The Italian cinema dynasty

“Come along, I’ll take you to the President,” says the press officer, leading the way up the stairs of the Art Nouveau building. It’s a slow climb, because at every landing there’s something to look at: large film posters, framed everywhere, one on top of the other, on the landing, along the corridors, right up to the ceiling – "Pane, amore e fantasia", "Poveri ma belli", "Rocco e i suoi fratelli", Fellini’s Il bidone, the string of melodramas starring Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson (So many tears! my mother used to say every time they were on the telly); but also old silent films featuring Leda Gys, the President’s grandmother, alluring and Art Deco-style in marvellous vintage posters. The catalogue of Titanus, the greatest, most glorious production company in Italian cinema. Here, in this company-cum-home, everything seems to have stood still. There’s none of the open-plan layout of big corporations: no turnstile with badge checks at the entrance, no living wall, no modular sofas, no youngsters in sweatshirts and trainers greeting you in front of an iPad. It feels more like a columbarium or the Louvre, perhaps a little eerie and melancholic, harking back to the golden age of Italian cinema. Guido Lombardo, the third generation of the Titanus dynasty, ushers me into his office; he is extremely elegant in a blue suit, despite the stifling heat and ‘heatwave’ – yet another of these days. He’s just passed fifty, but like everything in here, he too seems to come from another era. He’s just returned from Ischia, after a grand soirée of Visconti commemorations at Villa La Colombaia, marking the 120th anniversary of his birth. “They gave me an award for Titanus and its connection with Visconti’s work,” he tells me, showing me the plaque – a stylised profile of the director of “The Leopard” – before placing it on his desk, amongst piles of papers, vintage postcards and lopsided stacks of books. Visconti’s ghost is everywhere here. It begins right outside the front door: the Titanus building is in fact situated between Termini station and Castro Pretorio, in that labyrinth of Umbertine-era streets themed around the Risorgimento – Via Palestro, Montebello, Solferino, Goito, San Martino della Battaglia, Sommacampagna – which also forms the backdrop to "Senso". A premonitory sign, if you like. Then, at the entrance, the first poster to greet you is that of Visconti’s epic (“but they got the sequence of the tricolour fluttering in the Battle of Palermo wrong,” he explains to me, “nobody ever notices”).

And here, framed on the wall of his office like a hunting trophy, is the production plan for the film that ruined his father Goffredo: “My father had worked out with his accountant that, to recoup the costs of “Il Gattopardo”, every Italian would have had to see it at the cinema at least twice. According to another calculation, it had cost him as much as all the villas, apartment blocks and hotels in Cortina put together. Yet every time he was asked if he’d produce it again, he didn’t hesitate for a moment. ‘Yes, of course,’ he’d say, ‘it’s for “Il Gattopardo” that we’ll be remembered’.” The real financial disaster, however, was something else. "Sodom and Gomorrah", directed by Robert Aldrich, had been released the year before and had fallen flat. It was the usual mythological temptation of the film industry, which from time to time proves fatal for producers. “It was with Sodom and Gomorrah that my father lost everything, even more so than with The Leopard.” The audience for Titanus films had never been that of the big cities, but rather of the suburbs, small towns and the vast Italian countryside. Titanus was Matarazzo and Poveri ma belli, not Visconti and mythological blockbusters. In early 1964, Goffredo Lombardo was forced to sell the empire he had built in the 1950s on the back of popular melodramas: the Farnesina soundstages, the studios on the Appian Way, the dubbing studio in Via Margutta, and the cinemas, concentrated mainly in Naples. Everything. He was left with nothing. “My father was up to his ears in debt; he’d kept only a green Fiat 500 and the brand name, which he refused to sell because he knew that sooner or later he’d get it back.” But to understand how he managed it, we must start with Circeo, with Goffredo Lombardo’s passion for spearfishing and his obsession with sharks – elements that were already present in "Africa Under the Sea", the 1953 Titanus film: a tycoon, a yacht, the Red Sea, an eighteen-year-old Sophia Loren in a two-piece, in all the splendour of Ferraniacolor, entangled in a net amongst groupers and octopuses.

The Lombardos’ long-running feud with sharks began shortly afterwards. In 1956, Goffredo Lombardo was attacked by a great white shark at Circeo. Today, with climate change and sharks seeking cooler waters, such incidents happen almost everywhere, but at the time it was a rare event, almost on a par with UFO sightings. Although injured, he managed to make it back to shore. Anyone else – myself certainly – would have considered their days of deep-sea fishing and diving over, and would have opted for the Dolomites instead. Goffredo Lombardo, however, was fired up. “My father returned to Rome and went to the abattoir; he had forty litres of blood put into various tin cans, then he got hold of twenty kilos of cow’s udder, a shark hook, ropes, buoys, a shotgun loaded with buckshot, and then he went back to Circeo. He had a fisherman take him by motorboat to the exact spot of the attack, set the bait, scattered the blood in the water, the shark arrived and that was that.” All with the expertise of a producer setting the stage for his personal revenge. Shortly afterwards, he founded “Mondo Sommerso”, Italy’s first magazine dedicated to diving. All the pioneers contributed: Gianni Roghi, Maurizio Sarra, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Jacques Mayol, Folco Quilici and Enzo Maiorca. Stunning covers featuring Claudia Cardinale on a rubber dinghy. In one of the first issues, Lombardo published a very Hemingway-esque account of his revenge: “E morì di domenica”. It is clear that a man like him would never have resigned himself to the failure of his film empire. Reduced to poverty, the producer of "The Leopard" came up with the ‘musicarelli’ – those featuring Rita Pavone, Al Bano and Romina, and Gianni Morandi. He had them directed by a young Lina Wertmüller, who went by the name George Brown. The critics weren’t impressed, just as they’d had nothing but scorn for Titanus’s ‘melodramas’ years earlier – “Catene”, “Tormento”, “I figli di nessuno” – the ‘Temptation Island’s’ of our post-war era. The public, however, loved them. Box-office takings ran into the millions. Lombardo made a comeback. Little by little, he got everything back on track.

Today, “Rita la zanzara”, a yéyé music film starring Rita Pavone, is being screened with full honours at the Cinémathèque. A month ago, the restored version was a triumph at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna. “My father loved popular cinema. The melodramas starring Amedeo Nazzari were a modern take on the Neapolitan “sceneggiata”, which he had grown up with. The ‘musicarelli’ were a brilliant idea and there was nothing like them in Italy. But he also wanted to take risks with more artistic films. Every time we watched “Rocco and His Brothers” together, I’d notice his eyes were glistening… ‘What a masterpiece we’ve made,’ he’d say.” The ‘sceneggiata’ is the starting point for everything. Because the Lombardo dynasty began in Naples, and Naples will always remain their city of choice, the heart of the story. 1904: Gustavo, Guido’s grandfather, then aged nineteen, gave up his plans to become a lawyer and opened a small office to trade in films. Something unthinkable – to say the least, reckless – for the time. Worse than investing in Bitcoin ten years ago. His meeting with Leda Gys did the rest. She was the most sought-after silent-film actress, muse and lover of Trilussa, who had even given her that stage name (her real name was Giselda Lombardi). Lombardo took her away from him. “When Trilussa’s father was around, we were never allowed to talk about him,” Guido tells me, “there were no books of his in the house; I didn’t know who he was – I think I only found out after I turned thirty.” He shows me, with a certain pride, an old postcard of Leda Gys with a handwritten poem and a dedication by Trilussa. “I found it on a market stall.” A small personal consolation.

Father Goffredo entered the scene in the early 1950s. He found the winning formula with Matarazzo’s melodramas but also discovered Sophia Loren – whilst Gustavo had launched Totò’s career, to emphasise Titanus’s Neapolitan character. “Sofia Scicolone was a dreadful name. It would never have worked… Dad took his inspiration from Marta Toren, a Swedish actress who was very famous at the time and had even appeared in a Genina film. An L instead of a T and that was that. Sofia’s mum was absolutely against it – ‘You can’t change my daughter’s name!’ she’d say – but in the end my father had his way.” Today, few people remember Marta Toren.

Guido Lombardo’s office looks as though it has stepped straight out of a surrealist ready-made. A large room, dark panelling, a curved desk, every corner crammed with objects, paintings, old photographs, mementos and awards. Like an antique dealer in Portobello, but with Telegatti awards on the shelves. The real centrepiece, however, is a collection of Doulton and Beswick – hyper-realistic English ceramic dogs of all sizes: setters, pointers, spaniels, greyhounds, all striking a pose, all frozen in the moment just before the shot is fired. “I used to buy them in London; I always gave them to my father as presents, even though deep down he didn’t like them – he couldn’t stand them – but he kept them anyway; he’s put them all here.” It feels as though you’re inside an English hunting painting, one of those Victorian Landseer works with enormous dogs in the foreground and the owner a mere speck in the background. Guido Lombardo took over the business twenty years ago, following his father’s death. “As a child, they sent me to Paris because my father had received a leaflet from the Red Brigades threatening to kidnap me – ‘your son is next’. “In Paris, I went to school with Carla Bruni; I never would have imagined she’d become a supermodel.” Back in Rome, he worked his way up through every department, with no special treatment: electrician, camera operator, coffee runner on set. “Then I had to go to the editing room, sit through script meetings without saying a word, write up summaries of the scripts, go to the cinema every day and study the box office takings.”

When talking about cinema, Guido Lombardo doesn’t use management jargon. He doesn’t say ‘library’, ‘data-driven’ or ‘engagement’. In fact, he’s keen to remind me time and again that Titanus is one of the oldest cinema brands in the world (“Gaumont was founded a few months before us, but, well, we’re right up there”). “I’m one of the few producers who still talks about family,” he says, “because Titanus really was a family for so many people.” He tells me about Cesarina, his father’s tireless secretary, who used to travel here from Ostia – an hour’s train journey – every morning – “the Titanus offices opened at half past eight, but Dad would arrive at eight, before anyone else.” He tells me about the old prop masters he knew, about lunches on set with the stagehands, and about the ‘extra white square’ that was enough to make the crew happy. Those were the days.

As he speaks, I realise just how many Titanus ‘madeleines’ there are in my memories. My father used to buy “Mondo Sommerso”; he’d leave it lying about the house, and I’d be spellbound by the wetsuits, the photos of Mallorca taken whilst freediving, and the models in bikinis for a feature on ‘how to approach a grouper’. And then there’s the Titanus ‘shield’ logo, which immediately springs to mind along with that theme tune that used to play in the summer, after lunch, signalling that Amedeo Nazzari or De Sica or Gina Lollobrigida or Marisa Allasio and Maurizio Arena, the ‘maranza’ from Trastevere, were about to appear. And it is from television, in fact, that we must begin again. Because the Titanus that Guido Lombardo took over twenty years ago was primarily about drama, TV films and soap operas such as “Edera” and “Orgoglio” – major hits that continued the unbroken tradition of the old melodramas. “As a child, I remember my father talking about this gentleman who’d come from Milan, whom nobody knew: “But who is this bloke who wants to buy the whole catalogue? ‘We’ve never seen anything like this before,’ he’d say.” When, in 1980, he sold the television rights to the Titanus catalogue to Berlusconi, few understood what he had in mind. Goffredo Lombardo knew that that heroic, epic cinema – the kind made with Visconti and Fellini – was destined to disappear. “Although it was with great regret, my father had realised that cinema was a thing of the past, that business was shifting elsewhere. When he gave Tornatore his debut with “Il camorrista”, he suggested they make both the film and the series together, and Tornatore didn’t understand… ‘Why a series as well?’ he asked. ‘Because cinema is dead,’ my father replied.” The year was 1985. And thirty years before Gomorra and Suburra, Tornatore shot a five-part series that Goffredo Lombardo sold to Fininvest, thereby recouping the costs of Il Camorrista, an extremely expensive and complicated film. “Tornatore used to pace up and down down here, in front of the main entrance; he’d turn up every morning, and this went on for weeks, perhaps months,” he says. “He hadn’t done anything yet; he was twenty-five and wanted to work with my father. In the end, he took him on, put him to work reading scripts, then produced his first film. That’s what Titanus was all about.”

A few years ago, Tornatore made a major documentary about Goffredo Lombardo, epic even in its title: “L’ultimo Gattopardo”. But what about today? How does one keep a legend alive when it reaches the third generation and the world that legend built no longer exists? “I grew up with Sophia Loren; we’re still in touch. I grew up with a gentleman I always called Carletto, who I later discovered was Bud Spencer. My earliest childhood memories are of dinners at Steno’s house, with him and my father discussing sketches for Totò.” The leap from there to today’s platforms is a sharp one. “Over the last ten years, everything has changed again: we work at a frenetic pace, absurd sums of money are involved, and we hardly see each other.” But the brand carries on: restorations, rights, TV dramas, the Cinémathèque praising the ‘musicarelli’ with Rita Pavone. Guido Lombardo pulls his iPhone out of the jacket pocket he hasn’t taken off all morning. The Titanus shield is on the cover.