US Palmese: Manetti bros win the game

Everybody knows Italy loves football (or "soccer"). But, when co-director Marco Manetti - before the film begins in Milan's Anteo-Palazzo del Cinema - asks the audience "Is there anyone who doesn't love football, here?" I have to raise my hand. Yes, well, I don't care much for football, although once in a while I watch games of the Italian or Spanish national football teams. But that doesn't mean I cannot enjoy a story about football: after all I don't need to know about fishing to read The Old Man and the Sea or to be a martial artist to enjoy Enter the Dragon.

The new film by acclaimed Italian directors Manetti bros - Marco e Antonio Manetti - is about a big football star who ends up in a small amateur football team, a fallen hero who gets back on his track at last. And about the town of Palmi, in the province of Reggio Calabria, with the kind of people you might find in any southern Italian... or actually any Italian town; and about their dreams. It's social Italian comedy at its best, a sports movie and, undoubtedly, a Manetti movie, with their own brand of irony and empathy.

But, of course, I might be biased, because I've known the two guys for quite some time, I love them and their films. I've been working with them - mostly Marco - on the novelizations of their Diabolik film trilogy and now I realize why he sometimes answered my calls from Paris... But, mostly, I always enjoy their way of making movies.

Marco Manetti (fotocappi)

In Milan, young football French star Etienne Morville (played by former Belgian football player turned actor Blaise Afonso) grown up in the banlieues of Paris, has become rich, spoiled, aggressive; although he invented a unique move called "Houdini", he now makes the news mostly because of his unpleasant behaviour.

Meanwhile in Palmi Vincenzo (Rocco Papaleo), a pensioner and widower who lives with his daughter Concetta (Giulia Maenza), sitting in a café talking football with his friends, makes a few calculations: if every citizen of Palmi gave 300 euros, the local amateur football team - Unione Sportiva Palmese, or U. S. Palmese - might be able to buy a real champion, such as Morville.

Concetta is doubtful. Palmi's poetess Ferraro (Claudia Gerini) thinks football is the opium of the peoples. Anyway, not only Vincenzo manages to collect the money, but Morville's manager forces the football star to accept the offer, in order to clean up his name and image. After the big teams and the big life in Paris or Milan, now the place and the game are totally different. At first, Morville doesn't seem to accept the new rules. Till he finds himself again, changing his life, the team and the town, with a few surprising twists at the ending.

Antonio Manetti (fotocappi)

Meanwhile, in the real world, Palmese has become one of the most famous football teams in Italy. U.S. Palmese was filmed in Paris, Milan and of course the directors' beloved Palmi, birthplace of their mother (to whom the film is dedicated). Spoken in Italian, French and the local dialect, the movie makes use of several technical tricks, some of which - says Marco - inspired by the Japanese anime series Captain Tsubasa. Manetti fans can recognize their style in shooting, but also their enduring love for cinema.

Besides, in their path through different film genres (horror, sci-fi, crime, musical and now sports) they also seem to have now found the epic, the faces and even the film score (as usual by Pivio & Aldo De Scalzi, here dotted by rap from the three different movie locations) that could allow them to make their own spaghetti western.

I just had time to ask them about it, while they were surrounded by fans in the theatre's foyer. "Who knows..." said Marco.

Manetti bros wearing the official Palmese shirt (fotocappi)

Gabriele Mainetti's Forbidden City

Once more, Gabriele Mainetti succesfully creates a movie you wouldn't expect from an Italian production. "I don't want to feel comfortable", says the director, after dealing in a very personal way with superheroistic themes in two highly unusual and powerful movies, Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (2015) and Freaks Out (2021). In order to stay far away from his comfort zone, with La città proibita he challenged himself with an Italian-made effective kung fu movie, deeply faithful to the genre, while maintaining all the elements that have become typical of his work: human feelings, engaging characters, unconventional bad guys and... the city of Rome, which is always much more than a setting.

Kung fu movie lovers remember The Way of the Dragon with Bruce Lee - who also directed it - fighting young Chuck Norris in a Concord/Golden Harvest production unusually set and filmed in Rome. Lee's character Tang Lung arrives in Italy to protect the family restaurant from a local gang. Memories of this 1972 movie (released in Italy in 1974, six months after Lee's death and two years before Mainetti was born) might have somehow inspired La città proibita, although - says the director - when he suggested a martial arts movie in Rome, the producer thought he would do something like The Karate Kid. Absolutely not: Mainetti has a deep knowledge of the genre and how to deal with it.

First of all he needed real martial artists, including expert fight coreographer Liang Yang, who would sometimes need to take over direction and photography. And stars who could both fight and act, such as Shanshan Chunyu and the film's big surprise, Yaxi Liu. Some viewers might think that choosing a strong female main character is just a tribute to contemporary film rules, while Mainetti simply follows a long tradition of heroines in kung fu movies. Italian roles are filled by well known stars such as Sabrina Ferilli, Marco Giallini, Luca Zingaretti (internationally famous for the Montalbano tv series) and young Enrico Borello as the main male character.

Gabriele Mainetti (Photo: A. C. Cappi, 2025) 

The story: due to China's one-child policy (1979-2015) Mei always had to stay hidden at home, till her older sister Yun emigrated to Italy so she could stop living her claustrophobic existence. But Yun fell into mr. Wang's prostitution ring, hidden under his Chinese restaurant called "Forbidden City", in Rome's Esquilino neighbourhood.

Mei follows all the way the clandestine immigration path in order to find her sister and set her free, but discovers Yun has become the lover of Alfredo, owner of a nearby Italian restaurant, who left his wife and life for her.

Both Wang's gang and local boss Annibale, Alfredo's long time friend, are looking for the mysterious kung-fu-fighting Chinese girl to get rid of her. Meanwhile Mei joins forces with Marcello, Alfredo's son and cook in the family restaurant, to find the missing couple. A darker truth is about to be discovered. Mei nearly gets killed and soon she'll be out for revenge, while doing her best to preserve Marcello's innocence.

Written by Mainetti with Stefano Bises and Davide Serino, the movie balances perfectly staged action, comedy and noir, transplanting the rules of classic Hong Kong movies into the colourful, multiethnic setting of today's Rome. The result is both an Italian story and a Chinese story, with hints of William Wyler's Roman Holiday, Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars, Lo Wei's Fist of Fury and Bruce Lee's Game of Death, and a kitchen fight reminding of Jackie Chan.

Undoubtedly, it's an author's approach to martial arts films that doesn't betray the soul and spirit of the genre - which the director clearly knows and loves - but might appeal to audiences that are not familiar with a kind of movies viewers of the 70's grew up with.

Meanwhile, due to her impressive presence on the screen, martial arts film lovers in Italy start regarding Yaxi Liu - previously known as Yifei Liu's stunt double in Disney's 2020 live-action Mulan - as the next Michelle Yeoh.

Argento's Deep Red: 50 years and a fiction tie-in

On friday March 7th, 1975 - exactly 50 years ago - a new horror-thriller hit Italian theatres: Profondo rosso (Deep Red) was directed by Dario Argento, already a star after his thrillers that since 1970 had defined the "Italian Giallo" genre (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o' Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet) and the 1973 tv series Door into Darkness, in which he had been assisted by Luigi Cozzi (co-writer of Four Flies and other Argento movies, and later director, among others, of the science fiction cult movie Star Crash). The Italian Giallo usually mixes serial murders and a few supernatural elements, and Deep Red is considered its masterpiece.

The 50 years celebrations will include, in April 2025, a series of Profondo Rosso Concerts by composer Claudio Simonetti's group, Goblin, performing live their original soundtrack during screenings of the film. But the first act of the celebrations is a book: the most unusual kind ot tie-in.

Fantasmi di oggi e leggende nere dell'età moderna is a collection of original mystery/horror short stories by ten different writers, conceived by Mario Gazzola, who edited it with me (Andrea Carlo Cappi), containing original artwork by artist Roberta Guardascione, here also at her writing debut. The "lost book from the movie Deep Red" is published by Luigi Cozzi (also author of one of the short stories) through his publishing brand Profondo Rosso and will be available since mid-March 2025 at the famous Profondo Rosso Store in Rome in via dei Gracchi, 260 (which is also the home of the Dario Argento Horror Museum) and later all over Italy and in online bookshops. Before explaining what kind of book this is, let's look at where it comes from.

Like Argento's previous movies, Deep Red is the story of a killing spree aimed to hide a secret, which the main characters are forced to investigate if they want to survive. The film is set in a fictional Rome - actually made up with bits of Turin, Perugia and Rome itself - and starts with a public lecture during which German psychic Helga Ulmann (Macha Méril) suddenly feels a murderous presence in the audience. The same night Helga is killed near the window of her apartment.

British jazz pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings), who lives in the same  building, witnesses the murder from the street and runs into the victim's apartment, too late. His friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), also a jazz pianist, who was with him in the street, is too drunk to be of help, But Daly, after having been threatened at his home by the killer, finds himself on the trail along with crime journalist Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi, who after filming started a long relationship with the director and later gave birth to actress Asia Argento).

More victims are brutally killed, including non-fiction writer Amanda Righetti (Giuliana Calandra), whose book Ghosts of Today and Dark Legends of Modern Age (in Italian: Fantasmi di oggi e leggende nere dell'età moderna) gave Daly a few clues on a previous unsolved mystery that seems to be connected to the killing spree through an old children song and an abandoned villa. Everything is explained in the end, during the final confrontation between Daly and the killer.

Almost everything, because there's a few little mysteries left. Where does the strange puppet used by the killer to attack professor Giordani (Glauco Mauri) come from? Why is the mysterious villa called "the villa of the shrieking kid"? And why is Amanda Righetti - whose book was originally published in 1956 and doesn't seem to contain compromising information about the killer - murdered almost 20 years later, in 1975? All of this is explained at last in our book.

In the movie we can see the cover of Fantasmi, its index and the first pages of the chapter about the mysterious villa. Everything is so detailed that you might think the book - published in 1956 by Sgra in Perugia, Italy - really existed. It's just a "pseudobiblion", a book that is quoted and mentioned, though it never really existed. But what if we could write it?

The idea came to writer-editor Mario Gazzola, author a couple of years ago of Hyde in Time, a book containing the fake (but rumoured) first draft of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and two (also fake) sequels by two descendants of the writer, all illustrated by - apparently - three different artists... all of them actually Roberta Guardascione, working in three different styles.

Since I'm a writer and an editor as well, Mario suggested we might call in a few fellow mystery-thriller-horror authors to write the ten chapters listed in the index, each apparently a "non fiction story" written by Amanda Righetti about a supposed "real Italian mystery". We assembled the group, but while we were working on Amanda Righetti's fictional biography, something surprising happened: we discovered her life.

In 1956 Amanda published the first edition of Fantasmi, based on her university dissertation, from which she had omitted a few personal details that might have seemed too strange to her professors. Then she became a well known "paranormal reporter" and went on investigating mysteries, including some she had already dealt with in the book... and, also, some that regarded her. Including her interest for the works by Regina Calamai, a maudit artist of the early 20th century, some of which - The Black Paintings - had been collected by Helga Ulmann. That's why, around 1974, Amanda decided to work on a new edition of Fantasmi, with all the material she had left out in 1956 and her later discoveries, including an eleventh chapter, all illustrated with The Black Paintings. But, just a few days before going in print, she was murdered and the publisher decided to shelf her new book, which remained unknown for fifty years...

So our Fantasmi "by Amanda Righetti, new edition edited by Mario Gazzola and Andrea Carlo Cappi" is at the same time a collection of eleven short stand-alone stories (by Claudio Bovino, Andrea Carlo Cappi, Luigi Cozzi, Paolo Di Orazio, Mario Gazzola, Roberta Guardascione, Enrico Luceri, Gian Luca Margheriti, Claudia Salvatori and Giada Trebeschi), a novel about Amanda Righetti (by Cappi, Gazzola & Guardascione) and a selection of Regina Calamai's The Black Paintings (by Roberta Guardascione; one of them above).

It's up to readers to discover the connections among the stories, the untold secrets of Deep Red, the hints to the whole film universe by Dario Argento (including Suspiria or Inferno) and the details hidden in the anamorphic pictures, that can be discovered by looking at the book upside down.

Fantasmi di oggi e leggende nere dell'età moderna (214 pages, 19.00 euros, published by Profondo Rosso) is available since mid-March at the Profondo Rosso Store and website, and since April also in online and physical bookshops.

 

Remembering Aldo Lado

Aldo Lado (photo: A. C. Cappi)

Today, december 5th 2024, would have been his 90th birthday, but writer-director-producer Aldo Lado left us a ltittle more than one year ago, on november 25th, 2023. The first time I knew about his movies was in the pages of a magazine where my uncle's brother used to write; it was in the early 70's and he was already considered as one of the masters of Italian. thrillers. The only trouble was they were classified for an audience "over 18" and I was way under that age.

I had to wait for his thrillers to reappear in dvd to see them; meanwhile he had made several different movies, because he didn't like "to do the same thing twice". We met years later at Milan's famous shop "Bloodbuster", specialized in all about movies, and then at a festival, where we became friends. I gave him a book of mine called Malastrana (which had been the working title of his film The Short Night of the Glass Dolls) and we started reading each other. I had the pleasure of having in my hands the first draft of his brilliant suspense novel Il mastino and he had nice words for my noir novel Black and Blue.

Aldo Lado (photo: A. C. Cappi)

I shared with him dinners, drinks (with my fiancée, whom he friendly scolded whenever she said I was having one too many) or meetings with his fans (along with late friends Andrea G. Pinketts and Stefano Di Marino), and had him as the main guest at the 2021 Torre Crawford Festival. During that weekend he mentioned a controversy about the fatherhood (or rather, co-fatherhood according to him) of the original script for The Bird with the Crystal Plumage by another Italian master, Dario Argento. I wrote an article about it here, taking the chance for reviewing Aldo's career both as director and novelist.

Since he was not much into social network, I used to give him a call on his birthday and have a little chat about his writing projects and enjoy his humour. That's something I really miss.

Aldo Lado (photo: A. C. Cappi)

 

Il corpo (2024)

Versione in italiano

In Italy, during the 70's, it was called "thrilling" and it's great to have it back after a long time. The genre, internationally known as Italian giallo, was a particular formula of suspense-filled psychological thriller, often flirting with the supernatural: it might contain elements of ghost story (like Daniele D'Anza 1971 tv miniseries Il segno del comando) or just play with ghostly suggestions before reaching a completely rational solution (like Domenico Campana's 1976 tv miniseries La mia vita con Daniela).

Il corpo (2024), screenplay by director Vincenzo Alfieri and Giuseppe Stasi, is the Italian remake of the Spanish 2012 thriller El cuerpo (written and directed by Oriol Paulo) which was clearly inspired by the work of French authors Boileau & Narcejac (on whose novels H. G. Clouzot's Les Diaboliques and A. Hitchcock's Vertigo were based in the 50's) and had a strong flavour of Italian giallo. Alfieri recreates the plot with a few more details and gives actor Giuseppe Battiston the chance to develop fully and beautifully the character of the detective, with a performance rich of nuances.

Cappi with Battiston e Alfieri (Fotogiaco)

Rebecca Zuin (Claudia Gerini) is the fascinating and powerful heiress of an Italian pharmaceutical industry. Bruno Furlan (Andrea Di Luigi), a former precarious university professor of chemistry, is her much younger husband; his marriage granted him a top manager position in the company, a life of luxury and a collections of sports car, but living with the selfish, manipulating Rebecca is much harder than expected. After a brief, risky relationship with his wife's sister and company lawyer (Rebecca Sisti) Bruno falls in love with student Diana Bettini (Amanda Campana); he would leave his wife, but he'd lose everything and face Rebecca's revenge.

Until she dies, suddenly, of a heart attack.

Hours later, the night watchman of the morgue is struck by a car while fleeing in terror. Inspector Cosser (Giuseppe Battiston), called to investigate, is informed that one corpse has disappeared: Rebecca Zuin's, whose autopsy was due in the morning. Under the pouring rain, Bruno - who is spending his first night as a widower with his lover Diana - is summoned to the morgue... and a nightmare starts for him. The cop, still recovering himself from his own wife's loss and hiding his pain behind his harsh sense of humour, starts making questions. Why is Bruno apparently not shocked by Rebecca's death? Where was he when the police tried to call him several times? Has he murdered his wife and stolen her body to avoid the autopsy, in order to hide his crime?

Meanwhile, Bruno wonders if Rebecca is really dead... Or is she undead? During a blackout at the morgue someone opened the locker with her personal belongings and took her cell phone. It's october, but a calendar shows the date of March 20th, which has some particular meaning for Rebecca. Bruno finds an ambiguous message and a cell phone playing her favourite song (Mia Martini's Piccolo uomo) which for some reasons he has come to hate. Someone or something is playing a dangerous game with him and even Diana, at her home, might be in danger... Only in the final chapter of the story every mystery will be solved, during an extraordinary monologue performed by Battiston as inspector Cosser.

Twelve years ago in Spain I saw and loved the original version, El cuerpo, starring Belén Rueda (whom I couldn't forget since J. A. Bayona's horror The Orphanage, 2007) as the rich and selfish heiress, and José Coronado as the cop. The story, which mostly takes place during one whole night at the morgue, expanded with flashbacks revealing the characters' past, really felt like writer-director Oriol Paulo had rediscovered Italian giallo.

The Italian remake has been filmed one year ago in seven weeks and three days in Rome (though the city is not mentioned in the story). When I read about the new casting, it looked perfect. But the big surprise of Il corpo is the deeper approach to the inspector. While meeting the audience last night in Milan, along with Giuseppe Battiston, the director confessed that the actor himself suggested a few lines and the way they should be delivered, making the character more intense than in Coronado's performance. But that's what a remake should do: adding something to the previous version. There have been other remakes of El cuerpo and more are in the making, but some of the next ones - says Battiston - will be based on Alfieri's screenplay.

Trivia: Belén Rueda also starred in Alex De la Iglesia's Perfectos desconocidos, 2017 Spanish remake of Paolo Genovese's Perfetti sconosciuti (2016) which featured Giuseppe Battiston in the original version. Claudia Gerini (whom audiences around the world probably remember in John Wick 2) appeared as Eva Kant in the music video of the song Amore impossibile by Tiromancino (2004); in the Diabolik film trilogy by Manetti bros. (2021-2023) both Claudia Gerini and Amanda Campana appear as masked aliases of Eva Kant.

Back to Il corpo: a long time ago you could enter in Italian movie theatres at any moment, but for some thrillers it was "forbidden entering during the last fifteen minutes", a rule that should apply in this case. But I'd add the same suggestion that appeared in the final credits of Clouzot's Le Diaboliques: if you liked this movie, tell your friends... but don't be devilish, don't tell anyone the ending. 

Andrea Carlo Cappi

30 years in the dark side of the world

The latest Italian-made "Kverse" spy novel in
Mondadori's "Segretissimo", december 2024.

I've been a professional fiction writer in Italy since 1991, creating a few series of my own, from mystery to science fiction, and doing some tie-in work I'm very proud of. But I guess my biggest accomplishment is the universe that has been called "Kverse" (after the letter K, by which I often sign my emails), a noir/spy saga that started exactly 30 years ago: 5 interconnected series, 30 books plus 12 original ebooks and several still uncollected short stories, signed both with my name, Andrea Carlo Cappi, and the pen name François Torrent. Since 2019, older titles are reappearing.under my real name from Oakmond Publishing on Amazon, while new titles by "François Torrent" are published by Mondadori, the latest in the next few days.

One of the best kept secrets in Italy is the success of Italian spy novelists since the 90's. Most of them appear in Mondadori's "Segretissimo" collection, since 1960 available in newsstands all over the country (and, since 2012, also in ebooks, though paper is still the most important part of the business); it's the same kind of distribution that has been used for "Giallo Mondadori", the publisher's mystery and thriller collection.

There's no bestseller list for books sold in newstands, so nobody knows they sell more then many titles in bookshops; since they seemingly do not exist, they're not translated abroad and media don't talk about them: it's all left to word-of-mouth among Italian readers. But last night, after the publisher revealed on Facebook the cover of the latest novel by "François Torrent", there's been a huge response by fans.

As I already mentioned in an article about giallo, the fascist regime didn't approve of Italian authors writing mystery and thrillers. This led Italian readers to believe we were not even able to do it. Nevertheless, a few authors managed to publish great mystery books after WWII; Italian-made thrillers and crime stories have been very succesful in tv and cinemas since the 60's. So readers finally accepted "domestic" mystery novels in the 90's, but were still doubtful about Italian-made spy stories.

"Segretissimo", which had been succesfully publishing French, British and American spy novels, had started infiltrating Italian authors among its books in the 80's, but writers have been encouraged to use foreign pen names to sign their spy stories: today most of its authors are Italian, both men and women, working under fake identities. We've been dubbed "Italian Foreign Legion".

Giallo Mondadori's Christmas issue, nov. 1994,
with the first Carlo Medina short story 

I decided to write thrillers, particularly spy thrillers, in 1970, when I was six years old, after seeing North by Northwest and Dr. No. There would be a few more influences, because in the same period I also saw my first spaghetti western (Sergio Corbucci's Vamos a matar, compañeros) and started reading adventure novels by Emilio Salgari and Diabolik comics. At fourteen I began working on my early short stories, not so well written, but containing a few interesting characters and plots, and the firt bits of a "universe" I would later rewrite.

In 1991 I was hired by RadioRAI, Italy's national radio, for a succesful anthology mystery series; most of my material was planned for season two... which would be canceled, so I didn't get even paid for the one episode that had already been recorded (I'd be luckier in 2003, co-writing for RadioRAI the series Mata Hari, reaching an audience of millions). But, while picking up something from my universe and reshaping it, I started planning a thriller saga mostly set in Europe, covering a timespan from 1936 to modern times: the dark side of the world, told through crime and spy fiction.

After I established myself as a short story writer for "Giallo Mondadori", I was asked to write one for the 1994 Christmas issue. I adapted one of my early plots to the particular historical moment Italy was living, the aftermath of the fall of the First Republic. My mix of noir and socio-political remarks featuring Carlo Medina, former copywriter in Milan turned professional hitman, was very well received and gave birth to a series which would include novelettes and novels.

Among them, in 1997, my most succesful book ever, in which Medina unravels the plot that killed someone unnamed but easy to recognize: the novel was considered a very plausible explanation of the death of Lady Diana Spencer by one of Italy's top TV journalists. The stories with Medina as the main character are now collected in five volumes, but he also appears as a sidekick in other series of the same universe, Nightshade and Sickrose.

The first "Nightshade" novel in
Mondadori's "Segretissimo", march 2002 

In 2001 fellow author Stefano Di Marino made me notice that no series with a female secret agent was being published in "Segretissimo". Our conversation inspired me to create a new format, which I proposed to "Segretissimo" and was quickly approved: Nightshade (later renamed Agente Nightshade) features Spanish free-lance spy and hitwoman Mercy Contreras, codename Nightshade, whose first novel was released in 2002; the latest was in summer 2024.

Though I was publishing Medina and several other books with my own name, for Nightshade I had to assume the pen name François Torrent in order to avoid the distrust of Italian readers. The formula mixes action, international plots and a few real life events told from a different angle: one of my novels even forced Italy's Prime Minister to explain a previous statement of his, made at the eve of the Second Gulf War.

Twenty years ago, in 2004, another character emerged from the Nightshade series: Bolivian-born hitwoman Rosa Kerr, codename Sickrose, who would gain her own spin-off series in 2021: her fourth novel - a team-up with Carlo Medina, to celebrate both his 30th birthday and her 20th - is published this month in "Segretissimo".

A subject I've been following in many spy novels is the rise of the extreme right in the West: you can write an entertaining action series and also seriously point out what is really happening in the world. I even managed to "foresee" a few events, such as the second wave of terrorist attacks in Paris in november 2015, the links between separatists in Europe and Russian agents in 2016-17, or the "civil war" attempt in the US after the 2020 elections.

Meanwhile I went back to noir in 2013, with the Afro-spanish private detective Toni "Black" Porcell appearing in various short stories (most of them later collected in a book) and two novels; Black is also a member of Nightshade's team since 2015.

And in 2019 I recovered another old idea connected to the same universe: a Cold War spy series set in Spain during the 40's called Dark Duet (after an old novel by Peter Cheyney), which is currently published in original ebooks from Delos Digital.

Unlike traditional serial heroes and heroines, my characters grow old. If the saga goes on, someday they might pass the baton to younger characters, such as Cleo, and Afro-italian girl who often joins Nightshade's team; or Vida, Nicaraguan-born daughter of a former Russian masterspy, who is now Sickrose's protégée. It's a growing extended family I've been living with for (over) thirty years; and I'll keep writing about all of them as long as readers still follow and love them.

Andrea Carlo Cappi

Left to right, models Mary Rossa and Selene Feltrin as
Sickrose and Nightshade in the series booktrailers

The Diabolik Phenomenon 5-Sympathy for the devil

Giacomo Gianniotti as Diabolik in Ginko all'attacco (2022)

How Diabolik anticipates both 007 and Mission: Impossible

In his very first comics issue, november 1962, Diabolik is a merciless, cold-blooded criminal who wouldn’t stop at anything to get what he wants. Unlike Maurice Leblanc's Arséne Lupin, he’s not a ‘gentleman thief’. His weapon of choice is a knife, more silent and effective than any gun: he never carries nor uses firearms. Nobody knows his real identity, so he might be anyone, anywhere, anytime. In fear, people whisper his nickname: the King of Terror. When he’s in action, he wears a black superhero-style bodysuit with a ninja-like mask which only leaves his steel-colored eyes visible. But in fact he’s a master of disguise: he employs masks of his own creation to assume different identities or replace other persons: this allows him to collect informations or create disinformation, in order to get close to the loot and grab it.

Diabolik’s masks predate the ones used by the actors in John Huston’s film The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), the mask left by the Terrible Tinkerer at the end of The Amazing Spiderman #2 (1963), the ones worn by Fantômas in the film versions by André Hunebelle (1964-1967) and the ones used in the series Mission: Impossible (since 1966 till now). As far as I know, Diabolik #1 marks the first appearance in fiction of this kind of flesh-like masks looking like real faces, replacing theatrical make-up for disguises.

Diabolik doesn’t wear masks all the time. His real face in issue #1 might have been somehow a self-portrait of Angelo Zarcone, the missing artist, but soon the character will grow a strong resemblance to actor Robert Taylor. In the first three issues he uses the (stolen, we'll learn years later) identity of a man called Walter Dorian, in order to lead an apparent normal life in Clerville; he has a relationship with an innocent girl he met in #1, nurse Elisabeth Gay; but in #3, when she discovers his secret lair and calls the police, Diabolik is arrested and his real face appears on every newspaper. As you can also see in the first Diabolik movie by Manetti bros., based on the story of issue #3, he escapes thanks to the woman he had just met while trying to rob her, Eva Kant. She saves his life, but it will take awhile for him to trust her completely. In time – since Eva keeps suggesting not to kill innocent people, at least when it’s not strictly necessary – he becomes a little more ‘human’, but remains extremely pragmatic: any obstacle to his plans must be removed, even if it requires killing.

Diabolik's Jaguar used in the films (Photo: A. C. Cappi)

You might notice, masks apart, some similarities with James Bond in the movies. Ian Fleming’s original 007 has a ‘licence to kill’ issued by his government, but never takes advantage of it, while in the film Doctor No (1962) Sean Connery’s 007 does not hesitate to kill the unarmed professor Dent, a character who does not even appear in the original book (1958). Another example: at the beginning of the novel Goldfinger (1959) Bond is haunted by the recent killing of a Mexican drug smuggler, while in the film version (1964) we actually see him doing it: after electrocuting the man in a bathtub, he justs mutters sarcastically «Shocking. Positively shocking.»

It feels like in 1962 audiences world-wide start expecting the hero to kill people just for the sake of it. In Italy more than everywhere else, since the concept is stressed in the Italian title of Doctor No: Licenza di uccidere (‘Licence to Kill’, hence the need twenty-five years later to release in Italy the Bond movie actually called Licence to Kill under the title Vendetta privata).

What’s happening? Perhaps in the early Sixties people is getting tired of following rules. In real life we’re supposed to let someone else decide what we have to do, but in fiction we love to see characters removing every living obstacle.

Inside Diabolik's Jaguar (photo: A. C. Cappi)

The big difference is that James Bond has a licence to kill granted by a higher authority – Her Majesty’s Secret Service – and only eliminates bad guys, while Diabolik has just a self-appointed licence to kill and he is the bad guy. But most of his victims are usually rich and selfish people, which gives him some pre-1968 revolutionary aura (of course, all Clerville policemen who die trying to catch him are just... collateral damage). We’ll have to wait for the Eighties to reach the next level, when we start sympahizing with guys like Hannibal Lecter or Freddy Krueger.

There’s one more connection between Diabolik and the film version of James Bond: they both use technological gadgets and drive top British sports car, which become their equivalent of Batman’s Batmobile. Like Batman, Diabolik makes his gadget all by himself and, long before cell phones, he and Eva can communicate through radio-watches, which might have been inspired by the wrist-radio used by Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy since 1946.

In 1963 Diabolik is at the wheel of a 1961 Jaguar E-Type which soon turns out to be full of tricks, even before the first appearance of Bond’s 1964 ultra-accessorized Aston Martin DB5 provided by the Q Section in the movie adaptation of Goldfinger. But, while James Bond has at least two or three different lovers in each movie, since march 1963 there’s only one woman in Diabolik’s life...

To be continued...

Read also

The Diabolik Phenomenon 1 - Shocking a generation

The Diabolik Phenomenon 2 - Crimes for commuters

The Diabolik Phenomenon 3 - Welcome to Clerville

The Diabolik Phenomenon - 4 - The #1 mystery

Andrea Carlo Cappi, born in Milan in 1964 and living between Italy and Spain since 1973, is an Italian writer, translator and editor. Author of over seventy titles - most of which set in his noir/spy story universe "Kverse" - and member of IAMTW, he also writes tie-in novels for "Diabolik" and "Martin Mystère". Also a member of World SF Italia for his work in speculative fiction, in 2018 he won Italcon's Premio Italia for best Italian fantasy novel. He also works for the Torre Crawford festival and literary award, in memory of F. M. Crawford.

The Diabolik Phenomenon 4-The #1 mystery

Luciano Scarpa as Zarcone in Giancarlo Soldi's film "Diabolik sono io" (2019)

The real case of the missing artist

There were times when publishers in Italy translated foreign first names into Italian: there were novels by Giulio Verne and plays by Guglielmo Shakespeare. This also happened with a few characters in novels; so, for instance, Hercules Poirot became Ercole Poirot in the early Italian translations of Agatha Christie’s books, while Gone with the Wind's Scarlett O'Hara became Rossella O'Hara both in the novel and the movie. In 1962, for the reasons I have previously explained, Angela and Luciana Giussani needed a non-Italian environment for their new comics series and, as they set Diabolik in the fictional European state of Clerville, it seems they went in the same direction.

Diabolik’s name was exotic enough for Italian readers, but his partner could not be named – let’s say – Eva Bianchi, nor their adversary be an inspector Rossi. They needed to sound ‘foreign’ too. Angela’s favourite philosopher from her school years was Immanuel Kant, so she borrowed his surname for ‘Eva Kant’; while inspector ‘Ginko’ – whose first name has never been revealed – comes from the nickname of Angela’s husband Gino Sansoni. Thus, all three main characters of the Diabolik saga have the distinctive letter K in their names.

Most other characters in Diabolik have Italian first names but foreign or foreign-sounding surnames, such as Gustavo Garian or Giorgio Caron. It has never been specified which is the official language in Clerville – a French-sounding name, which is pronounced Clèrville, anyway – though in the new movies by Manetti bros. everything from shop signs to newspaper titles is written in Italian. Actually, the city of Clerville is probably inspired by Milan with a touch of Paris, while the seaside city of Ghenf might have borrowed something from Genova and Marseille, along with little bits of the French Riviera.

Movie poster based on the cover of Diabolik #1

But all this wasn't established from the beginning: the first issue, Il re del terrore (‘The King of Terror’), might have been set in France. As I said, it would not be succesful, had it been set in Italy. And it was succesful: Angela and Luciana Giussani did strike gold when issue #1 was released on november 1st 1962, although they were not satisfied with the art. The artist Angela had hired, Angelo Zarcone, was working at the time on sexy comics stories that would be published by Gino Sansoni’s Astoria the following year, in the collection Albo-Romanzo Vamp. Anyway, right after getting his check for his work on Diabolik #1, Zarcone disappeared. Forever. Leaving no trace.

Most informations about him have been collected later by comics expert and publiher Gianni Bono, intrigued by the mystery. It is said that Zarcone lived in a small hotel in Milan and was always late in delivering his work; that he was nicknamed ‘The German’, since he had a little blond son from a German wife or girlfriend and was seen dressed like a German tourist. Zarcone was the first one to draw Diabolik’s face and according to Brenno Fiumali – Astorina’s historic art director and author of the cover of the first issue – he even resembled the character. Was Diabolik somehow a self-portrait of Angelo Zarcone?

Perhaps it was due to his disappearance that Diabolik #2, L'inafferrabile criminale ('The Elusive Criminal'), was released only three months later, with a two months' delay, on february 1st 1963, with art by a friend of Angela and Luciana’s, Calissa Giacobini aka Kalissa. She was the first (and for a long time, only) woman to work on the art of Diabolik, but she must have been an emergency solution, since the Giussani Sisters were not convinced by her work either: that was the only issue by Kalissa and one year and a half later both stories, #1 e #2, would be remade with new art and reissued. But in 1982, to acknowledge him as the first Diabolik artist ever, Angela and Luciana tried to locate Zarcone with the help of Italy’s top private investigator, Tom Ponzi, to no avail. Where did he go and why did he disappear?

A. C. Cappi as himself in the film "Diabolik sono io" (2019)

In 2018 director Giancarlo Soldi filmed Diabolik sono io (‘I am Diabolik’), part documentary on the Diabolik phenomenon (with footage of the Giussani Sisters and original contemporary interviews to writers and artists of the series), part fiction. In the fictional side, Zarcone (actor Luciano Scarpa, as a Diabolik look-alike) might have been in a coma for over half a century. After the ambulance taking him from one hospital to another has an accident, he wakes up unaged like a comics character and flees, victim of amnesia, to search for himself in a world he doesn't know, where people on tv is talking about a character called 'Diabolik' who looks just like him.

But even after the movie was released in theatres and television in 2019, neither Zarcone nor any family member resurfaced and the mystery remains unsolved. Nevertheless, in spite of its poor art, the original historic issue #1 is today one of the most wanted comics in Italy and even forged copies are sold at a high price. So, what made Diabolik an instant hit and keeps the series going after more than sixty years?

To be continued...

Read also

The Diabolik Phenomenon 1 - Shocking a generation

The Diabolik Phenomenon 2 - Crimes for commuters

The Diabolik Phenomenon 3 - Welcome to Clerville

The Diabolik Phenomenon 5 - Sympathy for the devil

Andrea Carlo Cappi, born in Milan in 1964 and living between Italy and Spain since 1973, is an Italian writer, translator and editor. Author of over seventy titles - most of which set in his noir/spy story universe "Kverse" - and member of IAMTW, he also writes tie-in novels for "Diabolik" and "Martin Mystère". Also a member of World SF Italia for his work in speculative fiction, in 2018 he won Italcon's Premio Italia for best Italian fantasy novel. He also works for the Torre Crawford festival and literary award, in memory of F. M. Crawford.

The Diabolik Phenomenon 3 - Welcome to Clerville

 

Diabolik and Ginko's reflection in Ginko all'attacco (2022), 01 Distribution

From a real life murder to a fictional world

Mystery and crime fiction have been succesful in Italy since 1929, as I already explained here. But, according to the fascist regime in power since 1922, no murder was supposed to happen in Mussolini’s ‘perfect’ country, so most of the few Italian mystery writers at the time had to set their detective stories elsewhere. In the end, readers were effectively convinced that no murder story could ever be set in Italy, therefore no Italian writer would be able to write a credible one, two ideas that would persist for a very, very long time. Later, the regime censored the whole of crime literature, anyway.

The libri gialli were back on sale in 1946, in the newborn free and democratic Repubblica Italiana. But most Italian mystery writers still had to set their stories in US cities they had just read about in American hardboiled books, often hiding themselves behind foreign pen names. Anyway, in Italian language, the word giallo acquired the meaning of "real life unsolved mystery" as well.

When Angela and Luciana Giussani (who decided to sign themselves A. & L. Giussani, keeping their Italian identity) chose a thief and murderer who baffles the police as their new comics hero in 1962, they had two problems to solve: the name and the place.

Art by Riccardo Nunziati

In 1955 audiences world-wide were shocked by Les diaboliques, H. G. Clouzot’s movie based on a thriller by French mystery writers Boileau and Narcejac. The word diabolico became associated with murder... and terror: in 1957 Italian journalist Italo Fasan, under the unlikely pen name 'Bill Skyline', published one of the many gialli you could find in newsstands from minor publishers, a fake-American thriller titled Uccidevano di notte (‘They killed by night’) featuring a serial killer who writes letters to the police signing himself ‘Diabolic’. In 1958 a real life murder in Turin hit the news: the perpetrator sent the police a letter signed ‘Diabolich’ (with a final h), possibly inspired by Fasan’s novel. The book was immediately republished under the title Diabolic-Uccidevano di notte, this time with the author's real name proudly on the cover. Diabolich would never be discovered. In early 1962, famous Italian comedian Totò appeared in various roles in the crime spoof film Totò Diabolicus, inspired by the 1949 British movie Kind Hearts and Coronets.

All this events probably inspired Angela and Luciana's choice of the name ‘Diabolik’, with a final k - unusual in Italian language - giving it both an exotic and ‘evil’ sound. But where would Diabolik commit his crimes?

Clerville State map appearing in the films

At first Angela and Luciana Giussani thought about using Paris and Marseille as a setting, but soon they shifted to the fictional cities of Clerville and Ghenf, in the equally fictional European state of Clerville. This simplified work in the art department: no need to draw the Eiffel Tower in the background, for instance. Besides, no Italian policeman would be offended, since cops always seem unable to defeat Diabolik. A similar choice had been made in his novel El inocente (1953) by Spanish writer Mario Lacruz, who could not criticize the police in his country under Franco's regime; or by American writer Evan Hunter (born Salvatore Lombino) under his pen name 'Ed McBain' in his police procedural 87th Precinct series (1956-2005) set in the fictional US city of Isola, just because this allowed him more leeway in his stories then the real New York City.

After all, fictional cities like Metropolis or Gotham City had already appeared in DC Comics such as Batman and Superman. Half a century later this would lead to a detailed tourist guidebook (the brilliant Guida turistica di Clerville), complete with a Clerville city map and a Clerville State road map, which are now used as a reference book: for instance, the streets and squares mentioned in the opening chase of the film Diabolik (2020) strictly follow the city map.

But Diabolik goes far beyond. A whole brand new geography would be created, with fictional countries surrounding the State of Clerville, and more fictional countries all around the planet. In over sixty years, Diabolik and Eva Kant’s adventures would mostly take place in an alternative world. My personal contributions have been baptising ‘Gau Long’ a previously nameless Hong Kong-like city in the Far East, and establish ‘Zlata’ (inspired by Praha) as the capital of the Republic of Rennert: in the movie Diabolik-Ginko all’attacco you can find both cities in the departure list at Clerville Airport. The only exceptions to this "other world" in the comics are recent occasional short stories set in real Italian cities, published for comics conventions or special events.

One of the Jaguar E-Types used in the films

As it often happens with long-lasting series, time also flows differently in this world: characters are not allowed to age, or rather, they do it very slowly, while objects around change according to real life technology. Diabolik still drives his 1961 Jaguar E-Type, but cell phones and computers have appeared in the comics and Clerville has adopted euro as a currency, along with many real Euopean countries. The rule is: four years in the readers’ reality are just one year in the characters’ lives, so sixty years of comics are actually fifteen years for Diabolik, Eva and all the others. In this time, they have evolved somehow – as it would be natural in fifteen years – but have not been altered. Stories are still essentially capers, a subgenre not overexploited (unlike psychthrillers, for instance) and not so easy to write, which makes stories very interesting to read.

When Marco e Antonio Manetti turned into movies three classic episodes of Diabolik comics from the Sixties, they decided to remain closer to the time in which they had been written, just moving the stories slightly forward, between the end of the Sixties and the beginning of the Seventies. So not only in the films you can find cars, objects and clothing dating back to 1968-72, but also the look and the flavour of the movies of those times: while Diabolik (2020) has a few hitchcockian notes, Diabolik - Who are you? (2023) recalls Italian police movies of the early Seventies.

But there’s more to be discovered in the world of Diabolik, including another real life mystery behind issue #1.

To be continued...

Read also

The Diabolik Phenomenon 1 - Shocking a generation

The Diabolik Phenomenon 2 - Crimes for commuters

The Diabolik Phenomenon 4 - The #1 mystery

The Diabolik Phenomenon 5 - Sympathy for the devil

Andrea Carlo Cappi, born in Milan in 1964 and living between Italy and Spain since 1973, is an Italian writer, translator and editor. Author of over seventy titles - most of which set in his noir/spy story universe "Kverse" - and member of IAMTW, he also writes tie-in novels for "Diabolik" and "Martin Mystère". Also a member of World SF Italia for his work in speculative fiction, in 2018 he won Italcon's Premio Italia for best Italian fantasy novel. He also works for the Torre Crawford festival and literary award, in memory of F. M. Crawford.