I share the fine commentary from Professor Aurelio Miccoli about Renato's new book. To read Aurelio's original Italian please visit my Affairs Valentino Facebook page.
"I had the good fortune to follow the personal story of Renato Floris to the end, strengthened by our friendship which matured over the years because of our common interest in the character Rudolph Valentino. Renato was a Valentino scholar-researcher and this was facilitated by the fact he held an excellent command of the two languages, Italian and American.
After the publication of many of his studies on the subject, almost always conducted in collaboration with Evelyn, he decided to work on the Italian translation of "My Private Diary". This would be a new and different work from the existing ones, associating a literal translation of the text to the history of the diary itself but also to the historical context in which it was published.
When he realized the seriousness of his illness, Renato felt the urgency to finish his work and so our discussions became more frequent despite the distance (and thanks to WhatsApp) we discussed everything and analyzed all the possible hypotheses on the statements Valentino left, including typos and inexplicable inaccuracies. In short, I a modest scholar of Rodolfo's Italian affairs, had become Renato's consultant.
I admired his great culture, (he worked in the Turin theater school), his subtlety of analysis but above all his intellectual honesty. So when Renato passed away, Evelyn became determined to complete his work and make a further effort for publication, co-opting me as a consultant for the Italian language.
The result is an enjoyable and innovative work because among other things, it reveals previously unknown facts about the true authorship of the various versions of the publication.
Renato also inserts, in the volume, 227 authoritative personal annotations on the text. He expands the analysis of the Diary with thirty-one images of the honeymoon of Natacha Rambova and Rudolph Valentino and thirty-four pages of images taken from the version of the diary which appeared in the film magazine Pictures and Picturegoers in 1925.
All Rudolph Valentino enthusiasts and silent film scholars should know this work."
The book can be found here: bit.ly/3smXxqm
Below: Renato and Aurelio - two great friends in Castellaneta some years ago.
