Pietro Castellitto is The Forger: “That dark way between BR and the Magliana gang”

In his book on the Seventies Enrico Deaglio frames ’78 as the year of the two Toni: Chichiarelli and Manero. One is the icon embodied by Travolta, the other is the artist and ambiguous figure who Stefano Lodovichi tells in The forgerat the Rome Festival. A key yet unknown character who has crossed the history of our country, manipulating its symbols and truths. Suspended between genius and fraud, artist and ambiguous figure, Chichiarelli-Pietro Castellitto – was born in 1945 in Rignano Flaminio, on the outskirts of Rome. From a young age he demonstrated a natural talent for painting and miniature. He moves between shops, framers, antique dealers, until he perfects an extraordinary skill in the forgery of works of art and documents.

In the 70s, when Rome became the center of continuous tension between terrorism, secret services and organized crime, that talent led him to cross paths with the darkest worlds: the Banda della Magliana, the deviant services, underground politics. Characters who have the faces of in the film Edoardo Pesce e Claudio Santamaria. In the film the story, with a lot of license, and a less leaden tone than traditional cinematographic tales, is reconstructed through the relationship between three childhood friends, one will become a member of the Red Brigades, the other a priest.

Chichiarelli’s name exploded in 1978, during the kidnapping of Aldo Morowhen he was attributed the authorship of the statement number 7 of the Red Brigades, which announced, and was false, that the statesman’s body was found in the Duchess’ lake. A staging that mobilizes the carabinieri, army and firefighters in a useless hunt is one of the first political fake news in republican Italy. «Thirteen years ago – he says Riccardo Tozziwhich he produces with Cattleya – io e Stefano Petraglia we found a little book, The state forgerOf Nicola Biondo and Massimo Veneziani. I didn’t know this character: he had never been involved in any trial, but his name had resurfaced with the second Moro commission. I thought it was the perfect story for a film.” Also encouraging them, explains Tozzi, was Carlo Lizzani, who defined the story as “crazy”. «We then involved Miguel Gotor as a consultant: the mass of documents that emerged in the Commission allowed us to understand how many parallel lives Chichiarelli, who escapes any label, had.”

For the director Lodovichi «he is a man behind the scenes of the Great History, and this ambiguity makes him current. Even today, many young people experience a lack of interest in politics and public affairs.” Petraglia underlines how Chichiarelli «was not an ideologue or a militant, but an artist who transformed his talent into an instrument of manipulation, to the point of being overwhelmed by it. He starts playing fake, but that game becomes bigger than him. He is a boy full of ambition who ends up trapped in a network of stronger powers, just like Italy at the time.”

Per Pietro Castellitto «Toni is an avant-garde of fakes. He painted fake pictures and wrote a fake statement that changed the course of history. It is fascinating to think about how much we are immersed in the same mechanism today: we live surrounded by fictions, manipulated images, videos generated by artificial intelligence.” At the end of the 1980s, Chichiarelli was found dead – shot dead, according to the news -, although his death is shrouded in mystery. There are those who have hypothesized revenge, others a hoax, even the possibility that he survived. Castellitto reflects «through the stories of Tozzi and my father I understood that in the 70s there was a lively feeling, the conviction of being able to change history. At the time, young people had a future to write, today it seems already written.”