Dante Cappelli

Biography

Bologna, 1880s: a boy with a comic’s face and a tragedian’s eyes is born amid the city’s porticoed shadows. Within a decade he is stepping onto the flickering edges of a hand-cranked frame, giving body to Bizet’s fiery gypsy in Carmen (1909), then trading castanets for skulls as the melancholy prince of the ten-minute Hamlet (1910). A decade later, when the Alps themselves seem to rise against him, he scales the fatal cliffs of Le scogliere della morte (1921), hurling his silhouette into the Adriatic dusk. Dante Cappelli—silent, vivid, gone—leaves only these three shards of light still spinning in the dark.