When Ivan (my co-director) told me that he wanted to contact Simone Cristicchi to ask him
to read for us part of the autobiography of Umberto Tommasini, i immediately thought: “Who? The songwriter? He is not going to answer...” When he instead called us back, accepting with a rare enthusiasm, i start researching and studying more his career. And i found out that a part from winning the Sanremo music Festival, and producing various popular albums (never ordinary or trivial), Simone Cristicchi has a real and proper passion for popular culture and social history. Recently he sang with the miners of S. Flora, and he acted in theatre in the “Li Romani di Russia”, a tragic witnessing and an historical fresco of the terrible Russia campaign, during which hundreds of soldiers died.
At the end Ivan's idea was more solid than it sounded at the start.
So, dispite my skepticism, Simone's contribution for “An Anarchist Life – Dando del tu al mondo” has been precious: he read and acted parts that we chose of the biography as if they were his own, even if the time was very short, both to prepair and to organize. He has been just great!
Thank you Simone..
The foreground you see is a piece of art by Belinda De Vito, that made it through ispiration to the old writings on the walls of the Tommasini's house in Vivaro.
Fabio Toich

After the successful collaboration for "Boundless- story of Emilio", the association Dropout is back to work with Belinda de Vito, who

worked on some scenes of "An anarchist life." Belinda has given a big help during filming in Vivaro, where we organized a commemorative lunch in the old family house of  Tommasini. The house, now abandoned, however, has maintained its charm: the old stone walls can still be seen in the writings of the early twentieth century, the resurgence HOPEFUL proletarian and the advent of the "new world", reminding of the humanism and solidarity that is breathed by "Bichicchiu" in those days.

Here you can find attached the photos of Belinda De Vito made in Vivaro.

(Photos of Belinda de Vito)

Vivaro, in the province of Pordenone, is a special place. And not just for the fact of being at the center of the so-called "zone of Magredi" or the territory where the streams Cellina and Meduna sink into the ground water leaving the land barren and gravel.

It is also because it is the country of origin of the family Tommasini, the "Bichicchiu" as they were and are still remembered in the village. Over a hundred years ago Angelo Tommasini based in his home the first social library in the area, picking up in Trieste, where he had emigrated and worked as a porter, old books discarded and worn.

A real cultural bomb in western Friuli culturally dominated by the Catholic Church. The House of Tommasini thus became a place of exchange, where we were going to read, talk, drink a glass of wine. A place that still returns intact that alchemy.

It was not difficult for us to decide to set some parts of this documentary in Vivaro, in the old house.

A few months ago the magazine "A" gave a lot of space to the figure of Umberto Tommasini on the occasion of the edition in Italian of the biography. On that occasion, the editors of the historic Milan anarchist magazine published the interview made ​​by Claudio Magris and Claudio Venza, which became the preface to the book above. It 'goes without saying that the intervention of Magris is full of ideas.

On the page you will also find a heartfelt memory of Umberto by Clara Germani, editor of the first version in the dialect of the biography.

To access the page, click on "continue reading" below, and then in the "Related Articles" found the link to the page in question.