by Sara D’Ascenzo
Marina Cicogna died in her home in Rome: “They put labels on me, but my life and my decisions speak for me.”
She lived as she wanted and died as she chose, in the wooden bed that belonged to her mother Annamaria, with carved lion paws, sent from the house in Venice to the house at Via di Porta Pinciana 34 in Rome. Watches over a sleep that has become tormented and restless in recent weeks, an inlaid painting with eight traditional scenes Buddhist: “Yes, very important,” he liked to say. But most of all, she died with her lifelong companion Benedetta at her side, constantly watching over her and breathing her last. Marina Cicogna Mozzoni, 89 years old and a dream life told in the film “Marina Cicogna. La vita e tutto il resto” by Andrea Bettinetti in 2021 and in the book “Ancora Spero” (Marsilio, 2023) she died on November 4, 2023 in his house near Via Veneto, just around the corner from Largo Federico Fellini, in the toponymy at the end the summary of his existence dedicated to the la dolce vita and the cinema.
The career
Born on May 29, 1934, the son of the Count Cesare Cicogna Mozzoni and Countess Annamaria Volpi of MisurataCountess Marina Cicogna, granddaughter of the Venetian Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, who invented the Venice Film Festival in 1932, breathed cinema since she slipped into one of the film festivals as a little girl on the Lido Showrooms to see how many As many films as possible. A friend of a beautiful world that finally disappears with her, from Luchino Visconti to Gianni Agnelli, from Maria Callas to Aristotle Onassis, Cicogna loved men and women, had a flirtation with Alain Delon and a long history with the Brazilian actress Florinda Bolkan, who she met as a little girl at a party at Elsa Martinelli’s house and sent her to the cinema, where – it was the end of the 60s – she had begun to take her steps, becoming the first woman in Europe and perhaps in the world as well Producer. His signature on important films of Italian cinema such as “Teorema” by Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Metti, una sera a cena” by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” which won her an Oscar in 1971, which she refused to pick up in Los Angeles because of her insurmountable fear of flying. Proud opponent of conventions but also of the movements, she lived her sexuality without ever allowing herself to be pigeonholed.
The labels
«People often put labels on me – he said in his autobiography -. But my life and my decisions speak for me. I lived with Florinda for twenty years, I have lived with Benedetta for almost forty years. Yet I never loved her Conspicuous demonstrations their sexuality. I consider parades and the general display of one’s own orientation to be something superfluous.” Beloved dogs, Minnie and Gipsy, two Pomeranians, came from Korea and Russia, until the end they surrounded them with their raids. When she could, she looked out the window of her room, which she didn’t want to leave to go to a hospital bed: “Do you see him running free?” – he told me a few days before his death –. There is nothing better than the freedom you have with this view from San Pietro to Parioli. The beauty of his Rome, the light that he never wanted to give up.
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November 4, 2023 (modified November 4, 2023 | 1:54 p.m.)
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