Maria Rita Barbera from Messina, who last May 6th, in the Teatro 23 of Cinecittà in Rome, was awarded, together with Gaia Calderone, the Donatello’s David for the costumes of “Spring”film by Damiano Michieletto based on “Stabat Mater” (Einaudi), historical novel by Tiziano Scarpa winner of the 2009 Strega Prize.
For Barbera it is the second David after the 2023 victory with “La strangezza” by Roberto Andò, for whom he also worked in “L’abbaglio” (2025). Like the two films by the Palermo director, “Primavera” is a costume production, in which the Venice of 1716 is the backdrop to the story of the special relationship between the young orphan Cecilia (Tecla Insolia) and the great composer Antonio Vivaldi (Michele Riondino).
«It was a fairly complicated film – underlines Barbera – due to the little time available to work on the clothes, but exciting for the beautiful story that retraced the mood of “Gloria!” by Margherita Vicario”. On the screen, an eighteenth century closer to the Baroque of the late seventeenth century, with dark lines, than to the pastel-hued one typical of international cinema. The challenge was therefore to reconstruct in the costumes a historical period of transition on which little material exists, starting from the red dress worn by Tecla Insolia and the other interpreters of the orphans of the Pio Ospedale della Pietà. «At the time the girls, outside the hospital walls, wore a red dress as a representative dress and also wore a black mask, an element that the director cared a lot about and on which we focused a lot. For these dresses we respected the eighteenth century iconography, while for the everyday clothes we thought of very simple, material and not all identical models, which did not accentuate the waist too much, because Damiano did not want to make the eighteenth century feel too much. The idea was that they would be worn by girls continuously, so there was a lot of work done on the aging of the fabrics, dyed in various shades of grey.” A work of extreme precision, therefore, also successful thanks to Michieletto’s opera directing background and extended to the dress worn by Michele Riondino as Vivaldi. «In the film the great composer is a priest, so we went with a gray-black suit, which was also quite aged, and of which we created a duplicate for the violinist who acted as Michele’s stunt double, so that his arms or other details of the body could not be seen».
