The dreams of Carlo Simi, the man who built spaghetti westerns

 la Republica

by Giampaolo Simi

November 30, 2025

The dreams of Carlo Simi, the man who built spaghetti westerns

“He gave the Wild West many fundamental things: verisimilitude, attention to detail and then misery, dust, dirt, sweat...” 

The first few times I happened to frequent Rome and the office of some film production, every now and then I would hear him ask: “Are you from Viareggio? Relative of Carlo Simi?” I, with sincere candor, have always answered no. I swear, however, that I was tempted. Boasting a kinship with someone who Quentin Tarantino and Clint Eastwood have called a kind of genius would have earned me some points. 

Now the story of this genius is reconstructed in a book edited by his daughter Giuditta and Andrea B. Nardi. It is entitled The Designer of Dreams and is published by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and Sabinae editions.

His father wanted him to be an engineer

We are not relatives, also because Carlo Simi was born in Viareggio by chance. His father, an engineer specializing in maritime works, found himself working in the Versilia city in the mid-twenties and stayed there for a few years with his wife Antonietta Annibali.

But chance will play an important role in the story of Simi, the boy whose father wanted to be an engineer and eventually chose to become an architect. To become a myth in cinema, apparently, he did not think about it. But we are at the end of the fifties, those of Via Veneto and Hollywood on the Tiber. And so his architect son, more out of curiosity than anything else, tries to be an assistant for Mario Chiari, the prince set designer of Italian cinema. He met De Laurentiis and every now and then he was called upon to make his contribution to ununforgettable films such as Maciste against the Vampire and parodies of American cinema with Vianello, Tognazzi, Totò and Walter Chiari.

The meeting with Sergio Leone

You can smile at certain titles, but in the luxuriant Italian architecture of cinema there is room for everything, from the ramshackle sneer to the mythological fantasy with elephants and two thousand extras. It is possible then that at a certain point “the two Sergios” of Italian cinema (as Quentin Tarantino calls them), namely Corbucci and Leone, get it into their heads, practically in the same year, that Italians can also make western films (perhaps with American pseudonyms). One evening Simi finds himself in front of the sketches of the sets of one of these films. Working title: The Magnificent Foreigner. “But do you really think of making a film with this stuff?” he says and regrets it a moment after realizing that Leone himself has heard.

Entry into the world of cinema

Leone is just starting out, but he has a reputation for being tough, rigorous and authoritarian. He puts the young architect to the test with the classic "what would you do instead?". Two days later Leone enters the office of producer Arrigo Colombo and announces that his set designer will be Carlo Simi, period. Colombo knows well that with that young director with clear ideas it is useless to argue. He obtains as a quid pro quo that Simi also takes care of another western in the works, much richer, and which actually represented the flagship investment in the nascent Italian western genre. Guns do not discuss today is nowhere to be found. On Leone's film, judged too strange, no one would have bet, it must be said, not even a handful of dollars, but the story of the gunslinger with the poncho played by Clint Eastwood will become the third highest grossing ever in Italian cinema. And not only that: together with other westerns by Sergio Corbucci (the Django paid homage by Tarantino decades later) he will found the "spaghetti western" genre which, thanks to Leone, Morricone and Carlo Simi, will not be a provincial replica of American productions, but will succeed in the unthinkable: to make the classic American western appear outdated, starched and cheap.

His Far West

Yes, because Carlo Simi has given Sergio Leone's Far West many fundamental things: the verisimilitude obtained from the in-depth study of vintage photos, the attention to detail essential for long shots and then the misery, the dust, the dirt, the sweat, the stains, the bristly beards, the torn clothes. All this, in short, that in Leone's poetics serves to make a completely invented story realistic, and unforgettable. Who knows if those wooden facades, those saloons, that wind and that sand are not also the distant childhood memories of a Viareggio that, in the twenties of the twentieth century, was all in all still a small, collected agglomeration of bizarre buildings in front of the great frontier of the sea.