Italian Cinema Today

Rotonda By Sergio Ragone The Pollino Experience portal at pollinoexperience.com  is now online. The territorial communication and promotion project aggregates the accommodation and catering facilities belonging to the "Il Borgo Ospitale" compound in Rotonda.  The portal is divided into four main sections: Food , with direct links to the catering facilities and excellent food and wine offer which enhance the area's products: red aubergine and white bean; Hospitality , the section with direct connections to the Albergo Diffuso Borgo Hotel and its facilities; Wellness , the area to discover the wellness services offered by the Eufrasia SPA; Nature , a section entirely dedicated to direct contact with nature and the environment, for those looking for a fully sustainable and ecological tourist experience. Another section, Stories , is dedicated to the history of the territory and consists of testimonies presented by the protagonists and guests of the structures. Pollino Nation...

Written by Sergio Ragone After more than a year of closures caused by the fight against Covid, Italian catering restarts from Made in Italy and from the excellence of the territory. An example of how this strategy is successful is offered to us by the newly created platform "Officine La Rossa," a hub of Lucanian food and wine excellences, which recently opened in Rotonda, a village of extraordinary beauty and home of the excellent red aubergine DOP.  The creator of the project, which makes use of the collaboration with the Lucanian Coldiretti, is Franco Bruno who presented the basic idea of the Officine as follows: "Our challenge is to welcome the many tourists who come to Rotonda every year in the Pollino Park," explained Bruno. He went on to say, "In this structure, they can taste the best of agri-food products made in Basilicata; an initiative that aims to promote the best synergies between sustainable tourism and food combined with the typical hospitality o...

Poetry that crosses images and becomes cinema - By Sergio Ragone Born from an idea by Sergio Ragone and Omar Gallo, and created by the award-winning director Giuseppe Marco Albano , in collaboration with photographers Mariano Silletti, Federica Danzi, Raffaele Contini, Pierangelo Laterza and Michele Lategana, with the original music by Robert G. Pellegrino , the texts by Sergio Ragone , the voices of Omar Gallo and Andrea Ramolo (for the international version), the video "Terra lucana" is an artistic homage to Basilicata, to its natural beauty and its humanity. "We chose to make this video - Albano, Gallo and Ragone jointly declare - to try to give a new story to Basilicata. The choice of the shots of talented photographers, combined with the poetry of the words and the original music composed precisely for this work, has allowed us to overcome the usual and by now consummate narration of Lucanian places through the use of canonical images of Lucanian land...

Sergio Ragone in Matera "In the ancient heart of Basilicata, there is the future of Italy after Covid 19" - By Sergio Ragone Cinecittà Studios announced today that a new chapter of the infamous Rome film school, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, will open in the ancient stone city of Matera, located in the region of Basilicata. So I thought this would be a good time to share a thoughtful commentary by journalist and author Sergio Ragone whose work we have featured often throughout the years. He writes about the coronavirus pandemic and how it impacted his region and what must be done to continue the progress the Lucani have made in the past decade to build and promote Basilicata. There is an Italy that the narrative of this pandemic has cut out, useless to deny it. It is the Italy of small villages, of provincial cities, far from the red areas and from Milan that has lived, lives and suffers because of the Coronavirus. It is the Italy of small communities, o...

On the second night of the Giornate del Cinema Lucano, an annual film festival held in the southern port city of Maratea, a number of local filmmakers will present their projects. Among them is Giuseppe Marco Albano. I've been following Albano's work for several years, and enjoying all he's done in the southern regions of Basilicata and Puglia. In 2015, he won a David Di Donatello for his short film Thriller , the story of a young boy living in the Pugliese town of Taranto, who dreams to emulate his idol Michael Jackson in the foreground of the city's controversial industrialization. Albano used regional actors from Basilicata and Puglia, including Anna Ferruzzo, to tell the story in the most genuine, authentic way possible. Albano worked closely with his lifelong friends Angelo Troiano and Sergio Ragone. Together, the trio is a force to be reckoned with when promoting the infinite beauty and natural resources of their beloved Basilicata. The short film is a masterp...

" Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.”  -Albert Einstein My great-grandparents shortly after arriving in America Most Italian-Americans in their 40’s are third generation, which means our great-grandparents were part of the 12,000,000 people with hopes and dreams who arrived on Ellis Island during the mass immigration of the early 1900’s. Many of us are lucky enough to have known at least one of those brave souls. In my case, it was my great-grandmother Rosa Maria Nigro who immigrated to western New York from Rionero in Vulture, located in Italy's southern region of Basilicata. She came to America as a teenager in 1906. She married, raised four children (one of whom was killed on D-Day in World War II) and modestly lived the American dream. She passed away in 1980 when I was 8-years-old but she made a lifetime impression on ...