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Moreschi and Fellini:
Delineating the Vernacular Castrato in Post-Unification Italy 1
M A RT HA F EL D M AN ,
University of Chicago
WITH
M A RT I N A P I P E R N O 2
Questions about how to excavate a voice will preoccupy anyone who studies castrato singers, only
the last of whom, Alessandro Moreschi, made recordings and those only in the earliest phase of
shellac technology. Such questions have driven my recent attempts to assemble vocal genealogies
reaching back from Moreschi to his vocal predecessors and forwards to his vocal descendants. But
those attempts did not prepare me to discover that Moreschi had a nuclear family, much less to
be able to follow a branch of it over the course of more than a century through a whole panoply
of singers, dancers, actors, directors, and cinema people, reaching up to the present.
Moreschi’s immediate family leads in the present generation to his great-granddaughter Maria
Rita (Rita) Fellini (born 1945)—whose grandfather was the tenor Giulio Moreschi; whose
grandmother Vittoria Cevasco was an opera singer; whose mother Alessandra Moreschi did some
1. All rights are reserved by Martha Feldman and Martina Piperno, including rights to literary, staged, cinematic,
operatic, scenographic, and graphic/visual adaptation, without exception.
2. Profound thanks to Maria Rita Fellini and Fabio Panconesi for volunteering oral histories of the Moreschi-Fellini
families for this essay and for their extreme generosity with materials. Feldman also wishes to convey sincere thanks
to Luciano Luciani, some of whose archival treasures will figure in a chapter on castrato voices in her forthcoming
book e Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds, based on the Ernst Bloch Lectures, University of California at
Berkeley, Department of Music (University of California Press); to Patricia Barber, Emily Bauman, Rebecca Bauman,
Françoise Meltzer, and Johanna Reiss for invaluable readings of versions of this material in draft form; to Rebecca
Bauman, Hilary Poriss, and Courtney Quaintance for support on site and collection visits in Rome; to e
University of Chicago, Division of the Humanities, e John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the
American Council of Learned Societies for generous research support; to Mark Yeary for preparing the genealogy in
Fig. 1 and the musical examples; and to Martha Sprigge and Peter Smucker for research assistance at the University
of Chicago.
Most of the archival work discussed in this essay was carried out in Rome by Martina Piperno, a scholar of
Italian literature, acting upon requests and advice from Feldman. Funding for her assistance was provided by the
University of Chicago, Division of the Humanities. Principal sites of primary research have included: in Rome the
Archivio Diocesano del Vicariato; the office of Anagrafe of the Comune di Roma, the Archivio Storico Capitolino,
the Cimiteri Capitolini, the Archivio Notarile Distrettuale, and various church archives; and in Montecompatri the
office of Anagrafe of the Comune di Montecompatri and the Cimitero di Montecompatri. Piperno wishes to thank
Roberto Parisi, who offered generous information from his early Italian film collection in Viterbo, as well as the
musicologist Giancarlo Rostirolla and the notary Giuseppe Fuà and his assistant.
Piperno’s work is principally reflected in the section “e son, the wife, the thief, and her lover” and parts of
“Cinema Venezia.”
voiceXchange Vol. 5, No. 1 (Fall 2011): 1–34.
© 2011 by Martha Feldman and Martina Piperno. All rights reserved.
ISSN: 2153-0203
2 | voiceXchange
singing and film dubbing; whose father Riccardo Fellini was a tenor and documentary filmmaker;
whose uncle was the movie director Federico Fellini; whose aunt was the actress Giulietta Masina;
whose godfather was the actor and sometime singer Alberto Sordi; and whose late brother Julio
Salvador Solinas Moreschi (1961-2010) spent his adult life as a busy actor, director, singer, and
dancer and part of his childhood as a chorister in the Schola Cantorum, the same papal training
choir in which his great-grandfather Alessandro Moreschi was schooled before becoming a star in
the Sistine Chapel Choir in 1883 (selective genealogy in Fig. 1).3 As we will see, interweavings of
artistic activities through the Moreschi and Fellini families are not coincidental.
© Martha Feldman
and Martina Piperno
Antonia
Carrari
Francesco Moreschi
(1778–?)
(hypothetical sibling
of Anna Salvatori)
Rosa
Pitolli
Luigi Moreschi
(1812–1897)
Celestina Felici
(d. 1930)
Ida Barbiani
(1896–1984)
Giulietta Masina
(1921–1994)
Federico Fellini
(1920–1993)
Agostino Moreschi
(1845–1895)
Domenico
Salvatori
(1855–1909)
Alessandro Nilo
Angelo Moreschi
(1858–1922)
Urbano Fellini
Amerigo [Americo] Vittoria Cevasco
(1894–1956) Moreschi (1882–1925) (d. 1985)
Riccardo Fellini
(1921–1991)
Fabio Panconesi
(1951–)
Alessandra Moreschi
(1926–1994)
Maria Rita Fellini
(1945–)
* Julio Salvador Solinas Moreschi had one biological son, Alessandro, whose
mother is named Manuela, according to Fabio Panconesi. They never married.
Julio also helped raise a boy named Rodolfo, now about twelve and the son of a
previous partner (possibly Dorothea Klein). On his websites he described both
Rodolfo and Alessandro as his children.
Giuseppe Pitolli
Anna Salvatori
Pietro Rinaldi
(1844–1924)
Giulia Ferrucci
Guendalina Rinaldi
(ca. 1873–1957)
Giulio Moreschi
(1903/4–1955)
[adopted by Alessandro]
“Chicco” Salvatore
Solinas (?)
Francesco Saverio
Mancini (born after ca. 1905,
died after 1957)
Maria Maddalena
Fellini (1929–2004)
Manuela ?
Julio Salvador
Solinas Moreschi
(1961–2010)
? Mancini
Giorgio Fabbri
Francesca
Fabbri Fellini
(1965–)
Alessandro
Solinas* (2006–)
FIGURE 1. Selective genealogy of the Moreschi and Fellini families.
Computer version of chart created by Mark Yeary.
3. Particular sources of names and dates assembled here are noted below. A genealogy of the Moreschi family in
Montecompatri has been compiled by an employee at the Comune di Montecompatri, but since the conduit through
which Feldman received it in July 2011 is apparently not legitimate and we do not know the identity of its maker, we
have not used it here.
It was later in life that Julio began to use the professional name of Julio Salvador Solinas Moreschi; see his
filmography on IMDb (International Movie Database), where he was first credited thus in 2009.
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 3
I first learned of the suture between them in the form of a single thread, casually unloosed
from a larger weave of unwritten lore that had long resided in the Papal Chapel. No reference to
the connection between the Fellini family and the castrato can be found in the history books,
much less its fuller outlines. e original source of this slender reference was a generous collector
and papal bass named Luciano Luciani who has sung in the Chapel choir for decades. In
November 2006 he told me that Moreschi had had an “adopted son” named Giulio and gave me
an inkling that at some point his mother had been living with Moreschi. When we met again
three years later he added that in subsequent decades Giulio’s daughter had married “Fellini’s
brother.”4 Putting two and two together, it didn’t take much to realize that the brother was
Riccardo, who had married the then sixteen-year-old daughter of his singing teacher Alessandra
(Sandra) and that their daughter Rita was still living in Rome. I was struck to think that an
orthogonal relationship existed between the castrato and that master-director of auteurist film,
Federico Fellini, whose cinematic obsessions with autobiography, romanità, women, virility, and
boundary creatures are legendary, but at first I continued to search for such memories of the
castrato’s voice as might survive among the obscure detritus of old recordings, vocal habits
handed down through training, or anecdotes and other memories that might have survived
through the generations. In fact, by 2009 I had recovered small bits of a vocal lineage that
descends from Moreschi to two of his students and still hoped to recover more.
It was in that frame of mind that I began, in winter 2010, having contact by email, phone,
and then in person with Rita Fellini and more particularly, as things evolved, with her husband
Fabio Panconesi—contact that continues to this day. Still having little with which to flesh out the
family story, I met them in May 2010. I probed for recollections about Riccardo’s voice, which I
had listened to closely in Fellini’s early film I vitelloni (1953), hoping they would know
something about his vocal studies with Rita’s grandfather.
What Fabio and Rita proceeded to tell me threw me temporarily off my pet vocal tracks and
onto an elaborate familial history, as they began to offer up tales about which the family has
heretofore been silent. Panconesi encouraged me to record most of what they related and
sketched the beginnings of a genealogical chart that reached back five generations—a rough
sketch, he lamented, because there had been a “break” in the Moreschi family memory prior to
their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. He also accompanied me to Rome’s vast old
4. Luciani is a significant collector of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century papal choir materials, archival and
musical. He has also reorganized the Cappella Sistina diaries of 1899-1933, presently kept at the modern Archivio
della Cappella Musicale Pontificia at via Monte della Farina 44 in Rome. Luciani is committed to bringing honor to
late-nineteenth and twentieth-century chapel members, not least Moreschi as the shining light of his time. On
Luciani see Salvatore Salvo De Fattor, La cappella musicale pontificia nel Novecento (Rome: Fondazione Giovanni
Pierluigi da Palestrina, 2005), 217.
4 | voiceXchange
Cimitero del Verano to see the family tomb, which he had given a routine grooming the week
before since his mother-in-law and a number of other relatives are buried there.5
Ultimately these conversations have become an odyssey in family remembrance, revelation,
and reflection, driven by my promise to Fabio and Rita that May to honor their generosity and
candor by uncovering more of their story. I made some initial forays into a number of archives,
but once I assumed duties as chair of my department that July, legwork in Rome became all but
impossible. e archival work has continued through a close dialogue with Martina Piperno, my
outstanding research assistant in Rome without whose contributions this essay would have been
impossible to produce at this time. While my larger critical project on the material necessarily
remains in-progress, here we present together a goodly portion of the archival work assembled
thus far. We mainly limit ourselves to genealogical and social issues, but ones that will ultimately
shed light on how the death of an old patronage system—experienced by Alessandro Moreschi
and central to his legacy—converges with radically shifting cultural, political, and institutional
landscapes that bookend either side of Mussolini’s regime (1922-43). What we lay out is thus part
of a developing history that attaches to multiple social and vocal plotlines, extending from the
castrato to other artists and linking him more clearly than heretofore to multiple technological
forms of new media.
From province to city
A story that reverberates across generations cannot readily be told in a linear way. Before World
War II, Federico Fellini (1920-1993) and his brother Riccardo (1921-1991) escaped their coastal
hometown of Rimini in Emilia Romagna by traveling to the great metropolis of Rome, where life
and art often doubled back on themselves.6 Both married young, during the critical last years of
the war after Mussolini had been ousted (1943) and their countrymen were waging bloody
battles against one another—a time when many twenty-somethings were doing likewise as a
5. For an image of the tomb see Nicholas Clapton, Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato (London: Haus Books,
2008), 91 (earlier version as Moreschi: e Last Castrato [London: Haus Books, 2004]). Since publication of
Clapton’s book and since Feldman’s visits to the tomb, Panconesi has added photos of nearly all those in the tomb,
including Julio who died at age 49 on October 13, 2010. Previously there had only been a photo of Pietro Rinaldi
(on whom see below and Fig. 1), though Panconesi says there were once other photos too. e tomb was vandalized
along with others at Verano, apparently in the 1960s, including theft of architectural ornaments, but it's hard to
ascertain exactly what was stolen because tombs were also damaged during the Allied bombings of World War II
(destroying a number of documents in the cemetery archives as well). In 1994, when Alessandra died, her children
Rita and Julio had the tomb renovated because at that time it was crumbling down (Comune di Roma, Richiesta di
Operazioni Cimiteriali nel Cimitero di Verano, documents of August 1994 [not reproducible]).
6. Fellini talked countless times about line-crossings between life and art, invention and reality. Cf. "Miscellany
III”—“'I see no dividing line between imagination and reality'"; in Fellini on Fellini, translated by Isabel Quigley
(1974; n.p.: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1998), 150-58.
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 5
hedge against the uncertainties of war.7 e first Fellini brother to marry was Federico, at home
on October 30, 1943, to the iconic elfin actress Giulietta Masina; the second Riccardo, in June
1944, at a neighborhood church, to Alessandra Moreschi. Riccardo had sung Schubert's Ave
Maria at the wedding of their friend, painter Rinaldo Geleng, in June 1943; at Federico and
Giulietta’s he played it quietly on a small portable reed organ (a “harmonium”) to help keep the
event out of earshot of draft recruiters. About his own marriage into the Moreschi family, word
has it Riccardo used to joke that he’d gotten hitched after singing Bellini's "Prendi l'anel ti dono"
one too many times ("Take this ring I give you, which the dear beloved spirit who smiled upon
our love once bore to the altar")—a delicate, high-pitched aria di grazia qua barcarolle from La
sonambula, delivered by the leading man as he offers his orphaned fiancée his late mother's
wedding ring.8
In real life, the only orphan was Riccardo’s father-in-law Giulio Moreschi. As Riccardo’s voice
teacher, Giulio had doubtless been his coach for the Bellini aria, Schubert’s Ave Maria, and
virtually everything else Riccardo sang. Giulio’s own training had come from his castrato father,
whom he doubtless heard sing the immensely popular Ave Maria set by Gounod using Bach’s first
prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier (recorded by Alessandro in 1904).9 Surely he had also
heard him sing Schubert’s setting too, as well as various arias of the bel canto and other operatic
repertories. Using that training and inculcation, Giulio made his bread and butter teaching voice
from the mid-1920s until his death in 1955. He also did jobbing gigs around town, including
stints in the papal chapel with members of which he toured in Holland, Germany, and northern
Italy,10 though it was as a teacher that he seems to have worked most steadily, in a studio that
included pupils who went on to significant careers in opera, musicals, and film.11 A principal
7. Tullio Kezich, Federico Fellini, translated by Minna Procter with Viviana Mazza (New York: Faber and Faber,
2002), 50.
8. Ibid., 23. "Prendi l'anel" is Elvino's aria in La sonnambula, act 1, scene 1(Milan, 1831), written for the Bellinian
tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini, who routinely sang up to f in alt. In the opera, Amina sleepwalks while afterwards
dreaming of their upcoming marriage, uttering broken phrases about Elvino's jealousy. She then tumbles back into
sleep on another man's couch, setting off the inevitable series of complications.
9. Moreschi’s CDs were first remastered for Moreschi: e Last Castrato, produced by John Wolfson (Wadhurst, East
Sussex, England: Opal, 1987), track 12. Another remastering, including additional recordings from the Vatican
sessions with other artists, has recently been produced by Christian Zwarg and issued as Alessandro Moreschi, sopranocastrato (1958-1922) (Berlin: Truesound Transfers, 2009), track 21. e title Gounod gave the Ave Maria is
Méditation sur le Prélude de J.S. Bach. In the original recording engineered by William Sinkler Darby in April 1904,
Moreschi is accompanied by violin, piano, and harmonium (Gramophone and Typewriter Company 52045, matrix
2187 h).
10. Pictures and other documents in private collection.
11. Cf. n. 40 below.
6 | voiceXchange
source of his notoriety was having been adopted by Moreschi senior, the so-called angel of
Rome12 —though how so, most Romans at mid-century probably had little idea.
Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922) was the most prized castrato of his generation, and like the
Fellini brothers, came to Rome from the provinces. Otherwise his journey could hardly have been
less like theirs. Far from the bustling seaside town of Rimini in Emilia-Romagna, Moreschi spent
his first decade on a woolly hilltop outside Rome called Montecompatri, tucked into the so-called
Castelli Romani to the southeast of the city. Furthermore, where the Fellini brothers made their
escape to the big city with all the self-determination of young men, Moreschi was plucked from
Montecompatri at about age ten or eleven by a papal singer and teacher named Nazareno Rosati
(1817-1877)—a Minorite friar and high tenor soloist in the Sistine Chapel who had been much
esteemed as a singer in the Sistine Chapel but (having lost his upper register) was working
principally as a composer and teacher.13
It seems word had reached Rome about the beautiful boy singer who performed in
Montecompatri’s Chapel of the Madonna del Castagno, leading to his removal to the Holy City
for training there before puberty. Moreschi’s route to Rome was that of nearly all castrati from
about the 1820s-1830s onward: from a central Italian province eventually to Rome and (for the
successful ones) on to the Sistine Chapel. e 1820-30s coincide with the exit of the castrati from
the European operatic stage (most famously that of Giambattista Velluti in 1830) after more than
two hundred years, and signal the re-establishment of the Roman church as the principal
trafficker in the business of castrati.
But here similarities between Moreschi and other Sistine castrati of the nineteenth century
end,14 for few were taken under the wing and propelled to fame to such an extent. According to
Moreschi’s own account, given years later, after physically taking him to Rome, Rosati placed him
for training in the sheltered school of the church of San Salvatore in Lauro—the Schola
Cantorum of the Fratelli delle Scuole Cristiane, properly called A. Braschi in honor of Pius VI
12. Clapton, Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato, Chap. 6, and Franz Haböck, Die Kastraten und ihre Gesangskunst:
Eine gesangsphysiologische, kultur- und musikhistorische Studien (Leipzig: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt Stuttgart, 1927),
206. On Moreschi see especially Robert Anthony Buning, "Alessandro Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato" (MA
thesis, Boston University, 1990), and Alberto De Angelis, Domenico Mustafà: La cappella sistina e la società musicale
romana (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1926), as well as Luigi Devoti, "Alessandro Moreschi, detto 'L'angelo di Roma,'
1858-1922," in Musica e musicisti nel Lazio, edited by Renato Lefevre and Arnaldo Morelli (Rome: Gruppo
Culturale di Roma e del Lazio with Fratelli Palombi, 1958), 463-74. Brief biographical notices of Moreschi appear in
Leopold M. Kantner and Angela Pachovsky, La cappella musicale pontificia nell'Ottocento (Rome: Hortus Musicus,
1998), 168, and Salvo De Fattor, La cappella musicale pontificia nel Novecento, 219, with brief entry on Giulio
Moreschi, 229 (both volumes including important context for the Sistine Chapel in the period).
13. See Kantner and Pachovsky, La cappella musicale pontificia nell'Ottocento, 181-82.
14. e church of San Salvatore in Lauro is located near Lungotevere di Tor di Nona across the Tiber from the
Vatican. Chosen boys had traditionally been placed in orphanages, so-named. In nineteenth-century Rome many
went to the Pia Casa degli Orfani in Santa Maria in Aquiro near piazza Navona.
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 7
(Angelo Braschi)—which thereafter served in loco parentis, similar to an orphanage.15 Because
Rosati devoted himself to the boy’s training, along with composer Gaetano Capocci, Moreschi
was able to make a major solo debut at age fourteen (in July 1873), singing as soloist at the papal
basilica of St. John the Lateran where Capocci was organist.
It was truly the last gasp for papal castrati. Indeed in 1871, when Moreschi was removed from
Montecompatri, the town was part of the diocese of Frascati, which was still under the Pope’s
temporal jurisdiction in a period that had seen almost all temporal power wrested from the
papacy. But the last traces of temporal jurisdiction were about to be removed from the pope with
the total coup of Italian Unification.
In the decade after Moreschi’s debut, his singing attracted increasing notoriety from locals and
visitors, diary writers and news writers. According to his pupil falsettist Alessandro Gabrielli, “At
Rome a well-done performance would not have been conceivable without him” (ostensibly
referring to church performances but salon and hotel performances were among them too).16
After a period marked by decline of the castrati as premiere singers, Moreschi’s success thus put
the Roman castrati firmly back in public prominence. He was only twenty-four during Lent 1883
when he acquired the epithet of “angel” following a sensational performance of the leap-filled
coloratura part of the Seraph in Beethoven's Christum am Ölberge (in the Italian version, Cristo
sull’Oliveto).17 e brief vocal passages provided here show special castrato capacities for sustained
lines that require spectacular breath control (Ex. 1) and expansive range, along with the capacity,
particular to the best castrati, to make sudden registral shifts (Ex. 2)—all traditional attributes of
the best castrato singers.18 e demands of Ex. 2 are not unlike those of Leonora’s aria “O mio
Fernando” from Donizetti’s La favorita, in a performance of which the composer and later
15. Interview with Haböck, Die Kastraten, 206-07. See also Devoti, “Alessandro Moreschi,“ 464, and De Angelis,
Domenico Mustafà, 148-49.
16. Alessandro Gabrielli, “Riassunto delle conversazioni sulla storia delle cappelle musicali romane: III, La Cappella
Sistina dall’Ottocento ad oggi (continuazione),” Rassegna dorica 9, no. 3 (Jan. 1939): 255.
17. On this, see Buning, “Alessandro Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato,” 124-26, and Clapton, Moreschi and
the Voice of the Castrato, 81-82.
18. Cf. Feldman, e Castrato, Chap. 3, and also John Potter, Tenor: History of a Voice (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009), Chap. 2.
8 | voiceXchange
Chapelmaster of the Cappella Sistina Lorenzo Perosi (then age 16) accompanied Moreschi in
1888 (Fig. 2).19
#3 œ œ ™
& 8R
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e
-
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-
-
-
spi - ar.
EXAMPLE 1. Beethoven, Cristo sull’Oliveto [Christus um Ölberge], Seraph’s Aria, no. I, mm. 46–51.
Edition from Cristo sull’Oliveto Oratorio, posto in musica da L. van Beethoven…
(Paris, A. Ferrenc, chez Carli etc. [n.d.]).
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ #œ œ œ
&
J
sa - rav - vi
fe
Ω
. Ω Ω œ
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# Ÿœ #œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ œ # œœ œ
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-
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EXAMPLE 2. Beethoven, Cristo sull’Oliveto, Seraph’s Aria, no. 1, mm. 82–89.
19. Reported in “Riassunto delle conversazioni sulla storia delle cappelle musicali romane,” 255-56. e passages
here are less demanding than the murderously difficult mezzo role of Abigaille from Verdi’s Nabucco, which he is said
to have sung; see Buning, “Alessandro Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato,” 118 and n.4 there, quoting M.
Tiberi, “Domenico Mancini,” in notes to Le voci di Roma, vol. 1, TIMA 37 (Roma: Edizioni del Timaclub, 1981),
who refers to his delight in singing such scores with operatic colleagues. Domenico Mancini was a falsettist and
famous pupil of Moreschi’s who left a number of manuscript writings now in the Archivio privato Bartolucci (Salvo
De Fattor, La cappella musicale pontificia nel Novecento, 218 and 283).
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 9
FIGURE 2. Famous head shot of Alessandro Moreschi, dressed in the fashion of the day.
Image courtesy of Maria Rita Fellini and Fabio Panconesi.
To understand something of the allure of castrato singing and the particular glorification of
Moreschi, first-hand accounts are indispensable. In 1914 the doctor and musicologist Franz
Haböck interviewed Moreschi while he was ostensibly no longer singing in the Sistine Chapel
but still singing in the Cappella Giulia and the Laterano and remained a celebrity in the city,
partly by virtue of memory and reputation. “All my informants agreed that Moreschi’s voice in its
heyday had been of a beauty and power that they had never heard in a male or female voice.”
Although he conceded that Moreschi “had never possessed the true flexibility of coloratura
singing and lacked a trill”—both of which would have been de rigueur for the singing styles used
by castrati from the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries, but were no longer
desiderata in the age of dramatic singing associated with Verdi’s middle period of about the midnineteenth century and beyond—he reported that “his messa di voce had never been equaled.”20
Haböck pressed the intangible feeling Moreschi’s singing produced in his listeners into a pointed
20. Haböck, Die Kastraten, 208.
10 | voiceXchange
sensory account, which metaphorized a certain je-ne-sais-quoi about the castrato’s voice that he
could not fully explain in direct language:
When one wants to describe the sensual impression a voice makes, one might say that it has a
golden or silvery sound, or feels warm or cold. Moreschi’s voice can only be likened to the
clarity and purity of crystal. e absolute evenness and timbral unity of his sound, its
unusually powerful, clear, transparent, and sweet tone, completely different from a woman’s or
boy’s voice, the complete effortlessness with which, because of his apparently inexhaustible air
supply, one almost physically empathizes [with it] all awoke in me a compelling impression of
the most beautiful wind instrument ever given life by human breath…. When his voice rose
above the choir in a crescendo, it overpowered the boy sopranos as completely as a searchlight
outshines a little candle.21
Haböck’s first-hand description of Moreschi’s singing helps us understand how it happened
that by Maundy ursday of the very 1883 Lenten season in which Moreschi sang the part of
Beethoven’s Seraph, he also became a regular member of the Cappella Sistina, the pope's
prestigious choir at St. Peter's Basilica. To do so under normal circumstances meant applying for
the position by formal petition and having it be accepted by papal rescript (that is, by official
reply). In Moreschi’s case, the rescript was issued immediately, on 22 March 1883, allowing him
to bypass the sequence of carefully measured steps, from soprannumerario (a form of
apprenticeship) to partecipante (regular membership), normally required for entry. As Nicholas
Clapton notes, it also did so just in time for the papal administration to be able to have Moreschi
sing the soprano part of the occult, age-old Miserere by Allegri, which formed part of the
Tenebrae service traditionally done in darkness on Good Friday.22
Moreschi thus became a renowned and highly public part of a decidedly pre-Unification
institution, already in its last gasps. Paradoxically, as he was integrating himself into mainstream
bourgeois society, he was also finding himself in the odd situation of becoming increasingly alien
to the culture around him—a phenomenon that marked his whole life, as we will see.
Professionally speaking, Moreschi turned out to be the last papal castrato to be admitted to the
Cappella Sistina and was the last castrato known to be living when he died on April 21, 1922. By
the 1890s the Cecilianist movement was gaining notable and serious ground, even in
traditionalist Rome. It favored extreme austerity in church music, disdained the coloratura and
21. Haböck, Die Kastraten, 207. is was reported in the Roman La tribuna on December 28, 1902; see De Angelis,
Domenico Mustafà, 80 n.1.
22. In 1883 Lent began on February 7, Easter on March 25. Hence Maundy ursday was on March 22. Virtual
views of the interiors of the churches are visible at rome.arounder.com/it (accessed August 5, 2010). For a “period”
performance of Allegri’s Miserere from a MS with contemporary expressive markings, done in the style Moreschi
would have sung it in, listen to the CD Miserere mei deus, Ensemble William Byrd, conducted by Graham O’Reilly
(Austria: Astrée/Naïve, 2001).
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 11
polyphony associated with castrati in the Roman church, and castigated the practices of
mutilation that altered boys to produce men with high voices. In 1898 the rabid Cecilianist
Lorenzo Perosi became co-director of the Sistine Chapel alongside long-time castrato-director
Domenico Mustafà (1929-1912). On February 3, 1902 Perosi extracted a papal injunction
against recruiting any more castrati.23 e venerable Mustafà, by then fifty-four years in the
chapel, resigned. On November 22, 1903, the new arch-Cecilianist Pius X published a motu
proprio, "Tra le sollecitudini" (Among the Cares), that restored the monophonic chant to
Catholic churches while essentially suppressing polyphonic repertory as sacrilegious (in his words,
“solo singing should never predominate”) and forbidding high parts from being sung by anyone
but boys. On 8 December, Pius made the instructions more specific, calling for the patriarchal
basilicas to “lead the way.” And he tightened the stranglehold with a decree of January 8, 1904
that forbade all of the pope's major basilicas (especially the Lateran) from performing any music
“in modern forms” with "no exceptions whatsoever."24 is meant that young clerics were now
supposed to learn Gregorian chant.
All these developments formed the landscape in which Moreschi spent much of his working
career. It was only because Moreschi was grandfathered in that the papacy took advantage of
being able to have him sing in the Sistine Chapel until his 30-year contract was up in 1913.
(Indeed, in 1896 he had already obtained official permission to become a full-fledged member of
both the Lateran Choir and the Cappella Giulia.)
ere was nothing modest about the papal suppressions of 1902-1904. e music exiled
included touchstones of the repertory, older choral pieces like Mozart's "Ave verum corpus,"
more recent ones like Giovanni Aldega’s highly theatrical choral motet “Dominum salvum fac
pontificum nostrum Leonum,” and the ornate bel canto solo vehicle “Crucifixus” by Rossini.25
For that most atavistic of institutions, modernization also meant converting the all-male all-adult
choir with altered male sopranos to an all-male choir with boy sopranos, thus annihilating in a
stroke the very tradition which, from Monteverdi to Rossini, had laid the foundation for bel
canto singing and its neo-theatrical offshoots in post-Unification Rome.
23. e year 1898 overlapped with a period of negative press about standards in the Chapel (Kantner and Pachovsky,
La cappella musicale pontificia, 52 and passim).
24. e rescript was called "Urbis et Orbis." De Angelis describes it in Domenico Mustafà, 80, n. 1, and De Salvo
Fattor more fully in La cappella musicale pontificia, 14-21 and passim. In English see also Clapton, Moreschi and the
Voice of the Castrato, 165-66, 175-77.
25. Buning, “Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato,” passim; John Wolfson, liner notes in the remastered recording
Moreschi—e Last Castrato, Opal CD 9823 (Sparrows Green, Wadhurst [East Sussex], 1987); Clapton, Moreschi
and the Voice of the Castrato, 166-70 and 177-79; and the work of Jörg Derksen, “Der römische Sopranist Alessandro
Moreschi: Ein Sängerleben zwischen der Tradierung einer Künstlervita und den Wirklichkeiten neuer Medien nach
1900,” in Professionalismus in der Musik, edited by Christian Kaden and Volker Kalisch (Essen: Die Blaue Eule,
1999), and other work in progress. See also David M. Howard, “Acoustic and Physiological Aspects of the Castrato
Voice,” in Clapton, Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato, 227-58.
12 | voiceXchange
But ironically, the years of suppression also coincided with the spectacular fact of Moreschi
becoming an international commodity, and not merely for curious visitors to the Holy City. In
1902, the Managing Director of the London-based Gramophone and Typewriter Company had
the director of his Milan office send for two top engineers to record a phenomenal young tenor
named Enrico Caruso. One engineer came from London and another, more famous one from
America: namely Fred Gaisberg, an important figure in the history of early recording. e
director in Milan, Alfred Michaelis, had already made Vatican connections in hopes of someday
recording the voice of Pope Leo X; and finding Caruso unavailable for a few days, he and
Gaisberg— open to other Vatican opportunities—made a detour to Rome.
Enter Moreschi and the Cappella Sistina, with whom the company recorded seven numbers
in a room of the Vatican Palace between April 3-5 using the new horn-and-cutting-stylus
technology, some with Moreschi as soloist, others as a prominent member of the choir. Moreschi
and the choir recorded another ten with William Sinkler Darby as engineer in April 1904,
basically all performances of non-Cecilianist repertory now banned from services (and some
secular), but representative of a past church tradition which seems to have had the sanction of
Pius, who apparently recognized the value of preserving the old repertory.26 Flat-record recording
had only begun in 1901. e recordings were not only preservation projects, exorbitant to
produce, but gestures that recognized Moreschi's singing as something to be immortalized,
reproduced on a mass scale, and marketed to new global audiences.
e weight of the historical coincidence between the systematic exclusion of castrati from the
church, on the one hand, and the preservation of Moreschi’s voice along with the tradition it
represented, on the other, is poorly understood, though the events are not unknown. What is
unknown is that Moreschi's gutsy if sometimes hesitant and uncertain performances—made in
the face of demanding new technology and coincident with new mores that put pressure on the
castrato to disappear into the fold of "normal" well-heeled men—collided with treacherous
vicissitudes in his personal life, which, according to Panconesi, have left wounds in the family to
the present day.
e son, the wife, the thief, and her lover
Nowadays Rita Fellini and Fabio Panconesi own a belt shop (pelletteria) on the Corso in Rome
(called “Fellini”).27 Panconesi, the main interlocutor for this essay, is a generous, broad-minded
Florentine of innate intelligence who was raised in cosmopolitan Cairo. Most of what he'd heard
about Moreschi family history came from Rita's grandmother Vittoria (died 1985), who had
been Giulio Moreschi’s singing pupil and then wife and was staged in concerts and opera scenes
26. Even the one bit of chant he recorded was pre-Cecilianist, the Lamentations of Jeremiah in a Medici edition.
27. In a departure from the artistic enterprises that had marked the Roman Moreschis and Fellinis previously,
Alessandra opened a belt shop elsewhere in Rome, before Rita and Fabio opened theirs.
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 13
he put on. (See the recital program in Fig. 3, from 1925—a black-tie affair that took place some
time shortly after their marriage.)
FIGURE 3(a). Recital given of Giulio Moreschi’s students, 1925, in a program dominated by his new wife
Vittoria Cevasco (“Vittorina Moreschi”). Shown here are outer (3a) and inner (3b) pages of small folded
folio. Image courtesy of Maria Rita Fellini and Fabio Panconesi.
14 | voiceXchange
FIGURE 3(b).
Vittoria had helped rear Rita as a fragile wartime infant and had housed the couple from about
1973 through 1984, in the years following their 1973 wedding (pictured in Fig. 4), which she
attended along with both of Rita’s parents, Alessandra’s son Julio, and the female half of uncle
Federico Fellini and aunt Giulietta Masina.28
By that time, Vittoria, widowed for almost two decades, had become the family memory bank
and storyteller, despite having to whisper through a badly cicatrized tracheal hole that had
prematurely ended her career as an opera singer.
28. Comune di Roma, Richiesta di Operazioni Cimiteriali nel Cimitero di Verano, made on behalf of Vittoria
Cevasco, deceased 27 December 1985; request by Alessandra Moreschi, 30 December 1985. Feldman wishes to
thank Panconesi for the images in Figs. 2 and 3.
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 15
FIG. 4. Wedding of Maria Rita Fellini and Fabio Panconesi (September 14, 1973). From left to right:
Julio Salvador Solinas Moreschi, Fabio Panconesi, Riccardo Fellini, Maria Rita Fellini, Alessandra
Moreschi, Vittoria Cevasco, and Giulietta Masina.
Image courtesy of Maria Rita Fellini and Fabio Panconesi.
On Vittoria’s account, Giulio was born to a woman named Guendalina, whom the castrato
had married.29 Extraordinary as that sounds, what the archives reveal is even more so. According
29. e present generation did not know her surname. We learned it from the parish registers (see n. 30 below),
which also revealed the identity of the mysterious Pietro Rinaldi (her father) who co-owned the tomb in Verano with
the castrato. No marriage document has yet surfaced. A wedding may have happened at home or at the church of
Santa Maria in Traspontina, mentioned in connection with household members in the parish registers, but registers
for that church are extant only until 1883 (and given the Constitution of 1891 it seems unlikely there would have
been a church wedding).
16 | voiceXchange
to parish records (gli stati delle anime),30 in 1901 Guendalina (age 28) and Alessandro (43) were
living in a flat steps away from the Pantheon, together with his nineteen-year-old nephew
Amerigo and her father Pietro Rinaldi (1844-1924). It would seem that Alessandro and
Guendalina had already been together for some stretch of time (a few years perhaps) by then,
though how long we don’t yet know. 31 Meanwhile Moreschi and the father had recently become
co-concessionaries of a new joint family tomb (properly "Moreschi-Rinaldi") created for their
ancestors and descendants. 32 e venture suggests a certain degree of stature and wealth on the
part of each of them, though since Alessandro had acquired a woman and wife, and thus gotten
the social scale tilted in his favor, he could have had to balance the scales by heavily footing the
bill for Rinaldi.
Whatever the case, by 1902 the father was absent from the flat and was falsely represented to
the officials as being deceased by means of a new suffix attached to the name Guendalina, which
was changed in the 1901 version from “Guendalina Rinaldi di Pietro” to “Guendalina Rinaldi fu
Pietro,” meaning of the late Pietro Rinaldi (emphases ours). Quite probably it was Guendalina
herself who made the representation after crossing swords with her father. So much is suggested
by the fact that Pietro Rinaldi left the flat in 1902, combined with the fact that upon his actual
30. Archivio Diocesano del Vicariato, Parrocchia di Sant’Eustachio, Stati delle Anime [hereafter ADV/SdA], 1901.
e “stati delle anime” are a kind of census of the parishioners conducted by churchmen and parish secretaries before
the unified Italian State took over that function and substituted lay censuses for the previous religious ones. Up until
the second half of the nineteenth century, parish registers therefore tend to be quite accurate, whereas after 1850-60
they become both less reliable and fewer and fewer in number. Happily, the parish registers for the parish of
Sant’Eustachio (Piazza di Sant’Eustachio), of which the Moreschi address at via della Palombella 38 forms a part, are
orderly and detailed until about 1906. e parish registers of Rome as a whole are stored in poor conditions and at
the narrow premises of the Archivio Diocesano del Vicariato, Piazza di San Giovanni in Laterano 6, where there is no
bibliographical cataloguing or indexing of the records. Piperno received special permission to study them, since they
are in disorder and also unbound, though the data concerning the Moreschi family are clear apart from the irregular
1902 entry for Giulio (see below).
Feldman wishes to thank Luciano Luciani for a copy of a score of Moreschi’s on which there is a stamp of
the address on via Palombella. It was owing to that lead that it was possible to retrieve the household records in the
stati delle anime, although there is no date associated there with the address on the score in question. e residence,
which has just been cleaned and restored, is elegant and beautifully located.
31. As of this writing, we know about but have not yet located a will for Moreschi from the very late 19th century, in
which he leaves everything to Guendalina. e will was located by the freelance genealogist Jérome Blanc, whose
client was not willing to have the content shared.
32. Information on the concession of the tomb comes from Cimiteri Capitolini, Archivio, Atto di Concessione,
Alessandro Moreschi / Pietro Rinaldi, April 24, 1900. Residents in the Moreschi household lived on the 4th floor
(terzo piano). e nephew was Americo (Amerigo) Moreschi (1882-1925); see Fig. 1 and n. 30 above. Also boarding
at the flat in 1902 and 1903 was a student, likely Alessandro's, whose name in 1902 looks like Mario Costa and in
1903 like Maria Costa. A male singer is more likely to have been a live-in student. Neither male can be excluded as
possible candidates for Giulio's biological father.
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 17
death twenty-two years later—at a time when, as we will see, Guendalina was still alive—he left
no actual heirs.33
Battles may well have been raging in the household for some time, since 1903 saw an even
more bizarre turn. Alongside entries of members of the Moreschi household neatly scripted in ink
on successive lines of the annual parish registers, the name "Giulio" is penciled in next to the
castrato's nephew Amerigo in such a way as to suggest that Giulio and Amerigo shared the same
parentage (Fig. 5).
FIGURE 5. Parish record for Moreschi household, Archivio Diocesano del Vicariato,
Rome, Parrocchia di Sant’Eustachio, Stati delle Anime, via Palombella 38, 4th floor (terzo piano), 1903.
Reproduction courtesy of the Archivio Diocesano del Vicariato, Rome.
33. According to Vittoria Cevasco, as remembered by Panconesi, a younger son of Guendalina's came to see Giulio
at the cinema the couple ran at piazza Venezia during what Panconesi called “fascist times,” ostensibly to bring them
news of Guendalina. ey also remember stories of Guendalina herself going there to ask Giulio for money. Given
that Giulio and Vittoria married in 1925 (among other evidence, a privately owned photo of a 25th-anniversary
dinner party is dated 1950 on the back), combined with the fact that they ran the theater between 1925-1930 (see
below), Guendalina’s visit surely took place after her father died in 1924. Efforts to trace her through documents
dating from after 1905 have not yet been unsuccessful, but her second son Francesco Saverio Mancini reported her
death to Vittoria through a letter (privately owned) sent in 1957 from iene in the Veneto. He also visited Giulio
and Vittoria and was remembered distinctly for his club foot.
18 | voiceXchange
In 1904 “Giulio” is then listed on a separate line, following the standard format for the
records, this time explicitly designated as being 21 years old and being Amerigo’s younger
brother, with both of them annotated as sons of Agostino Moreschi from Montecompatri,
brother of the castrato.34
But the official entries have all the earmarks of a hoax, of alleging that the “new nephew”
Giulio was just another young blow-in from the old village green, when in reality the whole
construction was a front for Guendalina's newborn (needless to say, not fathered by her
husband). Not only do the parish records look fishy, but the commune of Montecompatri
preserves a birth record for the nephew Amerigo but none for any son of Agostino’s named
"Giulio.” e belief held by the Moreschi descendants that Giulio Moreschi was indeed
Guendalina's natural son and Alessandro Moreschi's adoptive son is seconded by several other
archival documents associated with Rita’s grandmother Vittoria.35 Additionally, the name Giulio,
while common enough, happens to be a male variant of Guendalina's late mother's name
Giulia.36
More than five decades after the parish records were fudged, the secret was effectively brought
out of the closet by Giulio's wife Vittoria, who in 1955 prepared cemetery documents upon the
death of her husband with the help of her "genero" (son-in-law) Riccardo Fellini, in the absence
of what she called a “vera suocera” (true mother-in-law). ere she gave Giulio’s age at death as
fifty-one, hence putting his birth at 1903-04 in the very years when the archives make no sense
(and not around 1884 when the parish records would claim).37 is age complements Giulio’s
appearance in many photographs of him privately owned by Rita and Fabio and with his
34. Agostino is annotated in the parish records as a “chierico,” a cleric or churchman, for reasons that remain unclear
to us (ADV/SdA, 1901-1905).
35. See n. 37 below.
36. In ADV/SdA 1901, the entry for Pietro Rinaldi lists him as widower of Giulia Ferrucci.
37. In Comune di Roma, Cimitero di Verano, Capitolini, Anagrafe, Giulio Moreschi's death is listed as July 14,
1955 (buried July 16), son of Alessandro Moreschi and Guendalina Rinaldi and "professore di musica" (document
signed by Vittoria Cevasco's “son-in-law” Riccardo Fellini). Giulio's parents are listed the same way in ibid., "Estratto
per riassunto dal registro degli atti di morte dell'anno 1955," August 9, 1994 (the day after Giulio's daughter
Alessandra's death). Giulio died of diabetes, which runs in the family (Fabio Panconesi, private communication, May
21, 2010). Giulio’s parents' names are also joined on a sacred stone (mattone) that belonged to the castrato, on the
bottom of which reads "Alessandro Moreschi and Guendalina Rinaldi" (partially cut off and now documented only
in a privately owned photograph).
e birth record for the (real) nephew Amerigo (Americo) Moreschi survives at Comune di Monte
Compatri, Dipartimento di Stato Civile, certificato di nascita, registri, part 1, series 78, Americo Moreschi, born July
27, 1882 to Agostino Moreschi and Celestina Felici (the latter buried in the Moreschi-Rinaldi tomb), located by
Piperno in July 2010. Using an Occam's razor principle, it becomes impossible to reconcile all these disparities with
claims made about Giulio in the parish records. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we thus suppose the
existence of only one Giulio, born at some point between about August 1903 and July 1904, not two Giulio’s (one
born in 1883 and another in 1903-4).
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 19
appearance as the hotel clerk in Fellini’s first feature Lo sceicco bianco (e White Sheik, 1952)
when he would have been about 48. e identity of Giulio's natural father was and remains
unknown. But Vittoria told her grandchildren that Alessandro became Giulio’s adoptive father
and sole parent when Giulio was quite small.
e rest of the story is one of scandal and heartbreak. Guendalina flew the coop for another
man, a croupier, it was said, and made off with her husband's entire fortune, including precious
objects and jewels which she sold, some on the street, the proceeds of which her lover promptly
lost at the gaming tables. Parish records suggest this turn of events had most probably happened
by 1906 when the extended Moreschi household suddenly disappears from their fine flat in
baroque Rome.38 All this would also explain why in 1902 Moreschi "boasted" to recording
engineer Fred Gaisberg about his large family, but also why, contrariwise, a Moreschi student later
wrote that the castrato's family life was "not tranquil" and why Luciani alluded balefully to the
marriage based on murmurings that continued to echo through the Sistine Chapel over the
decades.39 ereafter family members are found mainly in the somewhat humbler district of
Prati, across the Tiber nearer the Vatican, or near the railroad station, with one notable exception:
Vittoria and Giulio owned a lovely flat along the Tiber at Lungotevere degli Anguillara 11, where
Rita and Fabio lived with Vittoria between about 1973 and 1984, until Alessandra sold it for lack
of funds, having moved her mother that year to a senior residence.
38. Panconesi remembers the lover's last name as having been Mancini but doesn't know his first name. After leaving
the flat at Palombella 38 the household may have moved directly to via Virgilio in Prati (or via Plinio, which
intersects with via Virgilio), across the Tiber and much nearer to the Vatican, where they are next known to have
lived (though the address is apparently known only from the 1922 notice of Moreschi’s death; see note 39 below.
A few gifts evidently survived Guendalina’s theft. A gold watch and chain given for Moreschi’s having sung
at the funeral of Umberto I in 1900 was remembered by Devoti’s informant Franco Gentile (son of Sistine alto Luigi
Gentile) and the same item is listed among household goods of Giulio Moreschi in the 1955 testamentary
administration of the latter’s death (document in private collection).
39. Fred Gaisberg, "Recordings of Actual Performances: Notes from My Diary," Gramophone (Sept. 1944) 13: "I
particularly remember their rosy-cheeked conductor and solo soprano, Professor Moreschi, whom I then judged to
be about sixty but who was amazingly fresh and youthful and boasted of a large family, which greatly interested me."
Moreschi was actually 43 at the time, but castration during puberty had evidently led to extensive premature
wrinkling, which was common among men castrated prepubertally (and is confirmed by some photographs; see esp.
Kantner and Pachovsky, La cappella musicale pontificia, 279, upper image). Moreschi's student was Gabrielli, who
wrote in “Riassunto delle conversazioni sulla storia delle cappelle musicali romane,” “la sua vita intima, familiare non
fu tranquilla" (256). Alessandro was mourned by Giulio and Americo Moreschi in an obituary printed in Il giornale
d'Italia, April 22, 1922, and was given a grand funeral with polyphonic music; description in ibid., April 30, 1922.
Funeral cards for the service read “1922 “A/ Ricordo / di /ALESSANDRO MORESCHI / spento serenamente a 64
anni / il 21 aprile / dalla voce angelica / vissuto per l’arte musicale / da tutti ammirato e rimpianto / nel settimo della
morte / Amerigo e Giulio Moreschi” (private collection).
20 | voiceXchange
e family tie
Tack forward to 1943. Alessandra Moreschi, then barely seventeen, and her parents Giulio and
Vittoria were brought into the Roman "famiglia" of the Fellini brothers via the wedding of
Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina, where they made up almost half of the tiny guest list of
nine persons. Because wartime made travel perilous, they and Masina's aunt were the only
parental figures in attendance. 40 Masina remained their close in-law until her death in 1992.
After having been a go-to voice teacher for wannabe singing actors, at least four of whom sang
in films,41 Giulio himself was immortalized as the constantly reappearing hotel clerk in Fellini's
Lo sceicco bianco. e film follows the stereotypical Fellinian arc of the provincial who goes to
Rome—in this case a newlywed couple from Viterbo who roar into town on a train to meet the
groom's relatives and have an audience with the pope. Immediately the Fellinian fascination with
spectacle and mechanical reproduction interfere, for no sooner do they reach their hotel than the
starry-eyed wife Wanda wanders off (vagando, wandering) in search of her mythical divo-idol the
white sheik from the serialized photo-romances popular at the time and gets inadvertently cast as
a character in a new issue (the sheik played by another student of Giulio Moreschi’s, Rita’s
godfather Alberto Sordi). As the husband searches for Wanda frantically, Moreschi junior keeps
oiling up to his madcap guests to try to sell postcards—those quasi-satiric emblems of the
“provincial in the city.”42
Fellini's next solo movie, I vitelloni (1953), cast Riccardo, playing himself, as one of five
aimless middle-class young men who collectively perform a kind of fictive Fellini youth in the
brothers’ small city of Rimini. 43 Seeded with autobiographical patches that multiply Fellini's
function as auteur, the film is an early instance of Italo Calvino's comment that with Fellini "the
concept of autobiography has become the concept of cinema";44 or add the diffident Riccardo to
40. e wedding party was filled out by Giulietta's aunt Giulia, two friends, and two waiters; interview with
Giulietta Masina in Tullio Kezich, Giulietta Masina (Bologna: Cappelli, 1991), 30; see also Kezich, Federico Fellini,
73-74. Alessandra's son Julio gave her birthdate as October 10, 1926 on a death certificate, Comune di Roma,
Cimitero di Verano, registri.
41. Riccardo Fellini, Alberto Sordi, Noëlle Norman, and Assia De Busny [De Bouzny].
42. Aldo Tassone summarized this when he wrote that in all Fellini's films "Province and city become ‘a provincial in
the city’”; in "From Romagna to Rome: e Voyage of a Visionary Chronicler (Roma and Amarcord)," in Federico
Fellini: Essays in Criticism, edited by Peter Bondanella (New York: Oxford, 1978), 261-88, quote on 275, and see esp.
270, 275-76. For Fellini the train symbolizes transition to a world of wonders but also a subjunctive in-between.
43. Fausto Tozzi was slated to play Fausto but was replaced with Franco Fabrizi. Fellini explained how he fit roles to
actors and why he so often used actors’ names for their characters (specifically in I vitelloni) in "My Experiences as a
Director," in Federico Fellini: Essays, 5-7.
44. Italo Calvino, "e Autobiography of a Spectator," in Perspectives on Federico Fellini, edited by Peter Bonanella
and Cristina Degli-Esposti (New York: G.K. Hall, 1993), 26. Fellini would have agreed; see Federico Fellini: Essays,
63 (as well as 8 and 24).
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 21
volcanic Federico and the film is a double (auto)biography staged as a reminiscence about the
escapades of young provincials who are relocated in the subjunctive mood as a collective
symptom of authorial self and (fraternal) alter ego. Since in real life the brothers had left Rimini
shortly before reaching the vitellone age, the reminiscence is truly a Fellinian "invenzione," real
only in the sense Fellini intended in declaring to his co-scriptwriter: "What we've invented is all
authentic."45
In this case Fellini called on the "invented authentic” to capture the stasis of the province,
where girl-chasing, prank-pulling, parent-eluding, trouble-making, lover-deceiving, motherneeding, sister-clinging young men are caught in the present progressive and regressive of lazy
seaside summers, idle do-nothing big shots too big for their britches (hence vitelloni, big
overgrown veals).46 Only for those who are not permanently stuck in the provinces can the
mythological Fellinian arc uncurl, as we learn from the most contemplative vitellone, Moraldo,
who takes his baggage to the train station at the end of the film.47 En route there, a boundary
figure appears who mediates Moraldo’s transition: the town idiot, holding a life-size statue of an
angel that he’s been carrying about venerating as the Madonna, thus reminding us of Fellini's
frequent assertion that the provincial who leaves the motherland will nevertheless remain forever
caught in the trappings of a vernacular Catholicism that is Italy. For those so ensnared,
Catholicism and Italy are indivisible spaces of a national psyche.
e position of marriage in this scheme—by which Moreschi senior tried to make himself a
bourgeois man, with tragic consequences—is poignant and powerful. e vitelloni are bound up
with a church they try to shake off but always end up buckling to.48 e film revisits this
persistently religious middle-class vernacularism when their leader is about to run out on a local
girl he's knocked up. His father gets wise to what's happening, and comes down on him like a
45. From Federico Fellini, Ciò che abbiamo inventato è tutto autentico: lettere a Tullio Pinelli, edited by Augusto
Sainati (Venice: Marsilio, 2008) (and cf. n. 6 above).
46. Fellini critics have debated the etymology of the Italian title, but importantly Fellini coined it himself. Germaine
Greer had choice things to say about the Catholicism and fantasy world of vitellone types in a now-classic interview
with Fellini: "e Latin man stays on the threshold of reality. He postpones realization to an indefinite tomorrow
because he prefers the dream, the fantasy. at is the great wrong done to us by the Catholic Church and at the same
time the great protection that our religion gives us. It locks us into this phase of appetency, of excitement and
desire" ("Fellinissimo," reprinted in Perspectives on Federico Fellini, 227).
47. Innocent of where he is going, the viewer learns more years later from the horse's mouth: "I thought of a film for
this character, called Moraldo in città, and it should be a continuation of I vitelloni. It should tell of Moraldo's
adventures in Rome"; quoted from Federico Fellini: Essays, 10 (translation lightly adapted). e film was never
made, but the arc was repeated often, not just in the newlyweds' arrival in e White Sheik but in La dolce vita (1959;
the journalist who's come to Rome from the provinces), 8½ (1963—fully autobiographical) – both played by
Mastroianni – and Roma (1972; the young Fellini-as-journalist who lands in the Roman railway station before
proceeding to his boarding house).
48. Federico reportedly commented at Geleng's wedding, "Rinaldo, this is the end…" (Kezich, Federico Fellini, 50).
22 | voiceXchange
jackhammer: "You scoundrel! I swear on your poor mother's grave that this is the last dirty trick
you'll pull! at girl's father is a gentleman like me! He worked all his life… to support his family
with honor! I'll drag you to church myself. [almost sobbing] You'll see, I'll kick you there
myself"49 —vein-bulging, patriarchal, small-town working man's wrath, ordering him to stay and
make right. In traditional Italian society, ("official") sex is reserved for procreation and marriage,
and any sex destined to become visible should bear the blood, sweat, tears, and honor of the
official family. e scoundrel slinks outdoors where he's consoled by his pals—all but the
presciently clownish Alberto (Sordi again), who is convulsed in rude laughter.
Cut to the shotgun wedding, with voiceover narration. "So they got married, and it was a
lovely wedding if readied a bit quickly. Riccardo sang Schubert's 'Ave Maria' and made everyone
cry." Floating out of the medieval organ loft is Riccardo's tenor (already familiar from the film's
opening where he croons into a mic at a summertime restaurant hosting the Miss Siren beauty
contest, being judged by some minor starlights from the big city). e camera pans the church
and settles on the bride and groom, who are seen kneeling in rapt sincerity before the priest.
It’s ironic that in several weddings that took place over the course of a decade, live and
cinematic, Riccardo intoned that most iconic and affecting of all mother-venerating texts while
also warbling into an electronic microphone. How ironic too that his wife—whom he had left by
the mid to late 1950s—was descended by two generations from a woman who ended up doing
what the bad vitellone infuriated his father for trying to do: running out on her marriage like
some sort of vitellonaccia, stealing not her husband’s virginity but his material wealth and
reputation.
Yet even before Guendalina’s near-undoing of Alessandro, he could neither truly fulfill nor
escape the demands of the pervasive vernacular Catholicism that surrounded him. According to a
colleague, Salvatore Meluzzi—who tried to rat on him to papal authorities by claiming he was
overbooked and late for gigs and suggesting that it was because he was a cocky
“hermaphrodite”—Moreschi was an incorrigible outsider to the Roman bourgeoisie. When
bourgeois society (of the church or wider public sphere) reared its ugly head, there was no good
way for Moreschi to benefit from its condemnation of Guendalina, only from that of intimate
family and friends. One might say of these years that he was doubly exposed: by the technology
that butchered the very voice it celebrated by immortalizing it in a corrupted form, and by the
urbane society that invited his celebrity yet disdained it, luring him into normalizing as a
bourgeois man but fearing it too. Even his son’s family was part of the paradox. In the succeeding
generation Vittoria told her grandchildren repeatedly that their great-grandfather had been
deceived, left, and robbed by his wife, and that he was a great and famous singer, but without
ever mentioning that he was a castrated man.
Just what an acceptable bourgeois man was in Moreschi’s time is a matter for separate
treatment, but suffice it to say that over the decades it had come to look like anything but a
49. I vitelloni e La strada: soggetto e sceneggiatura di Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinella e Ennio Flaiano, preface by Irene
Bignardi (Milan: Longanesi, 1997), 53.
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 23
castrated man, above all by Moreschi’s time.50 In “e Masculine Mystique: Antimodernism and
Virility in Fascist Italy,” Sandro Bellassai notes the meaningful relationship by fascist times
between traditional Italian notions of virility and anti-modernist discourse, which extended to
condemnation of the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia.51 Traced back to the late nineteenth century,
the themes are still distinct but an incipient fascist ideology of gender is already recognizable in a
growing repulsion of feminine decadence and degeneration, manifested in fears of a so-called
“excess of ‘civilization,’” which swept over society in the wake of modernity. Eventually even
technological advances of the kind in which Moreschi participated would be glossed by fascist
discourse as corrupting.
Moreschi’s rather touching assumption of bourgeois modes and manners are threatened by the
new virility. Moving from the broadly cultural to the historically particular, we can see the stark
clashes of masculinity with class and service roles in the research carried out by Raffaella Sarti on
servants around 1900 and after. As she shows, shaving the beard became a hotly contested matter,
notably in 1907 when servants in Turin launched a fierce protest against the proscriptions against
growing moustaches for persons of their occupation, calling shaving a form of “facial
mutilation.”52 Measured against these objections, the castrati in a couple of famous pictures of
Moreschi with colleagues leap out. e castrati lack moustaches, hence by the measure of
Turinese servants are not just genitally and vocally castrated, but facially too.53 Moreschi may
have been bourgeois, and bourgeoisly married, but he was what the fascist Pavese called
“spiritually castrated,” faute de mieux, besides being physically so.
Marriage, reproduction, and the vernacular castrato
Before Moreschi, a number of castrati over the centuries had had the impulse to marry, and the
impulse was imputed to others. Susanna Burney, daughter of Charles, recounted to her sister
Fanny (novelist Frances Burney) a private speech that the great Pacchierotti made in her London
50. For the eighteenth-century part of this story, see Martha Feldman, “Denaturing the Castrato,” Opera Quarterly
24/3-4 (2008): 178-199.
51. Sandro Bellassai, “e Masculine Mystique: Antimodernism and Virility in Fascist Italy,” Journal of Modern
Italian Studies 10 (2005): 314-35. See also David G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Cecilia Dau Novelli, Famiglia e modernizzazione in Italia tra le due
guerre (Rome: Edizioni Studium, 1994); and Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, ca. 1848-1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
52. Raffaella Sarti, “Fighting for Masculinity: Male Domestic Workers, Gender, and Migration in Italy from the Late
Nineteenth Century to the Present,” Men and Masculinities 13, no. 1 (October 2010): 16-43, esp. 16-21. Cf.
Domenico Rizzi, “Liberal Decorum and Men in Conflict: Rome, 1871-90,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 10
(2005): 281-96.
53. See Kantner and Pachovsky, La cappella musicale pontificia nell’Ottocento, 151 and 189.
24 | voiceXchange
drawing room, concluding “I am afraid he wishes he could marry.”54 Farinelli fretted over his
estate and tried to find a suitable spouse for his brother in order to make up for his lack of a
direct heir.55 A treatise by Charles Ancillon entitled Eunuchism display'd appeared in 1718
(original publication in French, 1707) with a subtitle proposing the theme of whether eunuchs
are capable of marriage, and if they ought to be suffer'd to enter into that state… illustrated with many
remarkable cases by way of precedent… with several observations on modern eunuchs; occasion'd by a
young lady's falling in love with Nicolini… Many other writings of different genres gnawed over
the problem and made fun of it. Among innumerable satirists, Beaumarchais included a pathetic
castrato husband in his libretto Tarare.56
Only three castrato marriages are known to have taken place before Moreschi’s, one in the
seventeenth century and two in the eighteenth, none of them in Italy.57 Far from marrying,
castrato singers tended to be trained and employed in situations that were virtually all male, being
inculcated into their art as singing celibates in male societies. is was true of their training,
whether they lived in the private homes of male teachers or in all-male church schools or
conservatories, and it was true of their professional lives, which were most often anchored in the
church, even for that minority that eventually had big operatic careers. Castrations themselves
were usually represented as sacrifices to church, god, family, prince, or some combination thereof.
ey were carried out by males (often traveling male surgeons) and generally sanctioned by male
authority figures.58 Padre Martini’s epistolary of approximately 6,500 letters from the middle
decades of the eighteenth century is filled with correspondence about placing boys in the homes
of male teachers or in male-run churches or church schools. All these patterns still essentially held
true for Moreschi.
54. Quoted in Linda Kelly, Susanna, the Captain, and the Castrato: Scenes from the Burney Salon, 1779-1780
(London: Starhaven, 2004), 69.
55. Feldman gives this wider treatment in “Strange Births and Surprising Kin: e Castrato’s Tale,” in Italy’s
Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, ed. Paula Findlen, Wendy Wassyng Ryworth,
and Catherine M. Sama, afterword by Franco Fido (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 175-202,
400-414.
56. Discussed in Hedy Law, “Gestural Rhetoric: In Search of Pantomime in the French Enlightenment, ca. 1750–
1785,” PhD thesis (University of Chicago, 2007), Chap. 4.
57. See Helen M. Berry, e Castrato and His Wife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), on Giusto Ferdinando
Tenducci's marriage in Dublin, 1766; Mary E. Frandsen, “Eunuchi conjugium: e Marriage of a Castrato in Early
Modern Germany,” Early Music History: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Music 24 (2005): 53-124, on
Bartolomeo Sorlisi's partial marriage near Leipzig in the early 1660s; and Alessandro Gabrielli, “Riassunto delle
conversazioni sulla storia delle cappelle musicali romane,” 252–56; and Johann Friedrich Schütze, Hamburgische
eater-Geschichte ([Hamburg], 1794; repr. ed. Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik,
1975), 193, on Filippo Finazzi's 1761 marriage outside Hamburg. On castrato marriages within larger themes of
biological and social reproduction, see Feldman, e Castrato, Chap. 2.
58. See Feldman, “Strange Births and Surprising Kin,” and idem, e Castrato, Chaps. 1 and 2.
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 25
All Sistine Chapel singers were completely forbidden from marrying until March 7, 1891,
when a new constitution lifted rules of celibacy for lay members of the choir. e change was less
radical than may first appear. Being able to generate had long been the justification of the church
for sex and marriage. In 1587 Pope Sixtus VI’s famous Brief Cum frequenter targeted males
castrated for singing in renewing that justification, declaring that that “eunuchs, castrati, and
spadones” (men with damaged sexual organs) could not marry because they lacked what it took to
make offspring—the ability to procreate—and this just at the time when the church had begun
the business of having boys castrated specifically to create high-voiced singers.59
e new rules of 1891 still only allowed Sistine singers to marry if they were capable of
procreation, revoking the obligation of celibacy somewhat coyly by noting that it pertained solely
to “those who are not otherwise constrained.”60 But notably, the new constitution did more than
permit some singers to marry. It secularized the entire, previously clerical nature of the office by
newly allowing nonclerical dress to nonclerical singers when off-duty, by not forcing all singers to
take the prima tonsura, and by allowing those who were not priests to engage in other professions
upon papal approval. e slackening of rules probably gave Moreschi an opening to do what
many before him wanted to do but did not. ough the changes gestured toward a loosening of
marriage rules only in the most indirect way, if at all, they may have created an opening to marry,
probably in semi-private, as a paradoxical part of a general drift toward a more secular, modern
model of manhood.61
Perhaps Moreschi was in some improbable way a figment of modernity while also being the
most atavistic figure imaginable. By 1902, when Moreschi was engaged in the eminently modern
act of making recordings, he was also cultivating a very Roman, contemporary way of singing,
even as (or partly because) his voice had aged somewhat, leading to a lower register and less elastic
technique.62 For complementing his older vocal style, coming through the noise of cracks and
pops, is an intense verismo expressivity of tears, sobs, gasping h-sounds, glottals, octave scoops
and fast, anticipatory glissandi ("acciaccature"). e verismo accent makes sense given something
59. See Valeria Finucci, Introduction to Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History
from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, edited by Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2001); idem, e Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003); and Giuseppe Gerbino, "e Quest for the Soprano Voice: Castrati in Renaissance
Italy," Studi musicali 33 (2004): 303-57.
60. Kantner and Pachovsky, La cappella musicale pontificia nel Ottocento, 52; Clapton, Moreschi and the Voice of the
Castrato, 127-29.
61. Cf. George L. Mosse, e Image of Man: e Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996); Bruno P. F. Wanrooij, Storia del pudore: la questione sessuale in Italia, 1860-1940 (Venezia: Marsilio, 1990);
Domenico Rizzo, “Liberal Decorum and Men in Conflict: Rome, 1871-90,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 10/3
(2005): 281-96; Sarti, “Fighting for Masculinity.”
62. Cf. Haböck, Die Kastraten, 207-08.
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Fabio Panconesi recounted early on in exchanges with Feldman: that Moreschi and his wife were
regulars at the opera, then the Teatro Castelli—a matter wholly unaccounted in literature about
him.63 In fact, a family tale has it that when the castrato and his wife appeared at the opera,
people would ask who was more beautiful, the queen or Guendalina, for she was so covered in
the fine jewels that had been given the castrato for singing at the funerals and memorial masses of
royalty.
e idea of Moreschi imbibing his Romanness by listening to such operas as Mascagni’s
Cavalleria rusticana, and in that most profane shrine of hyperemotion, complements our
knowledge of his public singing of opera arias at the Hotel Russia, alongside the Mascagni tenor
Francesco Marconi and baritone Antonio Cotogni, a favorite of Verdi.64 Further reinforcements
to this sense of him arrived in June 2010, when Feldman was tipped off to the sale of
photographs of famous singers and composers signed to Moreschi between 1897 and 1913, at
least three of them by outright verismo artists: "To the Illustrious artist Alessandro Moreschi,
Enrico Caruso. Rome 1913"; "To the distinguished artist Signor Alessandro Moreschi, Ricordo di
Puccini, Rome, Puccini, 16 [?] 1900”; "To the most dear professor Alessandro Moreschi, with
esteem and affection. Mascagni. Rome, 1898" (see Fig. 6).65
Two generations later, Riccardo Fellini's singing still makes an auditory spectacle of
emotionality but tames the heart-sleeve tears and sobs of Moreschi senior’s generation. Not so
Alessandro’s own students, who can still be heard in extremely rare recordings, one of whom sang
so much in Moreschi’s veristic style, and with his strong vocal production, that he was taken for a
castrato by then Sistine chapelmaster Perosi.66
63. Some archives for the theater survive, but seemingly only general account books of ticket sales, not subscriber
lists.
64. Devoti, "Alessandro Moreschi," 467.
65. e other photographs are signed to Moreschi by Giuseppe Verdi, in 1897, and Lorenzo Perosi, in 1904. A sixth
photograph auctioned off was signed to Giulio Moreschi by the famously sob-filled Beniamino Gigli, in 1937. All
but Perosi are towering figures of Italian opera. Special Collections at e University of Chicago purchased the
photos of Caruso, Mascagni, and Gigli. e photos signed by Verdi and Puccini were purchased by anonymous
private Italian collectors. As of this writing, the photo of Perosi and some manuscripts of his music owned by
Moreschi remain in private hands, unsold.
66. e first falsettist is Domenico Mancini, who wrote that Perosi “got it into his head that since I sang in
Moreschi’s way, I was one of those ‘pure’ voices" (quoted in Clapton, Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato, 181,
following Buning)—a rumor that became hard to erase until Mancini reached adulthood and the truth became
obvious. e second is Alessandro Gabrielli, soprano in the Quartetto Vocale Romano Gabrielli-Gentili, which
recorded under the name of the Sistine Chapel Quartet (see Feldman, e Castrato, Chap. 3, forthcoming).
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 27
FIGURE 6. Photograph of verismo opera composer Pietro Mascagni, signed "To the most dear professor
Alessandro Moreschi, with esteem and affection. Mascagni. Rome, 1898.” Reproduction courtesy of
Special Collections Research Center, e University of Chicago.
Cinema Venezia, new media, and mediations
Acknowledging that theatricality was in the Moreschi gene and that mechanical reproduction was
central to its history, suppose we follow some cinematic threads backwards from the Fellini
brothers through Giulio Moreschi to the generation of the "last" castrato and forwards to his
cinematic descendants. On both sides there is a Romanness that loops together and unloops
swatches of church, family, social, and political histories. It emerges over a period of time when
Italy is simultaneously modernizing and resisting modernization in the face of swiftly changing
28 | voiceXchange
technologies and institutions and changing political landscapes. e incursion of cinema into
Italian popular life between 1910 and the 1920s took place with lightening speed. Not long after
fascism was ratified under Mussolini in 1922, cinema became a tool of nationalist propaganda.
April 3, 1926 saw the institutionalization of fascist spectacle via the Federazione Nazionale
Fascista Industriale dello Spettacolo.67 By that time, 225 movie theaters already existed in Italy.
Mussolini’s famed statement about populist cinema as a universalist phenomenon and
coordinator of international education and order was issued in 1928,68 and the rest is, as they say,
history.
In these years Giulio and Vittoria participated in the shift of institutional and media forms by
running a movie house at what is now the site of the old and historic Antico Caffè Castellino at
via Cesare Battisti 135 (= current numbering) off of piazza Venezia at the south end of the Corso
(Fig. 7).
FIGURE 7. Antico Caffè Castellino, summer 2011. Photo by Martha Feldman.
67. Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, 1895-1945 (Rome: Riunti, 1979), 238. For Brunetta’s history of
Italian cinema in condensed English version see idem, e History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from Its
Origins to the Twenty-first Century, translated by Jeremy Parzen (2003; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
68. Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, 244–247.
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 29
ey were volatile times. In 1929 Mussolini opened his offices in Palazzo Venezia, and from
then on was having innumerable buildings coopted or demolished in and around the piazza to
create a centralized site for his operations, with a central corridor for mass fascist propaganda
feeding out from the piazza onto the Corso.69 Although as yet we lack precise documentation
about exactly how the Moreschi theater was victimized by these upheavals, oral and documentary
histories show that it closed in 1930.70
But the history limned here loops back again. Grandmother Vittoria had described the
cinema to Rita and Fabio as a prewar place of near-mythical grandeur, elegantly outfitted with
three great shutters (“tre grandi serrate”) streetside that were lowered at the end of each evening
show. When exactly the grandchildren did not know, only that the grandparents had owned it for
about three years "during fascist times" before it was closed down by the police, ostensibly
because of the many political “skirmishes” (or was it conversations? discussions?) that took place
in front of its neighboring café.
e tale Vittoria told is borne out by notices in the Guida Monaci and other documents.71
e theater originally opened in 1906 as the Sala Vittorio Emmanuele to accommodate what Il
messaggero called “the good taste of the owners,” who succeeded in opening “a true jewel of
elegance and comfort,” which was to be “the preferred gathering spot [ritrovo] of the elite of
Roman society and those who love to watch select spectacles with a refined understanding of
art.”72 On 16 September 1911 it came under proprietorship of Francesco Castellino, it was
69. See Spiro Kostof, e ird Rome, 1870-1950: Traffic and Glory (Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1973),
56-59, D. Medina Lasansky, e Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). My sincere thanks to Professor Martha Pollak, architect and
architectural historian, for the references and for expert help with reading the architectural plans.
70. Guida Monaci (Rome, 1928-29), p. 825; ibid. (Rome, 1930), p. 826.
71. Guida Monaci (Rome, 1928-29), p. 825. A close family connection between the Castellino and Moreschi
families must have endured. Maria Sciandra (1830-1927), described as “in Castellino” (i.e. married into the
Castellino family), was clearly related to Francesco Castellino—probably, given her age, she was his mother. (See p.
30 and n. 73 below) Upon her death she was buried in the Moreschi-Rinaldi tomb, but only for one year before
being moved to the newly-opened Castellino tomb in 1928.
72. Il messaggero, December 11, 1906.
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rebuilt, and its name was changed to Cinema Venezia.73 One of the films screened in 1912,
keeping pace with current fashions, was a filmic version of Puccini’s La Bohème.74
By 1917 the theater had a new manager in Alessandro Moreschi’s nephew Amerigo, who ran
it until his death in 1925.75 Afterwards theater ownership was, legally speaking, assumed by the
Ditta Amerigo Moreschi (the Amerigo Moreschi company) and only taken over by Vittoria and
Giulio in 1928-29 and 1930, respectively (though quite likely, as Roberto Parisi has explained,
the slow bureaucracy surrounding proprietorship meant that Giulio carried on with Amerigo’s
work upon the latter’s death though neither Giulio nor Vittoria was registered as such until
1928).76
Preliminary architectural plans from 1911, drawn to map out how to create the theater from
the old Roman pharmaceutical society originally on the site, also match aspects of Vittoria’s
description (Figs. 8 and 9).
Films were projected on its west side, as seen from the cone of light and Edwardian-styled
figurines depicted as spectators, who gaze on a screen toward their left, which covers over the
original windows of the building. Customers entered through the great shuttered doors, now the
arched openings of the plein-air Antico Caffé Castellino, and exited onto a backstreet to maintain
good flow of human traffic, especially in the event of a fire or other crowd disturbance. ere was
plenty of lobby and corridor space, plus two stories, to make the place the elegant “ritrovo”
claimed by Il messaggero.
73. Archivio Capitolino, Verbale delle Deliberazioni Giunta Municipale di Roma, 16 August 1911, Prot. 79661,
Copia all’Ufficio V. (I.E.), document issued based on a decision of July 11, 1911. e principal text reads: “13° = Al
sig. Castellino Francesco per ridurre ad uso di Cinematografo e locali terreni con ingresso a via Nazionale 129 [now
Cesare Battisti] e uscito sul vicolo Mancino a condizione che il lucernario della sala abbia sportelli apribili; che nei
lavori di adattamento sia eliminato l’uso di materiali combustibili e salve le ulteriori condizioni imposte dalla
Commissione Prefettizia per la sorveglianza dei teatri ecc.”
74. Il messaggero, October 11, 1912.
75. Guida Monaci (Roma, 1917), p. 1042.
76. Guida Monaci (Rome, 1928-29), p. 825; and ibid. (Rome, 1930), p. 826; information from Parisi (private
communication).
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 31
FIGURE 8. “Architectural refiguration into a cinema of local sites at piazza Venezia formerly occupied by
the Società Farmaceutica Italiana, 1911.” ABOVE: Cross-section showing inner front part of theater with
added ornamental pediment set in cove, reading “Anno 1911.” Original elements of the old
Pharmaceutical Society are visible in ground floor paneling and cabinets along the upper gallery. e
building was well-lit by an original skylight, built like a conservatory, and by many windows. BELOW:
Cross-section showing cone of visibility from projection room to screen, with spectators seated in front of
the projectionist’s room. e screen, placed over pre-existing windows, was 12.5’ high.
Reproduction courtesy of the Archivio Capitolino, Rome.
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FIGURE 9. “Architectural refiguration into a cinema of local sites at piazza Venezia formerly occupied by
the Società Farmaceutica Italiana, 1911.” LEFT: Plan of ground floor showing the entrance from Piazza
Venezia side, ticket window, vestibule, drinking fountains, waiting room (sala di aspetto), viewing room
(sala degli spettacoli), staircases to gallery, offices, closet, lavatory, and back exit onto vicolo del Mancino.
RIGHT: Plan of upper gallery showing orchestra box, projection room (cabina di proiezione), gallery of
the viewing room, and staircase with balustrade leading to gallery seating. BOTTOM: Partial elevation
showing façade of back exit. Reproduction courtesy of Archivio Capitolino, Rome.
Coda
In strict biographical terms, Fellini (unlike Giulietta) had few dealings with his brother's
relations (and from a certain point in the early 1960s not even with his brother); nor does he ever
seem to have referred publicly to Moreschi senior, even if the lineage of Riccardo's father-in-law
was common knowledge in Fellini’s Roman circles, which included many famous directors—
Feldman, with Piperno, Moreschi and Fellini | 33
Cesare Zavattini, Roberto Rossellini, Pietro Germi, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini,
and Lina Wertmuller—plus producers Dino De Laurentiis and Angelo Rizzoli, actors Alberto
Sordi, Ugo Tognazzi, Anita Ekberg, Marcello Mastroianni, and a raft of others, plus screenwriters,
composers, costume designers, scene painters, critics, journalists, and on and on. Nevertheless the
castrato arguably held a stubborn place within the Roman preoccupations with boundary
creatures that Fellini epitomizes. ere is reason, too, to believe that at least into the 1960s the
castrati of recent Roman history lingered in the consciousness of Fellini’s contemporaries. In
1962, at the height of Fellini’s career, one of his early collaborators and lifelong friends, director
Pietro Germi, depicted the comic anti-hero of Divorce Italian Style (1961) Fefé—played
inimitably by Marcello Mastroianni—trying to interest his wife in a beardless male church
soprano. e man, Tonino stands in a choir loft singing that vernacular church standby the BachGounod Ave Maria. Fefé wants to push his wife into an affair so he can knock her off and marry
a younger woman, but no sooner does he remark admiringly on the beauty of Tonino’s voice than
his wife giggles at his naivété and clues him in to the man’s sexual condition with a whisper, as if
telling him what everyone else already knows.
Is it coincidence that the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria had famously been recorded by Moreschi
in 1904? To be sure, by the 1940s and 1950s few may have known of or knew the recording
outside particular circles. But cinema people were evidently aware that a castrato cohort had
populated Rome in recent history—otherwise why look for audiences to laugh about it?—and
those in clerical circles undoubtedly were.77
In Germi’s joke the castrato is the seat of an angelic voice imprisoned in a deficient body, an
unsettling figure who nonetheless invites desire. In a wider exploration of this theme, we could
demonstrate how the paradoxical dynamic he mobilizes in others is the very one that allows
Fellini’s own boundary figures to mediate between worlds sacred and everyday, human and
transhuman, and to serve as figures of grace. But the capacity to mediate thus always requires a
sacrificial condition. If the castrato’s particular sacrifice was in no way tenable in the twentieth
century, the emplacement of his disfigured body within the church was nevertheless a permanent
sign of the complicity between grace and sacrifice that his renunciation made possible.
Yet by that reckoning, by marrying and creating a family Moreschi refused the sacrificial
condition of his breed, even if ultimately he became a sacrificial victim of different kind: by being
abandoned (inevitably?), left for another man; by the fact of his child having been abandoned
and by Moreschi’s continuing to raise the very child who reminded him and everyone who knew
them of the injury done to him; by the theft of most of his wealth, acquired painstakingly over
77. ere were at least eight during the years of Moreschi’s employment in Rome and several still during the early
twentieth century. When I interviewed writer Tonino Guerra (1920-; Fellini’s co-screenwriter in three late films) at
his home in Pennabilli on July 17, 2011 he disclaimed any knowledge of or interest in this matter, but as he was
never really “Romanized” and had no desire to talk about anything outside his own writings, it’s hard to assess what
that means.
34 | voiceXchange
twenty and more years, never to be recovered; and probably also by losing his home along with,
undoubtedly, a measure of self-worth and maybe even standing.
Not all was lost. As we have seen, he most probably made the 1904 recordings after Giulio’s
birth or at least when Guendalina was undeniably pregnant, by which time his father-in-law had
moved out, probably prompted by other acts of insurrection of hers. Moreschi went on singing in
the papal chapel until 1913, as we have seen, ten years after the Motu proprio that banned the
presence of castrati in the chapel. His thirty-year contract made it impossible to dismiss him
entirely, but more to the point many appreciated having him sing in public, for he was not just a
local celebrity, talked about by the likes of the great tenor Giacomo Lauri-Volpi,78 but still skilled
and vocally powerful compared to all other high-voiced singers. When he died on April 21, 1922
his death was widely mourned in Rome, even by that arch opponent of having castrati in the
pope’s chapel, Lorenzo Perosi, who conducted music at his funeral mass.
Since the early twentieth century the family has taken great pride in Alessandro Moreschi’s
fame as a singer. ey named his granddaughter—and much more recently his small great-great
grandson—after him; and his great-grandson took the Moreschi name. If there were misgivings
about his state, or embarrassment over his having married, the family’s ills seem never to have
been ascribed to either. Far from a phantom presence, he was a shining star who was victimized
by disgraceful behavior. Moreschi has therefore functioned in family memory in two opposing
ways: as a beacon of opportunity, success, celebrity, and artistry; but also a familial crypt for
undue distress, hardship, shame, and loss. But that is really another story.
78. Reported in Devoti, "Alessandro Moreschi,” 472-73.