The idea is suggestive and, apparently, it is much more than a simple idea: bringing the film festival back to the terrace of the former Irrera a mare, in the reborn trade fair citadel. The president of the Strait Port System Authority, Francesco Rizzo, and the former mayor, Federico Basile, had discussed it a few months ago, well before the latter’s resignation, also because one of the objectives that Rizzo himself has set himself is precisely to bring back to life – a “dolce vita”, one might say – the square of what was the home of glamor in the 1950s and 1960s of Messina’s golden age.
From that terrace, after the first 1955 edition of the film festival led by Commendatore Giovanni Bellamacina, several stars of Italian and Hollywood cinema passed by, from Gina Lollobrigida to the Oscar winner Susan Hayward, from Vittorio De Sica to Ingrid Bergman. Clearly there is no ambition to return to those glories, certainly not in the short term, but the aim is to give the people of Messina an event that symbolically evokes those magical evenings, yes: a film festival that can represent, together with other events to be put on the calendar, a moment of reconquering a space that, even today, remains denied.
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