On February 19th all of Naples and especially the inhabitants of San Giorgio a Cremano should get up and toast the birthday of their most brilliant and lonely son of the second half of the twentieth century: Massimo Troisi was born on this day and now he would have been 70. th birthday if it hadn’t been taken away from us by a “Cuore matto” on the glittering night of June 4th, 1994. A few hours ago he had finished shooting his latest film (the “Postino”) and lived in his sister Annamaria’s house on the Lido di Ostia, which was interrupted at the age of 41 by a heart attack after the umpteenth episode of rheumatic fever. The paradox is that that night not only set the date of a human tragedy, but immortalized him in his eternal youth. We cannot imagine Massimo today as a quiet seventy-year-old, because his art, his facial expressions, his humanity crystallize in a vital impulse that only belongs to children and poets. Compatriot Mario Martone pays homage to him at the Berlin Film Festival with a beautiful documentary that he wanted to dedicate to director Troisi, breaking away from the well-known portraits that have been dedicated to him in recent years. His fate was sealed from childhood: the youngest of six children, very close to his father, who was a railway worker, in the middle of a family crammed into the house in Via Cavalli di Bronzo, where also lived two grandparents, two uncles and her five nephews, yes he had heart disease since he was a boy but he didn’t like to talk about it and few were aware of his heart problems. He made his theatrical debut at the age of 15 on the Parish Stage with Lello Arena and other friends to replace an actor who had failed to show up. He studied surveying, but the passion for poetry and drama caught him like lightning. Just two years later he wore the mask of Pulcinella in a farce by Antonio Petito, which he had given a revolutionary twist on the edge of the upheaval in the Neapolitan scene. “I’ve written poetry before – he would have said – but only for myself, then I started throwing away tea towels and putting ‘Lazzi’ in brackets when you could let your imagination run wild. I really enjoyed working with ‘ Lazzi’ to go out’, improvise, because then back to the script. It was the moment of alternative avant-garde theater and everyone wanted to use Pulcinella. Reevaluate it. There were Pulcinella workers and stuff like that. To me this character seemed really tired. I thought you must be Neapolitan, but without a mask, preserve Pulcinella’s strengths: embarrassment, shyness, never knowing which door to enter and his open sentences. Together with friends from the theater group “RH-Negativo” (later renamed “I Saraceni”) Lello Arena and Enzo Decaro, he began to have real success despite a trip to Houston in the meantime to have the mitral valve replaced. The group changed its name again (“La smorfia”) and with these traveling companions Massimo Troisi landed on television in 1977 with “No Stop”, an anti-narrative intuition in the panorama of shows of those years, signed by Bruno Voglino together with Giancarlo Magalli and the director Enzo Trapani. When the partnership dissolved in 1981, the eternal child with its sluggish black tights and almost surrealistic improvisation mania was already a star. The producer Mauro Berardi bet on him at a moment of fatigue in Italian cinema: within a year he was making his first film, “Ricomincio da Three”, with the complicity of Anna Pavignano – who became his partner – and Vincenzo Cerami. Shot in 6 weeks with a budget of 400 million lire, it was released in Italian cinemas on March 12, 1981 and immediately conquered audiences (14 billion lire at the box office), so much so that a cinema hall in Porta Pia, Rome, On the bill, the show lasted more than six hundred days. The awards came too: two David di Donatello, three Silver Ribbons, two Golden Globes from the foreign press. Between television and cinema (he appeared as an actor in No thanks, coffee makes me nervous and directed the paradoxical and prophetic Morto Troisi, viva Troisi), he was now a star courted in the Neapolitan Empire alongside Eduardo and Toto was hired. Again, this explains his return behind the camera only in 1983 – when everyone was urging him to ride the success of his debut – with the timid apology of “Sorry for the delay”. Since then he would have made just 4 films in ten years, although We Just Have To Cry is signed to Roberto Benigni and The Postman is credited with directing Michael Radford. Nine appearances as an actor (including his films), including the three most notable ones directed by an unexpected “elder brother” like Ettore Scola, who built on him real gems like “Che ora è” (shared with Mastroianni) and “The Journey of the Captain Fracassa” to bring him back to the glories of commedia dell’arte. The decision to interpret “The Postman” (which he had wanted so badly after the novel by Chilean Antonio Skarmeta) was a gigantic act of love for art and for this character: Troisi knew that by now he was very ill and himself had to undergo a new cardiac surgery. He postponed this date beyond all measure in order to finish the film “with the heart”. It was the effort that crushed him, but in this way he transported himself to another dimension: the same one that allows us today to remember him as a Shakespearean fool, an elf ever present in popular imagination. Dead Troisi, long live Troisi, we can also say by wishing him a happy birthday.
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