Ennio Flaiano

Ennio Flaiano
Born	March 25, 1910(1910-03-25) Pescara, Italy
Died	November 20, 1972 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Writer, Screenwriter, Journalist
Nationality	Italian
Genres	scripts, diary, fiction
Spouse(s)	Rosetta Rota
Children	Lelè
Influenced Federico Fellini, Vincenzo Cardarelli

Ennio Flaiano (March 5, 1910 in Pescara – November 20, 1972 in Rome), was an Italian screenwriter, playwright, novelist, journalist and drama critic. He is best known for his work with Federico Fellini.

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 (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 then ravaged by the awareness 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 (which has been constantly in print for sixty years) dealing with the misdeeds of Italian colonialism in Eastern Africa.

In 1971 he 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. His daughter Lelè, after a long and grave illness, died at age 40 in 1992. His wife Rosetta Rota, sister of composer Nino 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, 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 his 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 amd 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 various prose 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 wagon") into the Italian language.

In the last section of his book The Via Veneto Papers, journalist Giulio Villa Santa interviewed 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: It’s a legitimate one. We don’t know who we are, we are just so many passengers without baggage, we are born alone and we die alone. Once a woman writer quoted me in a book of hers, and in the English translation the English writer translated my name as Ennius Flaianus, thinking that this Ennio Flaiano was some Latin author. A few months later we met each other in a restaurant in Rome and were introduced and, naturally, she experienced an awkward moment, for she didn’t think that this ancient writer was still alive. However, we did agree that certain characteristics of my person, a certain style of life, indicated that she was right. I perhaps was not of this age, am not of this age. Perhaps I belong to another world: I feel myself more in harmony when I read Juvenal, Martial, Catullus. It’s probable that I’m an ancient Roman who is still here, forgotten by history, to write about the things that the others wrote about far better than I – namely, let me repeat, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal. (p. 251)

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

• In Italy, fascists divide themselves into two categories: fascists and antifascists. ^[1]
• Chastity is the mirage of obscene people.
• In my love stories remorse used to come afterwards, now it goes before me.
• I got so upset I couldn't sleep the whole afternoon.
• In 30 years time Italy won't be like its governments intended, but as its TV dictated.

Bibliography

• La guerra spiegata ai poveri (1946)
• Tempo di uccidere (1947)
  • The Short Cut (The Marlboro Press, 1994 new ed.)
• Diario notturno (1956)
• La donna nell'armadio (1958)
• Una e una notte (1959)
• Il gioco e il massacro (1970)
• Un marziano a Roma (1971)
• Le ombre bianche (1972)
• La solitudine del satiro (posthumous, 1973)
  • The Via Veneto Papers (The Marlboro Press, 1992)
• Autobiografia del blu di Prussia (posthumous, 1974)
• Diario degli errori (1977)

Filmography

Flaiano was a popular screenwriter and collaborated in many important movies, among which the following should be rememberd: Roma città libera (1948), Guardie e ladri (1951), La romana (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), La notti di Cabiria (1957), La dolce vita (1960), The Temptations of Doctor Antonio episode in Boccaccio '70 (1962), 8 1/2 (1963), and Juliet of the Spirits (1965).^[2]

References