MARCO FERRERI AND ITALIAN CINEMA

Italian cinema has always paid special consideration to truffles.

A shining example is the Italian director Marco Ferreri who actually dedicated two of his films to the precious fruit of the earth: The Man with the Balloons from 1965 (known as Break Up in the longer and complete version), a sequence included in the film Kiss the Other Sheikh which starred the masterful Marcello Mastroianni and Blow Out from 1973 with the great Ugo Tognazzi, Marcello Mastroianni and Philippe Noiret.

In the first film, The Man with the Balloons, there are two scenes in which truffles are present, in this case white ones: the first scene has Marcello Mastroianni going to the market, stopping at a stall which is displaying numerous white truffles, which he smells and finally buys.

In the second scene, which is very amusing, we see Mastroianni sitting down for dinner and, while watching the dog, he takes the truffle and starts to grate it, shouting out the cost of every strip of the prized white truffle that ends up in his food.

In Ferreri’s second film, Blow Out, the Italian director films truffles in the scene in which Tognazzi prepares duck paté. An unusual, but nevertheless appealing, approach.
From Marco Ferreri we move on to 1986 with Luca Verdone, director of the successful comedy Seven Kilos in Seven Days, with Carlo Verdone and Renato Pozzetto.
In this scene Renato Pozzetto finds himself in a minimarket set on ordering various very expensive foods, including two packages of truffle cream.
Without knowing it, Carlo Verdone is watching him as he shops, and he asks Pozzetto what he is doing. Pozzetto, who is surprised to see him there, replies: “Well, it was going on a bit and we wanted to curb our appetites.”

Verdone then says: “You’re about to have dinner.” Pozzetto in turn says: “Just a snack.” At that point Verdone exclaims: “Goodness, is that what you call a snack? Crab paté, truffles, salmon, caviar…”