In the Footsteps of Giuseppe Verdi

ARTE series Wagner versus Verdi, part 1

Almost everyone knows Verdi’s music, yet hardly anyone knows anything about Verdi the man. The maestro kept his private life hidden from the public eye. On his country estate “Sant’Agata” he led the life of a farmer. He grew vegetables, bred horses and cattle, worked the fields, built dairies. He did not always treat his employees kindly, and he rarely received visitors either. In the country he wanted to be entirely a farmer and to know nothing of cosmopolitanism. Verdi: a cosmopolitan shaped by rural life.

In a 1913 Cadillac, the film undertakes a journey through Emilia-Romagna. It discovers how the landscape, the food and the people shaped Verdi. Along the way we meet Massimo Spigaroli, whose grandfather produced the maestro’s favourite ham: the culatello, which only became famous through Verdi. In his delicatessen in Busseto, Bonini initiates us into Verdi’s culinary secrets, revealed to him by his great-aunt, who once cooked for Verdi. In Roncole, Verdi’s birthplace, we discover a Verdi shrine. The composer is venerated here like a saint, although he had little time for the church. For the first time a film crew is also permitted to look inside the Palazzo Orlandi in Busseto. Verdi lived there out of wedlock with Giuseppina Strepponi. The road movie ends at the Casa Verdi in Milan, the retirement home for pensioned musicians that Verdi himself considered his finest work. A place where Verdi’s music is genuinely alive every day.