Petraglia, Sandro

(1947-)

   Screenwriter. For much of his professional career Petraglia has worked with Franco Rulli to form the most prolific and respected screenwriting team in the Italian cinema of the last two decades. With a background in film criticism, Petraglia collaborated with Marco Bellocchio, Silvano Agosti, and Rulli in writing and directing Nessuno o tutti—Matti da slegare (Fit to Be Untied, 1975), a three-hour documentary on Italian mental asylums, and La macchina cinema (The Cinema Machine), a five-part documentary on the seamier aspects of the Italian film industry screened on Italian television in 1979. He subsequently worked on the screen-plays of Nanni Moretti's Bianca (Sweet Body of Bianca, 1983) and La messa e finita (The Mass Is Ended, 1985) before teaming up again with Rulli to write several successful television miniseries including Attentato al papa (Attempt on the Pope's Life, 1986) and the popular and long-running series on the Mafia, La piovra (Octopus, 1987-1994). Regularly working together from then on, Petraglia and Rulli scripted many of the key films of the emerging directors of the New Italian Cinema, including Marco Risi's Mery per sempre (Mary Forever, 1989), Daniele Luchetti's Il portaborse (The Yes Man, 1991), and Gianni Amelio's Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children, 1992). While continuing to write for the big screen and furnishing the screenplays of films such as Marco Tullio Giordana's Pasolini un delitto italiano (Pasolini, an Italian Crime, 1995) and Francesco Rosi's La tregua (The Truce, 1997), they also worked extensively for television in the late 1990s, on quality miniseries such as Don Milani—Il priore di Barbiana (Don Milani, the Prior of Barbiana, 1997) and La vita che verra (The Life to Come, 1999). In 2003 Petraglia and Rulli achieved their greatest triumph with Marco Tullio Giordana's much-acclaimed six-hour epic, La meglio gioventu (The Best of Youth, 2003), for which they received both the David di Donatello and the Nastro d'argento.

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira