Mario Alberto Ettore Monicelli (; 16 May 1915 – 29 November 2010) was an Italian film director and screenwriter and one of the masters of the Commedia all'Italiana (Comedy Italian style). He was nominated six times for an Oscar, and was awarded the Golden Lion for his career. Biography The early times Monicelli was born in Rome to a well-do family from Ostiglia, a comune in the province of Mantua, in the Northern Italian region of Lombardy, as the second of five children of Tomaso Monicelli, a journalist, and Maria Carreri, a housewife. His older half-brother, Giorgio (whose mother was actress Elisa Severi), worked as writer and translator. An older brother, Franco, was a journalist. Raised in Rome, Viareggio (Tuscany) and Milan, Monicelli lived a carefree youth, and many of the cinematic jokes he later shot in Amici Miei (My Friends) were inspired by his own experiences during his youth in Tuscany. In Milan, he finished his third year of high school and began his university studies. In the Lombard capital, Monicelli met Riccardo Freda, Remo Cantoni, Alberto Lattuada, Alberto Mondadori and Vittorio Sereni; together they founded, with the support of the publisher Mondadori, the newspaper "Camminare", in which Monicelli dealt with film criticism. Monicelli recounted how, in his criticism, he was very critical of Italian films, while, on the other hand, he exalted American and French films, which he loved very much, stating that perhaps he did so out of a veiled form of anti-fascism. "Camminare" did not last long as the Ministry of Popular Culture suppressed it because it was considered left-wing. Later, Monicelli returned to Tuscany, where he completed his University studies in Pisa, at the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy. Interested in the world of celluloid, he kept on putting off graduating until he was called up for military service. Monicelli said: "it was enough to go to graduation dressed as a soldier and you didn't need a thesis or anything else [...] That's how my degree came about, I don't even know if it's valid". In 1934 he shot his "first cinematographic experiment", the short film Cuore rivelatore (Tell-tale Heart), inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's work of the same name, together with Alberto Mondadori and Alberto Lattuada, with the latter acting as set designer as he was an architecture student at the time. The three sent it to a national cultural festival, "Littoriali", hoping in