These Italians are Really Entertaining! Quiz

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. A Sicilian inspector, bald headed, fond of good food, is the protagonist of a television series, very successful in Italy but also appreciated abroad. What's the name of this police chief?

Answer: Montalbano

"Il Commissario Montalbano" was created by Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri, who enjoyed big success very late in life. The series is set in Sicily in the fictional towns of Vigata and Montelusa and is partly spoken in Sicilian. The plots are always based on criminal cases, but with a dose of good humor.
Montalbano house, on the beach of Puntasecca (province of Ragusa) became a coveted B&B.
The series was distributed in the UK, France, Germany, and Japan among others.

2. Maybe the most Italian of all forms of entertainment, opera is very often sung in Italian. Mozart composed operas with Italian Librettos, like "Le Nozze di Figaro", "Cos� fan tutte", "Don Giovanni". Do you know the name of Mozart's Italian librettist?

Answer: Lorenzo Da Ponte

Da Ponte (real name Emanuele Conegliano) led a very adventurous life that ended in the USA, where he founded a opera house, the New York Opera Company. He became US citizen and died in New York in 1828. He wrote many librettos for Antonio Salieri, the "rival" of Mozart.

3. After WWII, Italian cinema lived its Golden Age with films depicting the hard life in post-war Italy, often employing non-professional actors. The idea, as director De Sica stated, was "deromanticizing" cinema. How was this movement, or this style, called?

Answer: Neorealismo

If you want to have a precise idea of what Neorealismo is, watch De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves", released in 1948.
"Nouvelle Vague" was the "French New Wave" of the late '50s and '60s, a revolutionary artistic movement whose protagonists were, among others, Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer.
"Peplum" is an Italian film genre focused on epic movies (generally B-movies) staged in ancient Greece or Rome.
"White Telephones" or "Telefoni Bianchi" is a term used to define romantic films of the '30s. Inspired by American comedies, set in beautiful houses where white telephones were seen as a status symbol of the rich, they were a typical expression of mainstream Italian culture under the Fascist regime.

4. Italian Prog-Rock: have you ever heard about it? This style of music, "Progressive", started in the '70s but lives on. Italian Prog-Rock has a lot of followers all around the world, especially in Japan. Can you guess, among these four bands, which one is or was NOT Italian?

Answer: Magma

Magma is a French band.
Italian audiences always loved progressive rock. Some English bands were more popular in Italy than at home: Gentle Giant for instance. Phil Collins remembered that the first Genesis concert held in an arena and not in the usual small venue was in Rome in 1972. But maybe he just wanted to be kind; that year in Rome, Genesis played in a disco.

5. "Six Characters in Search of an Author", "The Man with the Flower in His Mouth", "Man, Beast and Virtue" are all plays written by one of the most important dramatists of the twentieth century. What was his name?

Answer: Luigi Pirandello

Pirandello was born in Sicily in 1867 and died in 1936. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934.
He wrote around forty plays, novels, short stories and poetry.

6. Umberto Eco, professor, critic, linguist and semiologist-turned-novelist almost by joke, in 1980, wrote a novel that became one of the greatest literary hits written in Italian. Do you remember the title of this book, set in a medieval monastery?

Answer: The Name of the Rose

"Il nome della Rosa" sold 50 million copies worldwide. It was adapted for the screen twice, once in 1986 by Jean-Jacques Annaud (with Sen Connery) and in 2019 by Giacomo Battiato (starring John Turturro). After that Mr. Eco started to believe he was a real, great writer (he was wrong, in my humble opinion) but never again wrote something that matched the success of his debut novel.

He said many times that he hated "Il Nome della Rosa".

7. He is a mouse. He's made of foam, he has large blue eyes. He was a guest of "The Ed Sullivan Show". What's his name?

Answer: Topo Gigio

The character was created by Maria Perego back in 1958 and he was one of the protagonists of the newborn Italian television.
The puppet is animated from behind by puppeteers clad in black, on a black background. In this way, Topo Gigio can physically interact with human counterparts as he did in his "interviews" with Ed Sullivan.

8. Films like "For a Fistful of Dollars", "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly", "Once Upon a Time in the West", "Once Upon a Time in America", "Novecento", "The Mission", "The Untouchables" and many others wouldn't be the same without their wonderful music scores. Who wrote them?

Answer: Ennio Morricone

Born in 1928, Morricone is the probably the most influential and successful Italian composer of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In his eighties, he wrote the score for Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight". In his career, he composed more that 400 film scores and sold 70 million records worldwide. Besides music for films, Morricone composed successful songs, music for advertising and a hundred of classical pieces. He won two Academy Awards, three Grammy, a Golden Lion in Venice and a lot of other awards.

9. Even if he's more appreciated among his peers than by the large public, do you happen to know the name of the Italian artist who created some wonderful animated films like "Allegro Non Troppo" and the series of "Mr. Rossi" shorts?

Answer: Bruno Bozzetto

If you don't know the work of Bozzetto, may I recommend "West & Soda" (a parody of American Western), "VIP My Brother Superman" (a couple of super heroes in a fun but bitter satire of exploitation of factory workers) and "Europe and Italy"? You can find a lot of Bozzetto masterpieces on Youtube.

10. If I say "Pinocchio" you probably think Disney. But who was the Italian writer who created the character of the wooden puppet whose nose worked like a lie detector?

Answer: Carlo Collodi

Thanks to Disney, "The Adventures of Pinocchio" or "Story of a Puppet" is probably the most famous Italian book for children. The novel was written by Carlo Lorenzini, alias Collodi, in 1880. The film "Pinocchio" was released in 1940. Some notable differences between novel and film: the Blue Fairy in the novel is "The Blue-Haired Girl", the whale is a shark, the wicked puppeteer Stromboli is the rude but golden-hearted Mangiafuoco.

Source: Author zordy

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor kyleisalive before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

A list of Italian works, artists and characters, hopefully renowned worldwide.

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