Books about Lyda Borelli

Le dive italiane del cinema muto (2019)

Author: Cristina Jandelli
Publisher: Cue Press, 2019,
Pages: 282
EAN: 9788855100106
Description
Italian cinema of the 1910s, seen through its women, tells the material history of a profession still seeking cultural legitimacy but already driven by high artistic ambition: around the towering example of Eleonora Duse move divas such as Francesca Bertini, Lyda Borelli, Pina Menichelli, Diana Karenne and Daisy Sylvan, who in a brief season charted unexplored paths towards self-affirmation.
Cristina Jandelli
Associate professor in the SAGAS department (History, Archaeology, Geography, Art, Performing Arts) at the University of Florence, where she teaches Film History and Forms of Modern and Contemporary Cinema. Her publications include I ruoli nel teatro italiano fra Otto e Novecento (Le Lettere 2002, CUE Press 2016), La scena pensante. Cesare Zavattini fra teatro e cinema (Bulzoni, 2002), Le dive italiane del cinema muto (L’Epos 2006), Breve storia del divismo cinematografico (Marsilio 2007), I protagonisti. La recitazione nel film contemporaneo (Marsilio 2013) and L’attore in primo piano. Nascita della recitazione cinematografica (Marsilio 2016).

Dive! Lyda Borelli, Francesca Bertini (2018)

Italian and English edition. With 4 DVDs
Series: Il cinema ritrovato
Translator: Pollard T. A.
Publisher: Cineteca di Bologna, 2018,
Pages: 87
EAN: 9788899196578
ISBN: 8899196575
Description
Four masterpieces of Italian silent cinema, to discover the allure of the diva-film. Four films inhabited by formidable women and actresses who, a century ago, became the undisputed protagonists of the culture of the image. Ma l’amor mio non muore!, Lyda Borelli’s first film and the origin of the diva-film: a plunge into the imagery, culture and Liberty-style fashion of the day. Sangue bleu, in which Francesca Bertini reaches diva status in a sumptuous conjugal and maternal melodrama. Assunta Spina, “the” Bertini film, which she also directed: her greatest success, her most passionate role, and the founding work of cinematic realism. Borelli again, in the film that marks her apotheosis and the high point of Italian silent cinema: Rapsodia satanica, an erotic, fantastical drama, unique for the beauty of its colour tinting and for the score composed by Pietro Mascagni. With essays by Maria Lewinsky, Ivo Blom, Michele Canosa, Gerardo Guccini, Giovanni Lasi, Eric de Kuyper, Timothy Brock and Gian Luca Farinelli.

Il Teatro di Lyda Borelli (2017)

Edited by: Maria Ida Biggi and Marianna Zannoni
Publisher: Fratelli Alinari, Florence 2017,
Pages: 212
ISBN-10: 8895849272
ISBN-13: 978-8895849270
Description
This volume is the first monograph devoted to the stage career of actress Lyda Borelli, from her earliest years to her retirement from the stage in 1918. The fruit of lengthy research, the book allows readers to rediscover, through contributions by Maria Ida Biggi, Marianna Zannoni and Maria Dolores Cassano, the brilliant theatrical career of this fascinating performer, one of the first women in Italy to head her own company, loved and celebrated by audiences and press alike well before her name became inseparably linked to the image of a silent-film diva that has come down through history. Lyda Borelli perfectly embodies the modernity of the turn of the century: her image as an emancipated woman, shaped in part by the character of the female roles she brought to the stage, helped build her icon as a modern diva. A frequent subject of the society columns of the periodicals and newspapers of her day, Borelli stood out for the refinement of her toilettes and came to embody an incipient modernity that made her a muse for contemporary Futurist thought. Letters, newspaper articles, first-hand accounts and numerous unpublished documents allow the authors to examine Lyda Borelli’s stage career in relation to the cultural and social context of her time, in an exclusive, previously unpublished account.

Lyda Borelli. Ma l’amor mio non muore (2013)

Italian and English edition! DVD with book (multilingual)
Director: Mario Caserini
Edited by: M. Lewinsky
Publisher: Cineteca di Bologna, 2013,
Series: Cinemalibero
Pages: 22
ISBN-10: 8895862732
ISBN-13: 978-8895862736
Description
The origins of the Italian diva-film: presented here in its restored 2013 version, the first film starring Lyda Borelli, a hundred years on. A star who moved from the stage to the screen, Borelli would become the most expressive and elegant of divas, the most iconic and international, an image aglow with decadent allure somewhere between D’Annunzio, Oscar Wilde and the Pre-Raphaelites. Her debut film is a melodrama of love, deceit and death, a deep plunge into the imagery, culture and customs of its time.

La donna di rugiada (2012)

Author: Gianrocco Guerriero
Publisher: Telemaco Edizioni, 2012,
Pages: 148
ISBN-10: 889829400X
ISBN-13: 9788898294008
Description
The true protagonists of “La donna di rugiada” (“The woman of dew”) are a place and an encounter. The place is the magic-steeped Castello di Monteserico, a Frederician manor house that can still be visited in the territory of Genzano di Lucania. The encounter, instead, is one imagined by the author between Lyda Borelli, the beautiful diva of Italian silent cinema and wife of Count Vittorio Cini, and Carmela, a young local girl who embodies the candour, the innocence, the strength and the intelligence of the women of Lucania: never out of line, quiet and discreet, and yet able to make her presence felt in decisive ways.
In this novel the language is crafted with such care that it transcends its essential semantic dimension, rising into emotion and sound. The two women are, after all, too different to fully share the same language. Lyda and Carmela are like two lines destined to diverge after having crossed. And yet that point of meeting carries the sense of a deep fusion, with a taste of the infinite. Here, eros is pure primal sensibility, becoming shared understanding the moment the two souls recognise themselves as shaped from the same sensibility: a femininity intensified to its highest power. “That is why, when the voice drops, the dialogue becomes more intimate.” A dialogue that engages the senses at their source and turns into empathy, making palpable both the bodily nature of the soul and the spirituality of the body.

Lyda Borelli (1993)

Author: José Pantieri
Publisher: M.I.C.S., 1993,
Pages: 184
ITICCURAV: 0244685
Description
A monograph on Lyda Borelli by José Pantieri, Mario Verdone (1917-2009) and Vittorio Martinelli (1926-2008), published by the Museo Internazionale del Cinema e dello Spettacolo.

Emilio Sommariva (1984)

Catalogue published for the retrospective exhibition at the Museo Civico di Lodi
Edited by: Nicolas Monti and Mario Quadraroli
Publisher: Banca Popolare di Lodi, 2012,
Pages: 74
Description
The Fondo Emilio Sommariva, acquired in 1979 by the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense from the photographer’s heirs, brings together the entire archive of his photographic studio and its related paperwork, spanning 1904 to 1973.
It comprises 5,405 photographic prints (including 2,561 prints purchased by the Ministry in 2004 from the son of one of Sommariva’s assistants) and around 50,000 negatives, mostly on glass plates, along with inventory books and alphabetical indexes making up ten manuscript volumes in all, of fundamental importance for dating the photographic material.
The subjects that dominate the collection are portraits, views and reproductions of works of art.
The sitters range from the royal family to divas such as Lyda Borelli, Irma Gramatica and Maria Melato, from Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore to composers Puccini, Zandonai, Respighi, Pizzetti and others, from medical pioneers Mangiagalli and Perussia to the architect Luca Beltrami, and from Mata Hari to Filippo Turati, from Umberto Boccioni to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti to Gaetano Previati, among many others.