Tony Hatfield's Retired Ramblings

Alberto Sordi This apparently futile question springs to mind as you leaf through Spaghetti&Stars, a collection of photographs, dating from the days of the Dolce Vita, that show actors and actresses tackling a plate of spaghetti. The 164-page volume, published by Damiani, costs 28 euros. There are full-page photos of Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Aldo Fabrizi, Totò, Alberto Sordi, Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masini, as well as David Niven, John Wayne, Rock Hudson and Jean-Paul Belmondo, immortalised mouth ajar before a waiting forkful of spaghetti. Movie stills? Breaks between shooting? Photos snapped in a restaurant on Via Veneto? The odd thing about the book is that there doesn't seem to be a very clear distinction between work and play, or between shooting and an evening out with friends. It is as if the one flowed seamlessly into the other, and there were no real distinction between what was being filmed and how people lived. Of course, Totò in Miseria e Nobiltà (Poverty and Nobility), slipping spaghetti into his pocket in case someone steals it, is a scene that would not have taken place in a private home, but the Alberto Sordi wolfing spaghetti in Un Americano a Roma (An American in Rome) is not very different from Federico Fellini or Eleonora Rossi Drago at table, as we can see in the book. The truth is that in those years, let's say the 1950s and 1960s, there didn't seem to be much difference between the cinema and real life. What anthropologists call material culture, comprising our behaviour when dealing with the concrete facts of existence and of which our relationship with food is one of the most important, often ended up in cinema screenplays precisely in order to make the characters more believable. Sordi's Moriconi Nando giving milk to the cat and yoghurt to the mouse, and then "destroying" the macaroni that had provoked him has become part of Italy's collective consciousness, but there are endless comparable scenes. Anna Magnani in Onorevole Angelina (The Honourable Angelina) snatches packs of pasta from a black marketeer (the book's opening photograph). A tureen of steaming pasta greets Vittorio De Sica as Maresciallo Carotenuto at Sagliena in Pane, Amore e Fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams). It is a plate of pasta with butter - and a generous helping of grana cheese - that Peppone prepares for Don Camillo, returning famished from his enforced exile in the mountains in Il Ritorno di Don Camillo (The Return of Don Camillo). And there are the numberless brimming plates of spaghetti that Aldo Fabrizi faced throughout his career. Fabrizi was a genuine expert, who published a book of recipes for pasta, and on film, he judged the professional expertise of housemaid Elsa Merlini by quizzing her on Amatriciana sauce, in Cameriera Bella Presenza Offresi... (Position Wanted). Then there is Chelo Alonso at table with his future in-laws, who own a restaurant in Naples. He asks for a pair of scissors and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, calmly snips the spaghetti hanging off his fork, or out of his mouth, thereby solving at a stroke the eternal dilemma of the diner who is unable to wind pasta properly, in Guardatele Ma Non Toccatele (Look But Don't Touch). That is why the photos in Spaghetti&Stars have an appeal that transcends their value as documents or curiosities. Take, for example, the previously unpublished images of Sophia Loren on the set of La Ciociara (Two Women) straining pasta for the cast and crew. They are emblematic of a cinema whose films were able to interpret with passion, and above all coherence, the issues that were closest to the public's heart. In these films, the people on screen mirrored the ones sitting in the audience. That empathy seems to have faded over the years , in films where midday or evening meals may have a metaphorical value but have lost forever the concrete, everyday quality that prompted audiences to identify with them. Even at table. Paolo Mereghetti English translation by Giles Watson www.watson.it