Gabriele D’Annunzio, with the voracity of the ravenous provincial who descends upon the opulent city prepared for anything, didn’t leave anything or anyone alone. Urbino, Volterra, Florence, la Versilia, Mantua and Venice. Things didn’t go so well for him in Volterra though, as his Forse che sì, forse che no is amongst his weakest novels. Visconti, a man of the old school with a contemporary background, limited himself to borrowing the description of Volterra as a splendid “city of silence”. The opalines, the expensive furniture, the old stones are as art nouveau as the decadent movement or as Tosca’s veils set to music by Puccini. Onto a sense of compassion for the recent past – an ironic compassion as, all things considered, it has been one of the best periods in human history – the director superimposed the horrors of remote ages and of the more recent world of Hitler. Without hesitation, the evil of the myth blends with the rational and omnipresent hell of the concentration camps. One is even suspicious that Visconti, in such a personal film, wanted to counter the virile “form”, the ideal of classical beauty, with its feminine “roots”, offspring of intimacies consumed in the shadows: “Je suis l’enfant d’un nuit d’Idumée”, to quote Racine’s enchanting phrase. The choice of the stunning Claudia Cardinale, young but no longer adolescent, seems exemplary in this regard. A fine actress, she was still at that time of life in which one wants in all humility to learn about art and life.

Pietro Bianchi, Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, Bologna 1965