News from Italy
The love of giants is gigantic:
The fire of love that burns with a letter
City Lights: Ingrid Bergman & Roberto Rossellini
by Natalia Marino
The love of giants is gigantic
Or the mountains will fall to the ground
Or all hell will break loose
Or the world will sink
I will leave you like this
The calendar leaves show May 7, 1948. It was Roberto’s birthday. He was the son of a building contractor who had built the Barberini, Rome’s first cinema. For this reason, little Roberto had an unlimited admission card to see all the films he wanted. A passion that he cultivated until he became an editor and then director of his first works. During the war, he frequented the Osteria Fratelli Menghi, a meeting place for Roman artists and aspiring filmmakers, where he spent the evenings with Federico Fellini, Aldo Fabrizi, and many others. After the war, considered a recommended by the regime during the twenty years, instead he began to tell the horrors of war with films such as Rome, open city, shot with a meagre budget among the rubble of the bombings, and with Anna Magnani as the protagonist, his partner. At first, it was a flop, but when it was acclaimed in France and the United States, it returned to our cinemas too. It became a cult following the trilogy that includes Paisà, and Germania Anno Zero, almost exclusively with non-professional actors. Neorealism, in short.
Roberto turns 42 that day. He has been separated from his wife, Marcella de Marchis, costume and set designer, and lives with Anna at the Grand Hotel Excelsior. They had met in 1944 to shoot “Rome Open City”.
That May evening, the director receives a letter from Ingrid Bergman, who writes to him. The Swedish actress, married, living in Hollywood, already established (she had already won an Oscar in 1944 with Angoscia), sees a film by the Italian director Roberto Rossellini and is enchanted by it. So she decided to offer herself by writing a letter that has gone down in history: “Mr Rossellini, I am a Swedish girl who has lived in America for ten years, who speaks English well, a little French and can only say ‘I love you’ in Italian. I have seen your film, I am enthusiastic about it, and I would be honoured to have a small part in your next film”.
Ingrid is married. But in the autobiography written by Ingrid Bergman with Alan Burgess, the actress recounted having met the photographer in Paris in June 1945. She is in a relationship with the photographer Robert Capa. Ingrid wrote the letter to Rossellini because Robert Capa, during their relationship, had introduced her to the vision of Italian neorealist cinema. The Swedish actress was struck by Rome, an open city driven by her desire for continuous experimentation; she placed herself at the director’s disposal in case he wanted to cast her.
Who would turn down an actress with an Oscar and four nominations, star of a slew of already legendary films? He tries to arrange a meeting without Anna’s knowledge, but she has a thousand eyes and ears. Bergman was in Paris to film The Sin of Lady Considine, and Rossellini took the opportunity to go and talk to her in person. Bergman sent him a telegram to Rome with the date and time of the appointment. When the Swedish telegram arrives, Rossellini and Magnani are at the table. He doesn’t open it, and she keeps serving him spaghetti. “Is that okay? Want more sauce? Do you want chilli?”. Finally, the plate ready, she pours it on his head. Nannarella’s outbursts are famous.
Married to the dentist and future neurosurgeon Petter Lindstrom
“I will be right back.”
The evening Rossellini leaves to meet Ingrid, he leaves the Excelsior telling Anna that he will buy cigarettes and walk the dogs, the dachshund Lilina and the poodle Pippo. But he leaves Anna and is never seen again until the photos of him and Ingrid getting off the plane in Rome. When he met Bergman, he immediately engaged her to shoot Stromboli, land of God, making Anna Magnani even more furious, for whom he had written the part he was now giving to the Swede. Only then does he call her to tell her that “Stromboli” will be made by Ingrid? To repay him, Anna organises a photocopied production to be shot not far from them, on the island of Vulcano, to teach the “Swedish trafficker” a lesson, as her rival contemptuously calls it.
Roberto and Ingrid are in Amalfi. The two lovers are so in love that they leave the owner of the Hotel Luna Convento a photo hand in hand.
When they are already filming in Stromboli, Lifela publishes it and all hell breaks loose. Journalists and onlookers disembark with the steamers, Ingrid has the film in which she plays Joan of Arc coming out and the producer Howard Hughes is desperate: she, icy, composed, mother of a family, has so far embodied the icon of a puritanical America and traditionalist, and Hughes fears audiences will punish her by deserting the film.
In the summer of 1949, the scandal that exploded in the Aeolian Islands reaches everywhere, even in Washington, in the Capitol, with Senator Edwin C. Johnson who thunders against the Swedish Ingrid Bergman “culturist of free love, distiller of evil and depravity” and against the Italian Roberto Rossellini, corrupter of manners, whose films, so Johnson requests, must not be distributed to the sane American people. The director and the actress, both married, each already with a child, he who moreover lives in sin with Anna Magnani, have just fallen in love and the whole world is talking about it.
Rain of letters
Every morning, in the little red house where the two lovers are staying in separate wings, the postman leaves insulting letters to Ingrid, guilty of cheating on her husband and abandoning a six-year-old daughter. They come either from ordinary people or from acquaintances and friends and the latter are the result of the “moral suasion” campaign hatched by Hughes, who asked anyone to write to her to dissuade her. Only Ernest Hemingway, as Marcello Sorgi recounts in The Lovers of the Volcano, takes pity on her and writes to her: “Listen to me, daughter, I want to give you a little speech. We have only one life in front of us (…). You are a great actress. Great actresses always get into big trouble sooner or later; if they don’t have them, it means they are bitches (you can cross out the bad words). And everything great actresses do is forgiven.”
While in Stromboli they try to contain the scandal, with patrols to keep intruders and journalists away, on 7 June Anna Magnani lands on Vulcano and here everyone, instead, to get publicity, has an interest in fanning the flames of the rivalry between the two films and the two actresses. Meanwhile, on the set, the Swede realizes she is pregnant. On 4 August, having returned to Rome, she issued a statement to say that she was divorcing and leaving the cinema. Rossellini will obtain a divorce from his first wife with a trick, with Marcella taking citizenship in Austria, where, unlike Italy, divorce is allowed. The Vatican comes to threaten a violation of the concordat.
The first film to come out is “Vulcano”, in February 1950. Anna beat Rossellini to the punch, also because he is arguing with the American producers, who would like to cut the scene in which Ingrid converts and which they consider blasphemous. But at the premiere of “Vulcano”, the projection gets stuck. Once, two… four. In the hall, there is talk of sabotage. Then the journalists leave: the news has arrived that Ingrid has given birth.
Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman at the Venice Film Festival in 1950 for the presentation of Stromboli
Virtually everyone had been talking about their relationship for more than a year. For this reason, their announced participation in the Venice Film Festival had unleashed hell with the arrival of several paparazzi never seen before on the Lido. So we were in 1950, and Roberto Rossellini presented his latest work Stromboli at the Festival starring his new partner Ingrid Bergman, mother of his son Robertino and his wife (not on paper). Among the guests in Venice was Anna Magnani, the director’s former historian, who “unloaded” the year before for her Swedish colleague. And so the Festival becomes the scene of the most scandalous love triangle in the history of Italian cinema.
The Rossellini/Bergman couple chose Venice for their first official public outing; the role of the protagonist of Stromboli was initially intended for Magnani, to be then entrusted to the Swedish actress transplanted to Hollywood and with an Oscar in her pocket: out of spite Anna showed up at the Festival with Vulcano, directed by William Dieterle and interpreted together with Rossano Brazzi and Geraldine Brooks, practically a photocopy of Rossellini’s film. The press referred to the making of the two films as the war of the volcanoes…
Ingrid Bergman, and Roberto Rossellini, with the twins Ingrid and Isabella, celebrate the third birthday of their son Robertino in 1953.
It ended after Rossellini and Bergman had three children and made five unsuccessful films. He doesn’t want her to work with others; then she makes a film in Paris with Jean Renoir; he goes to India to shoot one, and he returns with the screenwriter Sonali Das Gupta, who is pregnant with him. New divorce. End of the story. Anna had already taken her revenge in 1953, bringing “Bellissima” to America, and in 1956 by winning the Oscar with “The Rose Tattoo”. And, without Rossellini, Ingrid starts winning Oscars again. Cancer patient, she will call Roberto next to her, in Paris, to say goodbye to him one last time. Anna will also want him at her bedside. And when he has a heart attack, the person he calls and in whose arms he will die is Marcella, his first wife.