DE BENEDETTI, ALDO

DE BENEDETTI, ALDO (1892–1970), Italian playwright. De Benedetti's light, sentimental comedies betray the influence of the French theater and of the Hungarian writers László Fodor and István Fekete. He made his reputation with the plays he wrote in the 1930s, including La resa di Tittì (1932), Lohengrin (1933), and Due dozzine di rose scarlatte ("Two Dozen Red Roses," 1936). The latter, his greatest success, became widely known outside Italy. Almost all of his plays deal with attempts to escape from a stifling reality, to seek refuge in a romantic life. De Benedetti also worked for the cinema as a scriptwriter and director. His most successful motion pictures were Marco Visconti (1922), Garibaldi (1926), Gli uomini, che mascalzoni (1932), and Mio figlio professore (1946), which was written in collaboration with Vittorio De Sica. Due to the antisemitic laws of 1938, De Benedetti had to stop writing plays; but he wrote the scripts of some successful movies, such as Maddalena, zero in condotta (1941). After World War II, he dealt with more serious matters in Lo sbaglio di essere vivo (1945), a play reminiscent of Pirandello. In 1970 he committed suicide. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: G. Antonucci, Storia del teatro italiano del Novecento (1986), 116–121. (Giorgio Romano / Alessandro Guetta (2nd ed.)