A trip to Piacenza

Castello di Monticello (my own practice painting)

PLANS, plans, plans. Bing is going to northern Italy, to visit some of the locations where the movie Hornets’ Nest (1969) was filmed.

I have booked a stay at the Grande Albergo Roma in Piacenza. It's a four-star hotel where the cast and crew were billeted during the filming, which took place from July to early September 1969. 

The plan is to hire a car that will head southwest to Monticello commune, specifically to a group of centuries-old buildings (houses, a pond and a chapel), where the Reanoto scenes were filmed. 

I suppose you might wonder why, having found the place on Google Streetview and getting some good screenshots of it (as well as stumbling upon photos uploaded by various folks on the net, for the sake of the beauty of the place and totally independent of its having been a film location: the movie is largely forgotten today) I still have this insane need to visit the site for myself.

The same reason I’m staying a night at the Grande Albergo Roma and another night at a hotel in Salsomaggiore Terme (so that I can devote the better part of the following day in the vicinity of the Torrente Stirrone). I want to walk in the footsteps of the film crew 55 years ago, to be “where it all began.”

I don’t know whether this is an act of destruction (end of the magic!) or of analysis, of finding or of letting go. Maybe all of these.

I have Daniel Keller to thank for the filming location of that crucial scene in the middle of the movie, where Aldo (Mark Colleano) and his gang bargain with Capt. Turner (Rock Hudson) to exact revenge on the Nazis occupying their village of Reanoto. I know that for many people Hornet’s Nest is just another war flick, and a pretty bad one at that, but I can’t help interpreting it as a coming-of-age film. The boys who played the members of the gang were mostly between the ages of 14 and 15. Those scenes by the side of the creek (irrigation ditch in the novelization; the Torrente Stirone in reality) dramatize the moment when young people realize that, in actuality, they are agents and actors as crucial to the outcome of a mission as any adult. It’s the moment that Aldo and his gang assert their agency. 

The summer I saw the movie, I was 11, and also beginning, in increments, to assert myself and think independently of my over-protective parents. Through those experimental excursions (or incursions, actually) into the world of fantasy, where they could not follow me, I carried my rebellion out. It wasn’t the first time I had written stories about people in books or films, nor the first time I had incorporated myself and others from my reality into these stories. The difference was that I was inventing stuff about a film that amused my father but repulsed my mother. Everything about Hornet’s Nest was wrong in her book – the violence, the molestation of the doctor (and subsequent violation and chastisement by the Rock Hudson character!), the children bearing weapons, the death of two of the young characters. It didn’t matter that the anti-war message was plain to see by the end.  My mother detested that movie.

I say “I” but I mean “we” – because my sister was my co-author, co-artist and co-conspirator.

The film culminated in the demolition of the “Dela Norte dam” – with the Diga di Mignano near Lugagnano Val d’Arda representing that massive concrete structure. Although it would have been possible to visit, or just look at, Diga di Mignano from the surrounding hills, I decided to leave it out of the itinerary. Possibly because I’d always been more interested in the boys (especially the smaller ones, as well as brave, doomed Silvio who at the time was the most romantically handsome young man I had ever seen) than Turner’s mission. For them, the breathtakingly violent raid on Reanoto (oh, the enthusiasm with which they greeted the destruction of their own village!) was the climax – the fulfillment of revenge.  

The hamlet in Monticello  is mentioned by several sources online, as is the Castello di Rivalta. The banks of the Torrente Stirone I only know from the location at the top of a call sheet that Dan Keller, or his parents, preserved. I was very lucky to find this on his website.

There is one other filming location that I wish I could visit, but sadly, I have absolutely no idea where it is. It is a cluster of buildings, with a low wall, a flagpole, a square tower and a belfry, that represents another village, where the benevolent Captain von Hecht (Sergio Fantoni) has set up his headquarters. At first I thought this was the Borgo di Rivalta/ Castello di Rivalta southeast of the city of Piacenza, another location associated with the film, but after studying various scenes from the movie, I concluded it was not. Neither is it the hamlet in Monticello (the back buildings, that is).  It is apparently a small village set in a valley (as one can see houses on a ridge at one point, and the diagonal line of mountains in another scene).  In my desperation, I went to an Italian website that listed all the castelli and churches in the Piacenza region, one page per – and Piacenza has a lot of castles and churches. I did not find it. I went to Google Earth and viewed every cluster of buildings in the area around Piacenza, looking for a footprint that would reflect the configuration of buildings in this sequence. This was, literally, looking for a needle in a haystack. Houses in Italy tend to look similar, with their red tiled roofs, though they may have been built centuries apart. It may not have been in Piacenza at all. The foothills of the Appenines are a big place. No, the only way I’ll be able to find it is to gain possession of a name -- a clue, the key.

Sadly, all the adults who were connected to the production have no doubt passed away. There will be others who might hold the key, though. The boys. All 15 were at this location. Some of them are on Facebook, actually, the Italians as well as the English speakers, but I haven’t had the nerve to approach them all. 

But I am overthinking things again, as usual. The truth is, I am still in Denmark, and will be here for some time. But I will post about my quest and my journey, when, hopefully, all is behind me. Wish me luck.

Now I too have seen the northern lights!

Took an hour of waiting, craning my neck until it hurt, face pressed to the angled window in the roof, ankles aching. I'm glad I had the patience, but sorry that my phone camera couldn't catch them. Saw four shooting stars as well, and something that might have been a satellite, but was probably just a plane.

I called to my husband to come up and see them, and he did, but was a trifle disappointed -- they were just broad bands of light emanating from the horizon (or from behind the silhouette of a tree in front of the property). He went back to bed, and didn't come up when I virtually yelled for him. This time the sky was lit up in subtle blue-green hues, striped with darker bands ... if they weren't so literal, the words "celestial" and "unearthly" would apply. Yet, there was nothing vulgarly aqua and magenta about them -- what we who live in more southerly latitudes know as northern lights are actually enhancements thanks to special camera settings. They were subtle gradations of color -- just I suppose herdsmen in the steppes and in Lappland must have seen them for centuries, although on nights with particularly intense solar activity they would have been far more spectacular. I just stood there, taking as much of it in, sad that I didn't have my husband, or someone, to share the sight of it with, although from all over Denmark people have been posting their own photos of the lights (lucky them, knowing how to work their cameras). The lack of photo proof doesn't matter, actually. I've seen the lights!! I hope I never forget them, nor erase the memory of them with false ones.

Maybe I can paint them sometime.