Castel Sant'Angelo - Museo Nazionale · Borgo
Documents, costumes, screenplays and archive material trace Visconti's career, 120 years after his birth, with a focus on Il Gattopardo.
The show opens on stills from Jean Renoir's Tosca, filmed here at Castel Sant'Angelo. Renoir left Italy when the war broke out, and among his assistants was Luchino Visconti, in his first film job. He came back in 1954 to shoot the execution that ends Senso.
From there you are inside the making of Il Gattopardo, the 1963 film of Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel. Set photographs, posters, original costumes, screenplays and sketches follow each trade behind it: screenwriters, set designer, decorator, costume designer, tailoring houses, composer. Curator Caterina d'Amico stresses that it was all done by hand, scripts written out and sets planned with photos and sticky tape. The castle adds Garibaldi relics from its own collection, from the years of the Expedition of the Thousand.
D'Amico calls the show small and affectionate, so fold it into a castle visit. It comes with the €18 castle ticket (€2 for EU citizens aged 18 to 25), Tuesday to Sunday, 9:00 to 19:30, until 29 November.
The Tosca stills
Look for the set photographs from Renoir's Tosca at the start of the route, shot in this castle on the film where Visconti first worked as an assistant.
You want a full Visconti retrospective: the curator calls it a small show built around Il Gattopardo.