It is the conservative, bourgeois Florence of the 1920s that welcomes Franco Zeffirelli, an N.N. Nescio Nomen , the fruit of an extramarital affair between Alaide Garosi and Ottorino Corsi.
The office assignment of the name-Zeffirelli-already seems to anticipate his destiny. In fact, it was his mother who suggested it to the registry office: it should have been “Zeffiretti”-from an aria from Idomeneo . The municipal copyist’s mistake turned Zeffiretti into Zeffirelli.
Franco Zeffirelli was raised by his mother in the house in Piazza della Repubblica where she, a widow, lived with her children and worked as a seamstress: “She was beautiful and nice. She liked music and played the piano very well. Her favorite composer was Mozart, and I remember, as if it were now, when she used to sing, to take her mind off her work, delightful pieces from Don Giovanni or the Marriage.”
It was a difficult childhood, especially when the albeit clandestine relationship between his mother and father deteriorated completely. At the age of five, he witnessed the last furious confrontation between the two and a scene that had all the characteristics of a “popular drama or rather” of a melodrama: “Who knows whether it may not have contributed in some way to my taste for those strong-toned ‘taps,’ those beautiful ‘scenone’ that Mascagni and Leoncavallo so enjoyed and, I confess, I too; it is a hypothesis that I do not feel like ruling out.”
It is Aunt Lide (pictured in the header photo), the father’s cousin, who took care of the little boy after the untimely death of his mother.
Immediately after his birth and then in the scorching Florentine summers during his childhood, little Zeffirelli was sent to the countryside by his wet nurse Ersilia Innocenti. To her, who had raised him the first months of his life away from prying eyes and city “gossip,” he was always very close.
The wet nurse and the peasant world in which he lived even became central to his formation.
To those summers, in fact, the autobiographical director attributes the responsibility for his approaching the theater.
Every week, in fact, wandering storytellers arrived to visit the farm, entertaining the poor peasant community by mixing news events with classic, fantastic and tragic stories. True self-taught actors with their own professional background: “Nothing in the theater ever managed to strike me more than the fantasies of those poor people. They knew how to capture our imagination, our hearts would pound and our eyes would fill with tears, but then we would burst out laughing with the comic stories that regularly closed those evenings.”
Zeffirelli will never forget those poor wanderers capable of such magical feats, who introduced him to the world of theaters and puppets that he himself began to build and imagine, lost in fantastic stories.
Gustavo, Aunt Lide’s companion and lover of opera and theater, understands little Zeffirelli’s dramatic leanings, and thanks to him, at the age of only 8, the little boy attends a performance of Wagner’s Walchiria at the Politeama Theater. The performer is baritone Giacomo Rimini, a friend of his uncle Gustavo.
A risky move against a child of the time! But one that was a revelation.
Zeffirelli was thunderstruck by the mystery of the show and the magic that can come from it, the sounds, the colors, the fantastic and wild performance of the actors. The miracle of opera.
“When I think back on the long road I have traveled in the theater, I realize that everything really began that night.”
At his father’s behest, the young Zeffirelli studied English language and culture with Mary O’Neill, one of the Ladies belonging to that dense and extravagant community so fond of Florence. The colorful expression of a time that would finally disappear with the years of fascism and that the director would recall in the auotobiographical film “A Tea with Mussolini.”
“It is as if I still see them coming, in the streets of downtown, always at the same times, invariably at tea time, when they would gather at Doney’s. They would swarm in pairs and small groups, along Via Tornabuoni, coming out of the Santa Trinità bridge, or the adjacent medieval streets!”
In his late childhood and youth years increasingly important is his love of theater. He became acquainted with Shakespeare’s sonnets, which he studied and staged under the supervision of Mary O’Neill; he attended a small theater group organized by the Catholic circle of the friars of San Marco.
Then again, Florence in the first half of the 20th century was teeming with small amateur theatrical experiences that produced a huge number of artists of national importance, such as the Teatrino delle Cure where Albertazzi took his first steps and the GUF (Gruppi Universitari Fascisti) theater where the young Arnoldo Foà acted.
Beautiful and exclusive, the testimony of his friend Luciano Alberti, future director of the Maggio Musicale and the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. In a performance at the Pergola he recalls “the young Franco” as the Marquis of Carabas in “Puss in Boots.” The company in which Zeffirelli acted was that run by the Teatro della Fiaba of Donna Flavia Farina Cini, a theater patron who was also of British descent.
Also from the years around the war is the participation in the Radio Firenze radio program in which Zeffirelli, together with his friend Luciano Alberti, plays “I ragazzi della Via Pal.”
The educational path from studies at the Liceo artistico and then enrollment in the Faculty of Architecture was suddenly interrupted by Zeffirelli’s choice to join the partisans.
“Later, much later in my work, I often rummaged through my memories for images to which I could return. When I shot the crucifixion scene in my Jesus, the horror of that morning returned to my heart: a mother prostrate on the ground weeping for her dead son, hanging like a Christ from the wood of a tree, with German soldiers marching relentlessly like Roman centurions.”