The relationship between Raffaele Viviani and the cinema was unfortunately fairly slight. At the age of twenty-four, he and his sister, Luisella, played in three medium length movies for Cines: Un amore selvaggio, La catena d’oro and Testa per testa. A fragment of only a few metres is all that has survived of the latter. Discovered and restored in Holland, Un amore selvaggio sees Raffaele and Luisella Viviani in a gloomy adventure set in Sicily. He plays the part of a violent, quarrelsome farm worker who cannot stand the way his boss’s son is courting his sister. The story looks set for disaster but everything ends happily.

The film offers only a glimpse of what Viviani later became, but even in England his talent was recognised as when the film was released in September 1912 the severe “Bioscope” critic described Viviani’s performance as «a wonderfully strong and realistic performance, fierce and almost terrible in its intensity».

Vittorio Martinelli