Dear Totò, death for you is not a level

by time news

Time.news – Death is one level. Caro Toto, we agree but here we exaggerate! Do me a favor! Because in some cases death doesn’t level well or doesn’t level at all (thank God). And she, Totò – or Prince Antonio de Curtis – is a clear example of this. For the registry office of this land he left in 1967, a little time ago, yet you see?, he’s still here, inquire: throughout Italy today they have remembered i 125 years since his birthface of the level and face of death.

Prince yes, with one string of names to arouse the bewilderment of many blue bloods, worse for those who – not believing in the noblesse in general or in particular to hers – would like her only as the prince of laughter or only Antonio Clemente, a pittance of the registry office rectified later by her. This time without irony. Because you could laugh with her about everything, dear prince, but not about heraldry and Gotha. So yes, a prince, but also a saint for some.

© Gennaro Giorgio / AGF

The celebrations in Naples for Antonio de Curtis

Per Paul Isoltwhich he named after her, “San Toto”, the last book in which he meticulously cataloged all his films. Saint for the Neapolitan people (before “people”, as if it were a bad word, was replaced by “people” or “ggente”), holy because the people even turned to her through the intercession of graces, because in via Santa Maria Antesaecula al Health District they even raised an altar for her, holy because at night, house by house, she left Rome with the chauffeur and slipped ten thousand lire envelopes under the door of the poor, holy because she kept hundreds of strays in a kennel and even the titled Rex, mythical shepherd of the police, he found hospitality there.

Holy because when one asks for her intercession, she also expects a smile, not Padre Pio’s bullshit, lay saint because it was not the Church that consecrated it but a spontaneous popular devotion.

Benign ghostor to quote her also a cheerful ghost she was, when there was a swarm of her alleged sightings a few years ago: some swore they had met her near Palazzo San Giacomo, some simply glimpsed her effigy on the subway walls, as if it were a Madonna, and who attributed to her prophecies about the future of Naples.

Ma better to celebrate births than deaths, better birthdays like the one that would have led her to blow out 125 candles today (so much for baking soda!). Surely her immortality does not rest on spiritual apparitions or even on that sanctioned by the statues – yet, how much effort to give her toponymic honors – nor does it rest on the prolific iconography: from the mural that portrays her with Peppino alla Sanità to the magnets and statuettes of San Gregorio Armenian.

His immortality it is in the language and in the philosophy of life, in the mask and in the affinity, because we really met some of the characters who she met: every condominium has known its rapacious accountant Casoria, every examiner has come across a scoundrel examiner who does not know the meaning of the word “paliatone”, every candidate for a job has found someone who proposes to survey the pigeons in Piazza San Marco, every traveler will have come across some Honorable Trombetta, or a brother in law like Aldo Fabrizi, an accountant de Funes or an upright tax hound (always like Fabrizi).

dear toto death for you is not a spirit level antonio de curtis

© Gennaro Giorgio / AGF

Antonio de Curtis

We could go on for pages as we run out of space, as in the famous letter that she – abbondandis in abbondandum – dictated to Peppino in the Milan boarding house to save your nephew from the alleged bad woman. And speaking of songs, leaving out who was the inspiration for the piece that has entered the Neapolitan classics, who knows which sprite of the air in a moment of love pain he dictated to her those words and that melody – a very simple thing, like many beautiful things – in the key without accidents of C major, which they transcribed on the piano while she whistled it. That too, prince. Pure composer but better than the “music swanby Caianello.

Here, only messy e subjective can be a memory, because the rest And already history of the theaterof the magazine and of the cinema in spite of those films made in a hurry and the critics who massacred her in life, which is why she demonstrated with Pasolini that she could blame them (but there was no need).

One curiosity remains, dear prince: will she then have fulfilled the vow of Luciano De Crescenzo, who doubted the afterlife without excluding it and hoped, if there were, to meet her right? Dead man talking, if you’ve seen each other then strike a blow.

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