The actor's thought is traduced in pills, building a number of topical opinions subdivided in paragraphs. "Laughing is the most poetical thing. Laughing has happiness and beauty: it has always been the thing that people love most. Laughing is something that cannot be explained..."

A part of the book is dedicated to the biography and in this section you will read that Benigni claims to remember next to nothing about his childhood. Born in Misericordia in 1952, Roberto the child's first memory is the rain, that of the day they moved from Misericordia to Vergaio. He was little more than four years old when the Benigni family experienced the drama of immigration, a difficult event shared by many other Italian farmer families, who in the fifties found themselves having to pay for the fragility of a sector that was overtaken by the development of industry in the great cities. "We slept in a single bed, because we were one of those families ridden with epic hunger. All our property consisted of three or four ducklings..."

It was a real exodus of the rural population towards the industrial centres beginning immediately after the war, and it made an impression in Roberto Benigni's memory. And he himself admits that the farmer world has always become part of his films, as a baggage of his past and of a world that risks disappearing more and more. Starting on the stage and for many years also at the cinema Benigni tried to portray characters of the Tuscan countryside, with the habits and costumes that are closest to him reproducing a part of Italy which is unknown to many. "Tuscan is a newer, less heard vernacular. It was little used before, perhaps because it was the language of the masters and you only laugh with the servants ".
 
Then there is the passage to "militant" cinema, child of the seventies, with the ridiculing of the most classic stereotypes. Roberto Benigni's other artistic experiences expresses themselves in the robes of the actor as directed by other Italian directors: Giuseppe Bertolucci, Federico Fellini, Marco Ferreri, Renzo Arbore or the American experience of "Daunbailò" with Jim Jarmush and Tom Waits. But also his director's experience with "Tu mi turbi", "Il piccolo diavolo", "Johnny Stecchino", until the well-deserved International recognition for "La vita è bella". Each of these films has a chapter of the book dedicated to it, not forgetting the nostalgia and the memory of Massimo Troisi in "Non ci resta che piangere".

At the beginning and the end of "Roberto Benigni" there are some curiosities on the birth of "Pinocchio", on this epithet friends, journalists and colleagues had stuck on him and which, by natural evolution, had to be transformed into image. "It's been twenty years, perhaps since I was born, that I've been wanting my nose to grow. Finally while I was in bed and I was thinking, I felt myself being taken by the hand: it was Pinocchio". Every time I finished a film I said: "Oh! And now I'm making Pinocchio!".

Roberto Benigni, 123 pages
Edited by: Cristina Borsatti
Published by: Il Castoro Cinema
Price: Euro 9,90

March.2002