L’ADIGE
By Claudio Beccalossi
September 18, 2026
(Claudio Beccalossi) The 9th anniversary of the death of Gastone Moschin (San Giovanni Lupatoto, Verona, 8 June 1929 - Santa Maria di Terni Hospital, 4 September 2017) has not moved any particular official re-enactments, not even where he came into the world, apart from those of online communities and specific social platforms relating to titles at the top of his copious filmography.
The versatile film actor has gone through various genres and interpretations, from spaghetti-westerns to detectives, from drama to comedy, with vast lunges in Italian comedy and in theater, television and Rai radio prose, alternating excellently light, tragedy, classics and contemporary, occasionally dubbing. With encroachment even on the photo-novel, "Il re si divertie (Rigoletto)", ("I romanzi di Sogno", no. 225, 1 April 1966).
He died in intensive care due to the worsening of chronic heart disease, his funeral was celebrated on 6 September 2017 in the sanctuary of the Madonna del Ponte in Narni Scalo (Terni), with subsequent cremation in Viterbo.
THE TRILOGY OF “MY FRIENDS”
Moschin was the unforgettable member of the ramshackle team of goliardic gypsies in the trilogy of "Amici miei" (the first film in 1975, directed by Mario Monicelli, the second in 1982, "Amici miei – Atto II°" again directed by Monicelli and the third in 1985 "Amici miei – Atto III°" signed by Nanni Loi). With him in the role of the bachelor, romantic and dreamer, architect Rambaldo Melandri, a key character together with Count Raffaello Mascetti, the journalist Giorgio Perozzi, Professor Alfeo Sassaroli and the bartender Guido Necchi (played respectively by Ugo Tognazzi, Philippe Noiret, Adolfo Celi and, in the first film, by Duilio Del Prete and, in the other two, by Renzo Montagnani).
Incisive (among many others) were the parts of the fascist leader Carmine Passante in "The Roaring Twenties", directed by Luigi Zampa (1962); of Adolf, the German in "Seven Golden Men", directed by Mario Vicario (1965); of the accountant Osvaldo Bisigato in "Signore & signori", directed by Pietro Germi (1966); of Mariotti, police delegate in "Ninì Tirabusciò, the woman who invented the move", directed by Marcello Fondato (1970); by Ugo Piazza in "Milano calibro 9", directed by Fernando Di Leo (1972);
of Don Camillo in "Don Camillo e i giovani d'oggi", directed by Mario Camerini (1972); of the Hon. Filippo Turati in "Il delitto Matteotti", directed by Florestano Vancini (1973); by Edmondo Castorini in "Paolo il caldo", directed by Marco Vicario (1973); of Don Fanucci in "The Godfather Part II", directed by Francis Ford Coppola (1974); of Dr. Trigona in "A Thorn in the Heart", directed by Alberto Lattuada (1986); by Carlo Tofani Geko as an old man in the uncomfortable "Porzûs", directed by Renzo Martinelli (1997).
Gastone's parents were Giuseppe and Amalia Baschera who, with their 7-year-old son, moved to Milan for their father's work. The family returned to San Giovanni Lupatoto during the Second World War and then returned to the Milanese capital where the young man graduated as a surveyor and worked in a bank.
THE BEGINNINGS
His ambition to act diverted him to Rome, to attend the Academy of Dramatic Art from which he graduated in 1955. In the same year, according to the accredited filmography, he was part of the cast of "La rivale", directed by Anton Giulio Majano (Chieti, 5 July 1912 - Marino, Rome, 12 August 1994), a sacred monster of screenplays, director of cinema and television, radio and television prose Rai, one of the great makers of Italian television dramas in their period of maximum splendor (in the twenty years Sixties and Seventies of the last century, circumscribed above all, according to experts in the field, from 1967 to 1979).
Moschin made his television debut in 1956 in "L'istante sotto l'orologio" by Gastone Tanzi, directed by Edmo Fenoglio (Turin, 4 June 1928 – Turin, 7 September 1996), while in the theatre he made his debut in 1955 in "I mariti" by playwright Achille Torelli, directed by Mario Ferrero (Florence, 25 May 1922 – Vicchio, Florence, 9 September 2012), with the Teatro Stabile di Genova which saw on stage, in addition to him, Valeria Valeri, Enrico Maria Salerno, Warner Bentivegna, Mercedes Brignone, Enrica Corti.
Gastone married, in 1960, fellow actress and voice actress Marzia Ubaldi (Milan, 2 June 1938 - Narni, Terni, 21 October 2023). The funeral of the latter was also officiated in the sanctuary of the Madonna del Ponte, in Narni Scalo. The couple had their daughter Emanuela in 1963 who followed, for a certain period of time, the interpretative footsteps of her parents who separated when she was 7 years old.
Later, the Melandri of "Amici miei" married the French Christiane Lhuillier and moved to live, since 1990, in Capitone, a hamlet of Narni, where his second wife, a homeopathic doctor, opened a horse riding school, the first hippotherapy center in Umbria. Although he had slowed down his artistic activity due to health problems and after getting closer to his first wife, he set up with her and his daughter Emanuela, in Terni, the acting school "MUMOS" (name derived from the initials of Marzia Ubaldi Moschin), in which the three were teachers, until the spring of 2013.
Today Emanuela, having put her past as an actress and acting teacher in the drawer of memories, manages a professional dog kennel in Narni (Albornoz di Monte Arnata Kennel) recognized by ENCI / FCI, specialized in the selection of breeds such as the chihuahua, the Pomeranian fox and the zwergschnauzer (dwarf schnauzer).
THE ARRIVAL OF HIS DAUGHTER EMMANUELA
He came to San Giovanni Lupatoto, in November 2017, on the occasion of a revival wanted by the municipal administration and cineforum in memory of the famous lupatotino by birth, who died a few months earlier. Emanuela Moschin, in fact, attended the screening, in the "Astra" cinema theater, of the evergreen film "Amici miei" and recalled the summers as a child, when, during the school holidays, she spent months away from Rome, at the home of grandfather Bepo and grandmother Amalia. And, after the latter's death, he spoke of returning with his father to the town, to visit the
Grandparents' graves in the cemetery.
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