Alberto Bevilacqua ► reececrothers.com

*This post is dedicated to Ewa, who suggested it.

The Album:

Other Editions:

The Film:

The Lady Caliph herself, Romy Schneider.

The Director:

From Wikipedia:

Alberto Bevilacqua (27 June 1934 – 9 September 2013)^[1] was an Italian writer and filmmaker. Leonardo Sciascia, an Italian writer and politician, who read Bevilacqua’s first collection of stories, The Dust on the Grass (1955), was impressed and published it. Mario Colombi Guidotti, responsible for the literary supplement of the Journal of Parma, began to publish his stories in the early 1950s.

Friendship Lost, his first book of poems, was published in 1961. Caliph, published in 1964, was his breakthrough novel. The protagonist, Irene Corsini, imbued with his own sweet and energetic temperament, is one of the strongest female characters in Italian literature. His novel This Kind of Love won the Campiello Prize in 1966. In both This Kind of Love and Caliph, Bevilacqua oversaw the adaptations and productions of the film versions. This Kind of Love won Best Film at Cannes.

The author with his books. It’s actually hard to find images of Bevilacqua WITHOUT his books in the shot, for which I love him.

Bevilacqua was also a poet. His writings have been translated throughout Europe, the United States, Brazil, China and Japan. In 2010, his seven “stories” as he liked to call them, were included in the Novels volume of the prestigious series “I Meridiani.”^[2]

Bevilacqua directed seven films between 1970 and 1999. His 1970 film La califfa was entered into the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.^[3]

Bevilacqua, aged 79, died in Rome on 9 September 2013 from cardiac arrest.^[4] He had been hospitalized since 11 October 2012 for heart failure.^[1]

Posters:

The Novel:

Translation of back cover (according to Google):

The story of the passions and rebellion of a beautiful, authentic and proud woman, against the backdrop of a city - Parma - and its stream, which symbolically separated the poor from the rich.

Califfa is a beautiful girl of popular origin who becomes the lover of Annibale Doberdò: the most powerful industrialist in the city, a sort of Mastro-don Gesualdo, authoritative and unscrupulous. Memorable portrait of a free woman, fundamentally healthy and, in her own way, innocent. Califfa is a lover without servility in whose loving frankness the industrialist finds, in a crucial point of his existence, a new desire for life and his own freedom. All the powerful people in his court arm themselves against this relationship, but only Doberdo's sudden death will end it. And Califfa will return to her neighborhood of origin, alone, but with the awareness of having contributed to transforming not only the soul and intimacy of a man, but also the social aspect of a city.
«Central novel» in the 1960s, for its clear literary success and because it testifies, through some great protagonists, to the splendors and miseries of that Italian economic miracle that would inspire the best fiction and the best cinema of the time.
The novel's notoriety was amplified by the film shot by Alberto Bevilacqua himself and starring an unforgettable Romy Schneider together with Ugo Tognazzi.

By Alberto Bevilacqua. Einaudi published La polvere sull'erba (2000), his first novel, unpublished since 1955, the year in which it was written, Viaggio al principio del giorno (2001), La Pasqua Rossa (2003), Storie della mia storia (2007) and the collections of poems: Piccole questioni di eternità (2002), Tu che mi ascolti (2005), Duetto per voce sola (2008).