Queer Places:
Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori
Florence, Città Metropolitana di Firenze, Toscana, Italy
Danilo Donati (6 April 1926 - 1 December 2001) was an Italian costume designer and production designer. He won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design twice: the first time for his work in
Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968), the second time for his work in
Federico Fellini's Casanova (1976). In addition, he received numerous David di Donatello and Nastro d'Argento awards for his costume and production designs in various films.[1]
Among the film directors with whom Donati had worked were Federico Fellini and
Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Born in Suzzara, near Mantova, Italy, he studied in Florence and became a muralist and fresco painter. In the mid 1940s he settled in Rome and shared lodgings with other anti-Fascists. In Rome he took a diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts.
For several years he was the supervising art director at RAI, Italy's national television network. His first job as an assistant costume designer was for
Luchino Visconti on his films La Vestale, (1954), and La Traviata, (1955). In the mid 1950s Danilo Donati became an acolyte of Franco Zeffirelli and in 1963 he designed the costumes for Franco Zeffirelli's production of La Traviata at La Scala.
In 1964 Danilo Donati designed costumes for Pasolini's black and white film The Gospel According to St Matthew, and received his first Oscar nomination. His novel Il Coprifuoco, (2000), was about young gay men hiding from German forces in Florence in 1943 and is taken to be largely autobiographical. The book was among the five finalists for Italy's literary award, the Strega.
In his novel Coprifuoco bombs and food rationing strike a particular Florence: the homosexual one. As if he wanted to resume the intertwining of the Palazzeschian Sorelle Materassi to dip it into the archeology of the camp, Donati tells the story of a beautiful fugitive American soldier who falls into the life of some gay friends, who give him shelter, who are registered at the registry office like Gino or Moreno but who, among themselves, prefer nicknames such as Fiordigiaggiolo, Marlene, Cinciallegra, Clara (in homage to Calamai). Portraits in all possible shades, including the inevitable "hysterical fag" (as Busi would say), improvise mothers for a child who could be something more, and who fills their loneliness and their little war-blown life. An invented story whose protagonists are inspired by characters who really existed (the hunt for "who's who" is officially open), has its best moments precisely in the description of a clandestine community but not too much, portrayed at Paskoski's tables amidst fluttering paltò and furtive glances in a city where the terribleness of being gay was softened by a certain openness: the same where poets and artists lived who saw beyond the dictatorship.
"All in all it was a happy island, it was thought that art defended us from the abuses of the black shirts and the Germans. What an illusion"
said Donati. Coprifuoco is the novel about the death of beauty (of a city, of people) "or rather, of a concept of beauty that did not pass from the biceps but from the eyes of Donati: I wanted that, closed the book, you had the feeling that everything was irreversibly closed, finished ». Yet there is no nostalgia, if anything, bitterness: «For me Florence is dead, killed by all those Japanese who take pictures and don't look. I'll go back there
once I'm dead, maybe. Buried in the English cemetery».
Donati died in Rome, Italy.
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