by Diego Zandel – 04/12/2020

I don't remember when I personally met Franco Giraldi, the director who passed away last December 2nd in Trieste from Covid, at the age of 89. It was certainly in the 1980s, when he was the partner of the writer Elisabetta Rasy, who had introduced me as a contributor to the afternoon edition of the Roman newspaper Paese Sera , for which I believe she was a correspondent and for whose morning edition I already contributed. But I became friends with him many years later, in the early 2000s, at a screening of the 1974 film The Red Rose at the Casa del Cinema in Rome , which had been broadcast on television at the time and which Giraldi adapted from the novel of the same name by the Istrian writer Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini. With him, in the audience were two other outstanding Triestine men, Tullio Kezich and Callisto Cosulich, with whom, along with Giraldi, they later shared a poignant saraband of memories of when Kezich was a RAI television producer and of the beautiful things that were done for television back then. Trieste, Venezia Giulia, Triestine literature, and Istria formed the backdrop to my memories. Callisto Cosulich, in fact, came from a famous family of shipowners, but he had immediately chosen cinema, so much so that he abandoned his studies in naval engineering at the University of Genoa and, in 1947, founded, with Tullio Kezich himself, the film section of the famous Trieste Culture and Arts Club. In short, I felt at home, and afterward, after saying goodbye, I went downstairs to join them. Perhaps that was when Franco and I recognized each other again. We had many things in common. First and foremost, the fact that we were both frontiersmen, belonging to ethnically mixed families. Franco Giraldi was born in 1931 in Comeno (Komen, now in Slovenia) to a Slovenian mother and an Italian father from Istria, a condition he had portrayed well in the 1996 film, starring Raul Bova in the title role, La frontiera (The Frontier) , based on the novel of the same name by Rijeka writer Franco Vegliani (a film, incidentally, I had discussed with the late Rijeka poet Valentino Zeichen, who had greatly enjoyed the film). This film also concluded a trilogy of films based on the works of writers from the Julian region, given that between La rosa rossa and La frontiera (The Frontier) there had also been, in 1977, Un anno di scuola (A Year of School ), based on the story of the same name by Giani Stuparich.

But my real acquaintance with him began after he married Palmira, a cardiologist from Fiano Romano, whom I and my first wife, Anna, who passed away in 2012, went to visit in Giraldi's beautiful house (in the same building where the man he considered his master, Giuseppe De Santis, lived), and then went to lunch at the home of the writer and poet Mario Quattrucci, who had been mayor of Fiano. I remember that, on that occasion, we talked a lot about our lost lands. A feeling that with age grows again (I see it with me, as I get older) and that led Franco Giraldi to return there forever. In 2008 I invited him to Trieste, to participate in the event "Trieste and psychoanalysis" organized in the Julian capital by Progetto Italia of Telecom. A magnificent moment, in which I, sitting in a small room of the Grand Hotel Duchi d'Aosta, interviewed Franco Giraldi (and others), with our voices that the loudspeakers spread across Piazza dell'Unità d'Italia, while in this one, above, on cables stretched between the buildings, some acrobats put on a show with an exciting series of numbers.

We still saw each other, but after the death of his wife Palmira, in 2009, whom he had married not many years before, he disappeared. I learned that he had gone to live in Gradisca d'Isonzo. I tried to get more news from friends in Trieste, to get him to come to Rome where, at the Community of Julian Refugees, we planned to present, with the ANVGD, his three Julian films.

Now the bad news. With him goes one of the most representative frontier directors, even if he will not be remembered by most for the films we have mentioned, but for other more successful titles: for his Italian westerns (he began his career as Sergio Leone's assistant, to then take that path himself, films that, among other things, as he recalled, gave him the highest earnings) and then other films, belonging to the Italian comedy genre, such as The big doll – which earned Ugo Tognazzi the Nastro d'argento as best actor. In 1971 Giraldi directed Monica Vitti in The super witness and the following year in Orders are orders in which Gigi Proietti also plays. Lhis expressive maturity will culminate with the film The green jacket of 1979, based on the story of the same name by Mario Soldati, of whom he was a close friend (and whose wife Jucci Kellermann was from Fiume), considered his best work. Much of his commitment in the following years was absorbed by television, for which he also created the series Lawyer Porta, with Gigi Proietti and the one dedicated to Pepe Carvalho, the detective protagonist of Manuel Vasquez Montalban's novels.