HOW HUMAN IS HE, THE PLOT
The film, dedicated to Paolo Villaggio, aired in prime time on Thursday 30 May on Rai Fiction and is available on RaiPlay. The story develops starting from Genoa, in the mid-1950s, where Paolo Villaggio and his band of friends from the Genoese bourgeoisie –a very young Fabrizio De André, the “Polio”, a professor of literature in a wheelchair, and Piero, Paolo’s brother, carry out their goliardic nocturnal raids. But while Polio and Piero work and study during the day, Paolo and Fabrizio sleep and in their spare time compose songs like ‘Il Fannullone’ and ‘Carlo Martello’ returns from the battle of Poitiers”. Paolo, an out-of-course law student with a blank transcript, gets his girlfriend Maura pregnant. Then, the bride in the town hall, dressed in a t-shirt, clogs and swim shorts. Paolo’s father, an engineer from Palermo, finds him a job at Cosider, where Villaggio will remain for seven years and where the idea for the timeless character of the accountant Ugo Fantozzi will mature. In those same years, at the Baistrocchi company’s theater he began to experiment with what would become his future workhorses. It is here that he is discovered by Maurizio Costanzo, actually in Genoa to see Jannacci, who however had fallen ill and had been replaced at the last minute by Villaggio himself. Immediate love at first sight which led to the signing of a contract for Costanzo’s own Roman cabaret theatre, the “7×8”. From here begins the long career that has given one of its most beloved faces to the history of Italian cinema and television.