From Paolo Colombo

Walking along Via Matteotti, just a stone’s throw from the centre of Conegliano, one cannot fail to notice an unusual monument: it’s of a woman reclining on a crescent moon which in turn rests on a sphere representing the planet Saturn. The inscription on the plaque reads: “Lux aeterna. To George Méliès”. The statue is a tribute to the great French director, regarded as being the founding father of cinema and special effects, and shows a scene from his most famous film Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), made in 1902. The statue itself was commissioned by the director and entrepreneur Giorgio Fabris who managed the Méliès Cinema located next to the monument (now renamed Cinergia) from 2001 to 2019 and who is now artistic director of the Accademia Theatre in Conegliano.

The monument to Méliès marks the beginning of a fascinating and previously undiscovered journey revealing the many unique and often largely unknown links that the city of Cone – gliano has with the world of cinema – the so-called ‘seventh art’. Much like the threads of a spider web, they unite every corner of the city. Another example is the Federico Grava Secondary School located in via Filzi. Back in 1932 it was cal – led the State-Registered Middle School and one of the forty first-year students was a truly special individual who would get up at five every morning to take the train to Conegliano from his home in Sacile. He was none other than the great writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini and he attended school for just one term before moving to Cremona. But that childhood experience was to remain etched on his memory, so much so that, years later, aged 25 he even wrote a story about it entitled A train journey with a Priest on the Venice-Udine train. Still today, Pasolini’s original school report is preserved in the school archive. It shows he achieved seven out of ten in Italian, history, geography, mathematics and ten out of ten for conduct. His only poor mark was in Religious Education, for which he just scraped a passing grade.

Now we fast forward thirty years to 1966. This was the year Signore & Signori (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians) was released in Italy. Regarded as director Pietro Germi’s masterpiece, the film is an incisive and accurate portrayal of the dramas, gossip and petty politics typical of small-town Italy of his day. The film is set mainly in Treviso, birthplace of its screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni, who took his inspiration from his own experiences in the city and the stories of his friends. The third scene was filmed entirely in the Contrada Granda area of Conegliano’s historic centre, between the Teatro Accademia, Osteria alla Stella, the Scalinata degli Alpini, Piazza Cima and Via XX Settembre. A few years later, Vincenzoni himself explained why this was: “My friends from Treviso and I experienced these stories first hand. In the first scene, the character pretending to be impotent is me, Moschin was my uncle, and when we filmed the scene depicting violence against an under-age girl, the trial was actually still pending. My friends turned up on set. They were terrified and tried to control what was going on and we ended up filming some scenes in Conegliano for fear of reprisals!”.

Fast forward a few more years to the seventies. This was the birth of so-called genre films, meaning films such as detective stories and spaghetti westerns. The most famous protagonist of both genres was Clint Eastwood, but few people know that in the Italian version, his voice was dubbed by a voice actor from Conegliano named Michelino Calamera, better known as Michele Kalamera (his Greek surname was Italianised during the fascist era). Born in 1939 to a Sicilian father and VenetoGerman mother, he passed away in July 2023 at the age of 84. Famous in particular for his voice acting, he was also a theatre actor and in 1963 founded the theatre in L’Aquila together with Gigi Proietti. Kalamera said: “I was chosen by Clint Eastwood himself after he saw my audition for The Outlaw Josey Wales. That was in 1976. He was very impressed and declared that he’d ‘finally found his Italian voice’ and I’ve been his voice actor ever since”. In addition to Eastwood, for whom he worked as voice actor on all his films from 1976 onwards, except for a hiatus from 1986 to 1990, Kalamera worked as voice actor for many other film stars, including Steve Martin, Michael Caine, Robert Duvall, Donald Sutherland, Robert Redford, Christopher Plummer, Burt Reynolds, Christopher Lee, Anthony Hopkins and many others. In total, he played over fifteen thousand roles, including stars, co-stars and key characters in both cinema and on TV.

Speaking of cinema and TV, Conegliano was also proud host of the celebrated Antennacinema film festival from 1979 to 2000. Held in the Teatro Accademia the festival was the brainchild of an idea developed by its founders Michelangelo Dalto, Giorgio Gosetti and Carlo di Carlo. They wanted to analyse the deep – and then little understood – connection between the world of cinema and television. Antennacinema garnered national recognition for Conegliano thanks to the high-calibre attendees, who included such famous actors as Alberto Sordi, Stefania Sandrelli and Michele Placido, film directors Mario Monicelli, Nanny Loy and Edgard Reitz and famous TV personalities including Pippo Baudo, Maurizio Costanzo and Renzo Arbore.

We should round off our tour with a look at the present and an eye on the future. Our look at the present takes the form of Cinemadamare, the world’s largest free international gathering of young filmmakers. This is an itinerant cinema campus and production focal point for filmmakers, and film industry students and professionals. Every year, the event sees over 300 budding young directors team up to collaborate on every phase of film production – from scriptwriting and location scouting, to shooting and editing. This year, the campus’s first port of call was none other than Conegliano where 50 young people from 35 countries spent ten days through June and July collaborating to create what will become a short film lasting 15 minutes.

“Maybe we’ll tell a wine-themed folk story… why not?” says Cinemadamare’s director Franco Rina. So who knows? Perhaps the next Christopher Nolan could cut his teeth creating a film about a glass of Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore D.O.C.G.!

Article originally published in Visit Conegliano Valdobbiadene magazine Fall Winter 2024. The entire magazine is available here.