Silenzio. Le sette vite di Diana Karenne

After L’architettrice, Melania Mazzucco once again tells the story of an entire world through the destiny of one woman. ‘Nobody knows who she is. But she is unique, strange, different from all the rest. They will not forget her.’ A foreigner and a mystery, the protagonist of this story arrives in Italy in 1914. Nothing she says is true, because she is both on the run and searching for herself. She doesn’t know exactly what she wants yet, but it could be anything: writer, painter, musician. Instead she becomes a film actress, and under the name of Diana Karenne she is one of the divas of the golden years of Italian silent films: the queen of silence. Melania Mazzucco has followed the shadow of Diana Karenne and her thousand identities in archives, libraries and film libraries all over Europe. In her many lives, Diana Karenne was many things: a mysterious foreigner, a femme fatale, a gypsy, a singer, a film entrepreneur, a spy, a nun torn from the convent, a saint, a countess, a queen, a tsarina. Before time erased all memory of her, between 1916 and 1919 she was above all the most fascinating diva of Italian silent cinema. But that’s not all. She wrote the scripts for her films, began to direct them, becoming one of the first female film directors in history, and from a certain point onwards she produced them as a businesswoman. Restless and elusive, Diana juggled aristocrats, diplomats, producers with a reputation for being crooks, actors on the prowl, always followed by the suspicion of being a spy. She moves from Rome to Turin, from Milan to Naples and Genoa. She is admired by her female audience, who see her as a model of freedom and independence, and feared by men because of her unpredictability and stormy romances. She reveals nothing of her past, and never settles anywhere. She is the first to believe the lies she tells, to the point of creating an alternative reality, and a new woman: Diana Karenne, in fact. In the post-war period, however, the Italian film industry went into crisis, and in 1921 Diana moved to Paris and then to Berlin. There were exiles from Bolshevik Russia there, and her origin forced her to come to terms with her identity. Unlike other silent film stars, it wasn’t so much the transition to sound that ended her acting career, but rather the irresistible desire to disappear, to become yet another woman: the mystical muse and companion of a Russian poet to whom she could sacrifice her art.