New book release: Once upon a time there was Sergio Leone. A history of lived cinema

THE BOOK. The biography of Piero Negri Scaglione with the emblematic and already clarifying title: "Sergio Leone. Il romanzo di una vita” (Sergio Leone: The novel of a lifetime) 

L’eco di Bergamo

By Giacomo Giossi

July 28, 2025

Sergio Leone. Il romanzo di una vita

(Sergio Leone: The novel of a lifetime)

By Piero Negri Scaglione

 

Country: Italy

Publisher: Sperling & Kupfer

Language: Italian

Pages: 272

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 8820082349

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-8820082345

Available: May 27, 2025

 

He was our John Huston (Ford), but he was also much more: an idea of cinema and society, of culture and politics. An artist who has always been able to translate his cinematographic gaze with a very personal and refined, but always profoundly popular authorial gaze. Sergio Leone was many things and many of them contradicting each other, but above all he was able to be the synthesis of an idea of total cinema that was strictly authorial and strongly identifiable and recognizable as such in each of its fragments. A cinema always devoid of any form of narcissism and self-referentiality, open to an idea of play and adventure within which each spectator could project himself.

Sergio Leone's cinema was a perfect mechanism, built with strength and patience, care and with a certain degree of rough decision-making.

Biography

A beautiful biography by Piero Negri Scaglione with an emblematic and already clarifying title now arrives in bookstores: "Sergio Leone. The novel of a lifetime" (Sperling & Kupfer). Already the author of the beautiful essay "What have you done in all these years. Sergio Leone and the adventure of "Once Upon a Time in America"» in which he gave substance to an investigation into the making of the Roman director's international masterpiece, with all the long travails and production complexities that had marked its genesis, now Blacks Scaglione offers readers an organic portrait of Sergio Leone from the beginning.

A story as enjoyable as one of his films, which cannot fail to see Ennio Morricone as a co-star, Leone's accomplice and friend since school and then a fundamental collaborator with some of the most beautiful soundtracks in the history of cinema. A music that not only illuminated Leone's films, but partly rewrote them, redefining the meaning of a work that is still current and lively today thanks also to that extraordinary musical trait. Piero Blacks Scaglione's book is an unmissable opportunity to grasp not only the greatness of a master of Italian cinema, but what Italian cinema was in its complexity from neorealism to Italian comedy to spaghetti westerns that imposed themselves on audiences all over the world.

More than a director, warns Negri Scaglione, a real rock artist, loved and recognized by real die-hard fans in every part of the world, a real idolatry was unleashed around his figure so strongly recognizable in that thick white beard that immediately became the identity of an idea of the world and cinema.