Ricordo di Samarcanda, Circa 2003

Tonino Guerra  

Internationally renowned poet, writer and screenwriter, he was born on March 16, 1920 in Santarcangelo di Romagna, where he died on March 21, 2012. Lived for thirty years in Rome, with long stops in Russia, which became his second homeland, at the end of the 1980s he moved to Pennabilli, an ancient Malatesta city of Montefeltro, where he used to spend long summer periods, and in which he is buried. Son of peasant parents (he will teach his illiterate mother to write), during the Second World War he was deported to Germany and locked up in an internment camp where he began to compose the first verses in the Romagna language. 

Immediately after the war, he published his first collection of poems in dialect, I scarabócc. This is followed by others, including I Bu (1972), a milestone in his literary work. As a prose writer he made his debut in 1952 with the short story La storia di Fortunato, published in the Einaudi I Gettoni series directed by Elio Vittorini. 

He publishes fifty books including short stories and poems, winning numerous prizes: Pirandello, Pasolini, Gozzano, Nonino, Carducci and Comisso. From the early 1950s he devoted himself to screenplay and wrote for the greatest directors of the time, including Vittorio De Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, the Taviani brothers, Elio Petri, Mario Monicelli, Francesco Rosi, Theo Anghelopulos and Andrej Tarkovsky. Over 120 films he has written, from Antonioni's L'Avventura to Fellini's Amarcord, winner of the Academy Award. 

In his long career he has collected four David di Donatello, three Oscar nominations, the European Cinema Oscar for Best Screenwriter and a Palme d'Or at Cannes. A multidisciplinary artist, like the great humanists of the fifteenth century, he expressed the themes of his poetry in the most diverse artistic forms, as can be seen from the collection of his works on display at the permanent museum Nel mondo di Tonino Guerra in Santarcangelo di Romagna.