We know well the Hannibal's producers never gave Florentines a great importance,
but renaming our Major Domenici in "Dominici" is really too
much!!! Since the 4th of May no one in Florence is talking of anything else. The Americans are shooting a film. In the beginning, great enthusiasm. Adoring crowds for the actors/stars, the doors of the Palazzo Vecchio wide open for the event, all the city in raptures. Then ..... on the Ponte Vecchio they were to shoot the scene where Chief Constable Pazzi (Giannini) was buying a bracelet. There was pandemonium. In order to placate the shopkeepers who were in revolt De Laurentiis himself intervened. The incautious production team had organised unlicensed vendors on the bridge, who were not well accepted by the Florentines, particularly by the shopkeepers in the historic centre. Again from the beginning. The film is shot with an empty bridge and contented shopkeepers.
In the meantime, in Palazzo Vecchio the political powers were undergoing
a confrontation with some Council members, convinced opposers of the permission
to give Florence into the hands of these Americans. Shooting takes place in the stateroom "dei Cinquecento" and in Piazza Signoria everyone is hurrying to carry out this important shot. Inside the stateroom, however, there is not enough light. Why ? Because the difficult legal bureaucracy regarding security had, for many years, forbidden the cleaning of the windows. Nothing feared, Hannibal will fix it. So, thanks to the film production team, from today the stateroom "dei Cinquecento" has clean windows.
Then even from Rome comes disappointing news.
It is difficult to understand how the centre of Florence with its narrow
little medieval streets, which all year are crossed over by tourists coming
from all over the world, could support the huge lorries necessary for
the shooting of this film already well known to us before it opens in
the cinemas. |
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