The Castle and the cinema

Over more than a hundred years about forty works belonging to the period of "silent movies", some fifty feature films and a hundred documentaries in addition to several TV reports in occasion of important events. They all witness the attention reserved to landscape, monuments, art and historical evidence which have marked the territory through the years. Within this context, the Castle has played a key role on repeated occasions.
The story that saw Ugo and Parisina as protagonists inspired "Parisina (A Romance at the Court of Ferrara)" directed by Giuseppe De Liguoro in 1905, based on the script of the Ferrarese writer Domenico Tumiati, as much as the documentaries "Unfortunate Lovers" (1949) filmed by Vancini-Baruffi and "Love Tragedy" (1954), directed by Adolfo Baruffi. Besides, the Castle has acted as the almost exclusive setting (including both outdoor and indoor shots) in Roberto Danesi's "Torquato Tasso" (1914): a journalist then pointed out that the grandiose monument was suddenly «crowded with a curious moltitude of armour-bearers and courtiers who got back from the XVI century ...».
The cinecamera also focused on a number of documentaries such as "Ducal Ferrara" (1954) by Alessandro Tonegato - Antonio Sturla as director of photography, estimated as the pioneer of Ferrarese cinema and author of several memorable shots of the Castle; Fabio Medini's "Holiday in Ferrara" (1961); Gianfranco Mingozzi's "Via dei Piopponi" (1961); Giuliano Montaldo's "Ferrara, the City of Wonderful Sights" (1988); Florestano Vancini's "Ferrara" (1995). The palace also features in the aerial views of Folco Quilici's "Emilia Romagna - Marche" (1968) or reflected on the water in the French director Frédéric Rossif's "Emilia Romagna, the Creative Will" (1981). A series of films, on the other hand, also drew their inspiration from modern history, especially that of the fascist decades. The work in which the Castle features more prominently is Florestano Vancini's "The Long Night of 1943" (1960). On that occasion the Castle had to be virtually reconstructed due to technical reasons, yet it looked so real that not even the Ferrarese realized it was fictive. In various other famous films the palace provided the setting of single episodes such as in Franco Rossi's "Youth youth" (1969), Vittorio De Sica's "The Finzi Contini Garden" (1970), Leandro Castellani's "A Regime Crime (The Don Minzoni Case)" (1973), Florestano Vancini's "Bitter Love" (1974) and Giuliano Montaldo's "The Gold Eyeglasses" (1988). The Ferrarese territory as been the set of other important films: a case in point is Luchino Visconti's "Obsession", followed by Roberto Rossellini's "Paisà", Mario Soldati's "The Woman of The River", Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Cry" and "Beyond the Clouds", Ermanno Olmi's "The Trade of the Arms". Today the cinematographic adventure is still going on in Ferrara with a series of new films and TV serials ... The imperative 'Camera!' will still be heard in Ferrara.