . Pierce Brosnan, Peter Greenaway, Piera Degli Esposti, Gloria Steinem, Raffaele Pisu, and even Francis Ford Coppola and his wife Eleanor arrived for a master class... and then one of the last divas of Italian cinema, Claudia Cardinale . The Bologna festival has pulled off many other such wonderful coups, but that time it seemed as if the city truly had two dimensions: the cinema of reality, the dream of cinema. Cardinale arrived humming " Domenica è sempre domenica ," catapulting everyone back to a June of times gone by, so sweet. The actress , who passed away last Tuesday at the age of 87, was in town just eight years ago at the documentary film festival to receive the Celebration of Life Awards , and shortly before that, she had been at Cannes 70 , which had dedicated its poster to her, barefoot while dancing on the rooftops of Rome. It was a great coup to have an icon in the city, who gave herself to everyone with great simplicity, after all her fame was also due to the fact that she had always been an anti-diva.

In the background, a shot with Fio Zanotti. In the left frame, on the set of Antonio Pisu's film, with Giancarlo Giannini. On the right, Claudia Cardinale with Raffaele Pisu: together for "Nobili bugie" (Noble Lies).

Just the year before, she had starred in a Bolognese film , ' Nobili Bugie ', directed by Antonio Pisu, which was the first feature film by the Bolognese production company Genoma Films, created by Paolo Rossi Pisu and his brother Antonio. The cast also included Giancarlo Giannini , Nini Salerno , and Ivano Marescotti . Claudia Cardinale played Duchess Romola Valli, part of a family of impoverished nobles who, in 1944, survive their economic decline in the only place they still own: the Villa La Quiete estate in the hills outside Bologna. The Duchess, with her husband Pier Donato Martellini (the legendary Raffaele Pisu), form a tired and dejected couple, unaware of the war and residing on the estate with the servants now reduced to a minimum. As if that weren't enough, they have to care for their son Jean-Jacques, an immature fifty-year-old who spends his days composing poems dedicated to Bologna FC. The two protagonists , Cardinale and Pisu, came to Biografilm also to present the film , which had a significant Italian debut (it had been shown at Cannes), and naturally it was one of those times when the city drew the national spotlight. It must be said that Bologna, in a certain sense, is truly a world apart from the rest of Italy. Thanks to the presence of the Cineteca and her work on Cinema Ritrovato, Cardinale is constantly on the big screen. Just Tuesday, when the news of her passing broke, there were those who were watching Werner Herzog's ultra-modern "Fitzcarraldo ," starring the duo Klaus Kinski and Claudia Cardinale: truly a truly unreal "stop," because restored cinema, brought back to the present, freezes the lives of its protagonists in time. And just this year, the Cineteca brought Pietrangeli's restored 'The Magnificent Cuckold' to Venice Classics, a work in which the great actress starred alongside Ugo Tognazzi in 1964. Cardinal forever.