Queer Places:
Ristorante Villa Excelsa, Via delle Viole, 1, 73017 Sannicola LE
Countess Maria Gioacchina Stajano Starace Briganti di Panico , known simply as Giò Stajano ( Gioacchino Stajano Starace, Count Briganti di Panico from birth to 1983 ; Sannicola , 11 December 1931 - Alezio , 26 July 2011 ), was a noblewoman , writer , journalist , Italian transsexual actress and painter . [1] In the 1960s , before the gender reassignment surgery (1983), he was at the center of public attention as one of the first publicly declared homosexual men in Italy . [1] For his night swim in the Barcaccia Fountain , it is also said that it was Stajano who inspired Federico Fellini for Anita Ekberg 's bathing scene in the Trevi Fountain in La dolce vita (1960). [1]
Grandson of the Fascist hierarch Achille Starace , his maternal grandfather, [1] Giò Stajano was born on 11 December 1931 in a small village in Salento, Sannicola, in the then Kingdom of Italy , to Count Riccardo Stajano Briganti di Panico and Fanny Starace, only daughter of Achille Starace. [1] [2] At his birth his gender was male and the name assigned to him was that of Gioacchino Stajano Starace Briganti di Panico, abbreviated to Giò Stajano. [1] [2]
As told by Giò Stajano himself, once his grandfather Achille gave Benito Mussolini 's arms precisely the infant Giò, who on that occasion peed on the Duce . [3] At the age of twelve, with the fall of fascism , his parents separated.
Giò attended the Jesuit College of Villa Mondragone in Frascati . After high school, he moved to Florence , where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts . Subsequently he moved to Rome and followed some courses at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" .
In 1956 , during the annual edition of the Art Fair in Via Margutta in Rome, Stajano exhibited his paintings, obtaining some success with the public. He met Giorgio de Chirico , Renato Guttuso and Alberto Moravia , began a friendship with Novella Parigini and began to frequent those circles that Federico Fellini would later recount in La dolce vita ( 1960 ). [4]
In 1959 he published Rome upside down , [2] [5] an autobiographical text, which recounts his mad raids in Roman high society and simultaneously describes the homosexual reality in Italy at the time. The text, explicitly gay , was seized by the authorities on charges of propagating ideas contrary to "public morals" and "harmful to customs". Which obviously helped to focus the attention of the tabloid press on Giò Stajano, who at the time obtained the consecration as the "most famous homosexual in Italy".
Immediately after Rome turned upside down, Stajano hurried to publish Better the egg today [2] (initially, Better man today ), again on homosexual life in Rome, in which he alluded in a not too veiled way to the homosexuality of various public figures , among which the ex king of Italy Umberto II , defined here with the nickname "Umbertina". He followed up with another tabloid book, Roma erotica . These texts too were seized shortly after their release in bookshops, but not without having sold a certain number of copies and contributed to further increasing Stajano's celebrity. He became one of the most famous protagonists of the Roman "dolce vita" [6]. He opened a club and inspired director Federico Fellini by bathing in the Barcaccia Fountain in Piazza di Spagna , before Anita Ekberg bathed in the Trevi Fountain in the film La dolce vita ; in the latter film he obtained a part, however, due to a dispute with the director, this was not included in the theatrical edition of the film, but was later added in the restored editions for TV and videocassettes / DVDs . [1]
In addition to Fellini, he worked with Steno , Dino Risi , Riccardo Freda . Between 1958 and 1961 he collaborated with the tabloid weekly Lo Specchio .
In 1961, mostly because of his celebrity, he was among the people summoned to be questioned by the judiciary in the context of the " green ballets " scandal in the Brescia area . On this occasion she, to her protest, presented herself in the magistrate's court in the guise of a mourning woman, knitting a ball of black wool .
At the end of the 1960s he began to collaborate with the weekly review of manners and current affairs, as well as eroticism, Men , in which he replied with a tone between the bizarre and the sibylline to the letters of homosexual readers in the column Oscar Wilde's living room : this column was in absolutely the first (and for many years, the only) space aimed at a gay audience in Italian publishing . [2] In 1971 he also obtained the chair of direction of the periodical.
During the eighties he took part in some pornographic photo novels for the Supersex series . [7]
With the birth of the gay movement , which Giò Stajano never joined, and with the social changes of the late 1960s, interest around the scandalous character who had caused discussion in the news decreased.
From 1982 in Italy it became legal for people with gender dysphoria to change their gender by birth, however still after the operation and modification of the external sexual characteristics. Thus, in 1983 , Giò Stajano decided to put into practice what he felt he belonged to, namely being a woman and not a man, and he underwent a gender reassignment surgery in Casablanca ( Morocco ) at the hands of the professor Bourou, taking the name of Maria Gioacchina Stajano Starace Briganti di Panico (always abbreviated to Giò Stajano). [5]
After this intervention, he returned to the limelight and released his first interview with the journalist Francesco D. Caridi of Il Borghese , the weekly for which Giò Stajano had written articles on worldliness signed with the pseudonym "Pantera Rosa", where he targeted above all the Roman aristocracy .
In 1992 , he finally published his autobiography, titled My Scandalous Life . [5]
In recent years, Maria Gioacchina approached the Catholic religion : she declared to the press, with great hype , that she wanted to enter a convent for women, but that she could not do so solely because of her gender change, which was not recognized as legitimate by the Catholic Church . Finally she found acceptance at the nuns of Bethany of the Sacred Heart in Vische , as a lay nun.
Among the last public appearances we recall the interview granted to Paolo Bonolis in The sense of life in 2008 and that to Piero Chiambretti in the Chiambretti Night broadcast in 2009 . [2]
He died in a rest home in Alezio on July 26 , 2011 at the age of 79. [1] [2] She was buried in the family chapel in Gallipoli . [2]
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
