In 1986, Vieri Razzini was in charge of film programming at Rai 3. On the tenth anniversary of Luchino Visconti’s death, he decided to devote a retrospective to him, accompanying the broadcast of the films with a series of testimonies that would bright to light Visconti’s many souls: the intellectual, the aristocrat, the political figure, the reformer of Italian theatre, the flamboyant opera director. The working group tasked with collecting them consisted of the cinephiles of Officina Filmclub – Ciro Giorgini, Paolo Luciani, Cristina Torelli, Roberto Farina, Roberto Torelli, Fabrizio Grana – and myself; in other words, a small band of insatiable hounds. I remember those months of exhilarating hunt: the goal was to track down everyone who had collaborated with Visconti in any capacity, track them down, and have them recount their experience of working with the great Maestro. We interviewed around a hundred people. And since we were indeed insatiable, these were extremely long, eager, voracious interviews. The interviewees did not merely speak about Visconti; through their recollections of their relationship with the Count, they also revealed a great deal about themselves. Before long, Razzini forgot that he was the commissioner and joined in the hunt; we all became accomplices, and we ran wild, without restraint. From the vast amount of material gathered, we edited eight thematic episodes, each over an hour long, featuring an extraordinary cast: Claudia Cardinale, Annie Girardot, Charlotte Rampling, Silvana Mangano, Mariangela Melato, Clara Calamai, Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Enrico Medioli, Pietro Notarianni, Goffredo Lombardo, Pietro Ingrao, Giuseppe De Santis, Francesco Rosi, Franco Zeffirelli, Citto Maselli, Piero Tosi, Mario Garbuglia, Umberto Tirelli, Franco Mannino, Carlo Maria Giulini, Aldo Tonti, Giuseppe Rotunno, Armando Nannuzzi, Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman, Massimo Girotti, Paolo Stoppa, Burt Lancaster, Dirk Bogarde and Walter Chiari. As in an extended drawing-room conversation, the interviewees overlap, complement, and at times contradict one another, each recounting their own truth; while we interviewers simply listen, invisible. Visconti himself, almost as if summoned, appears in rare black-andwhite archival footage.

Caterina d’Amico de Carvalho