The incredible biography of Antonio Ligabue, one of the leading Italian painters of the 20th century, but also a person who truly understood what it meant to suffer and feel alone on a daily basis, is brought to life by Giorgio Diritti.
Antonio Ligabue is not like other children. He is of Italian blood but has been in Switzerland since birth, which took place in Zurich at the very end of the 19th century, always suffering from goiter and rickets and entrusted from his first year to a family of Swiss-German peasants (whom he later considered his real parents). At just twenty years old, after receiving a fragmented and superficial education, he was expelled from Switzerland and forced to flee to Italy, a country completely foreign to him and whose language he did not speak. Upon arriving in Gualtieri, an Emilian town from which his official father hails —husband to his biological mother, Bonfiglio Laccabue— the young Antonio suffers from cold, hunger, and above all, immense solitude.
To fill his existential voids, between one odd job and another, Ligabue discovers art and especially painting. The encounter with Renato Marino Mazzacurati, at the end of the 1920s, gave Ligabue the decisive push to dedicate himself solely to painting (and sometimes even sculpture), the activity that best allowed him to communicate and explain to the world how to listen: he would do so until the day of his death.
Anyone who has visited an exhibition dedicated to the great painter knows (and Diritti reminds us in the credits) how much the explosion of shapes and colors constituted the main attraction. As if they became for him an indispensable tool to escape the sufferings of a life marked by mental disorders and mockery.
In the lead role, naturally that of the naive Emilian painter in adulthood, is Elio Germano, who was able to make Ligabue “his own” by offering the deep inner suffering he often knows how to convey to the characters presented to him on the big screen.
Ligabue as a boy and child is played by Oliver Ewy and Leonardo Carrozzo, respectively.
Gianni Fantoni lends his face to the industrialist Antonini while Dagny Gioulami is Elise, the Swiss adoptive mother, and Pietro Traldi is Renato Marino Mazzacurati, whose mother is played by Orietta Notari. Finally, Andrea Gherpelli takes on the role of Andrea Mozzali.
