Letizia Quaranta

Biography

Turin, 30 December 1892: while the city’s trams clanged through the frost, Letizia Quaranta drew her first breath—and with it, a vocation for the camera. By 1914 she was already haunting the silver sheet, stealing hearts in Love Everlasting. Six years later she stepped into the muscle-bound myth of La trilogia di Maciste, flexing charisma opposite cinema’s first colossus. Between those milestones she met fellow scene-stealer Carlo Campogalliani; the set lights dimmed on their wedding but flared again for her 1942 swan-song, Forbidden Music, where her voice—now seasoned by three decades of applause—echoed through wartime darkness. On 9 January 1977, Rome’s winter mists folded around her final curtain; the reels, however, still spin, keeping Letizia forever alive in flickers of light.