Zvanì begins with the train taking the coffin of poet Giovanni Pascoli from Bologna to his birthplace: a symbolic image of the connection between private life and collective memory. Director Giuseppe Piccioni has explained that it was inspired by Paul Fusco's photographic book, Funeral Train, about Robert Kennedy's funeral. The journey acts as a device to bring together ghosts and real characters, allowing the viewer to play a strong imaginative role in the story. The film is not a biopic, it focuses on only a few episodes of the Romagna poet's life, and is intended as more of a guide "to the young, adventurous Pascoli, attracted by revolutionary ideals, who risked losing the most important moment of his poetic vocation."
The film was shot in Emilia-Romagna in 2024: at Villa Torlonia and the house of his birth, the Museo Casa di Pascoli, in his birthplace of San Mauro Pascoli (province of Forlì-Cesena). Locations also included places around Sant'Arcangelo and Bologna. Three weeks of filming in the province of Lucca, Tuscany (October - November 2024) included Barga, the hamlet of Castelvecchio Pascoli, and the Val d'Orcia.
Zvanì begins with the train taking the coffin of poet Giovanni Pascoli from Bologna to his birthplace: a symbolic image of the connection between private life and collective memory. Director Giuseppe Piccioni has explained that it was inspired by Paul Fusco's photographic book, Funeral Train, about Robert Kennedy's funeral. The journey acts as a device to bring together ghosts and real characters, allowing the viewer to play a strong imaginative role in the story. The film is not a biopic, it focuses on only a few episodes of the Romagna poet's life, and is intended as more of a guide "to the young, adventurous Pascoli, attracted by revolutionary ideals, who risked losing the most important moment of his poetic vocation."
The film was shot in Emilia-Romagna in 2024: at Villa Torlonia and the house of his birth, the Museo Casa di Pascoli, in his birthplace of San Mauro Pascoli (province of Forlì-Cesena). Locations also included places around Sant'Arcangelo and Bologna. Three weeks of filming in the province of Lucca, Tuscany (October - November 2024) included Barga, the hamlet of Castelvecchio Pascoli, and the Val d'Orcia.
MeMo Films, Rai Fiction
1912: following the death of Giovanni Pascoli, a train takes his coffin to Bologna for his funeral, carrying students, officials, and relatives, and his sister Maria (known as Mariù). The journey reflects the sense of communal mourning, with people of all social classes paying homage to the poet. Mariù's memories reveal aspects of Giovanni's life: his father's assassination, the poverty of his youth, his political commitment, and complicated relationship with Giosuè Carducci. Despite personal and political difficulties, he completed university and reunited with his sisters after years. They lived together, but family dynamics were tense: independent Ida left her brother to seek a life of her own. Famous but unhappy, Giovanni retreated to Castelvecchio with Mariù, where his funeral train passes through a surreal space, peopled with mysterious apparitions, just like his poems.
