Paolo Pietrangeli – Death – Paolo Pietrangeli, 76-year-old, of Rome, Italy, a Roman singer-songwriter famous for Contessa and director of Amici and Maurizio Costanzo’s show passed away on November 22, 2021, in Rome, Italy. He directed six films between 1975 and 2001. His 1977 film Pigs Have Wings was entered into the 27th Berlin International Film Festival. In October he was awarded the Tenco Prize but was unable to attend the award ceremony due to his illness.
He was born on April 29, 1945, in Rome, Italy. He was the son of director Antonio Pietrangeli and Margherita Ferrone. He started writing songs in the 1960s, and in 1966 he joined the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano musical group. It was in that period that he composed “Contessa”, written during an occupation of the La Sapienza University of Rome: the song alternates stanzas in which a dialogue is imagined between two people of the upper class (including the Countess of the title ) who scornfully comment on a strike in the factory and stanzas in which the workers instead praise the revolution. In the following years, Pietrangeli continued to work in music, but also began to devote himself to film directing. He made his debut in 1974 with the documentary on Italian neo-fascism Black and white, and in 1977 made the film Pigs with wings, based on the novel of the same name by Marco Lombardo Radice and Lidia Ravera. He also worked as assistant director of Luchino Visconti in Death in Venice and by Federico Fellini in Roma. In the Eighties, he left the cinema to devote himself to television, directing the program for many years Maurizio Costanzo Show and of Friends of Maria De Filippi.
Nicola Fratoianni shared the news of Paolo Pietrangeli demised on Facebook expressing his pain, he also said that his childhood was accompanied by the songs of the deceased “I just learned that Paolo Pietrangeli is gone. It’s great pain. Many of his songs accompanied my childhood, then the formation and the early years of my militia. Then the meeting in the years of Refundation and the discovery of a careful and passionate, ironic and generous person. Today I cry for a great songwriter, friend, and comrade. Never forget that today we still have to fight because even the surgeon has the right to see the doctor’s child.”
Paolo Pietrangeli’s obituary will be organized by the family
Photo Credit (PC) goes to Nicola Fratoianni