Maurizio Costanzo has died. The journalist, TV host, author and screenwriter was 84 years old. He died on Friday in Rome.
«Bboooni, be bboooni». When the rate of argument rose he resorted to the Roman adage. How many times did she say that Maurice Costanzo in the 4,480 episodes of his Show, the one that bore his name, the one that marked the evenings of 34 years of Italian television. They had closed it in 2009, but they couldn’t do without it, and they had restarted it in 2015.
Now it’s really gone.
He alternated commitment and disengagementgood and excellent, less good and less excellent programs, was that of the shirt with the mustache in the Dino Erre Collofit commercial, that of the P2 card number 1819, the one that the mafia tried to blow up for his commitment before alongside then in memory of Giovanni Falcone.
He was a journalist, but also a radio and television author of songs (for Mina, If by phoningwritten with Ghigo De Chiara, a success in 1966), playwright, screenwriter (for four films by Pupi Avati; for A particular day with Sophia Loren and Mastroianni conducted by Scola in 1977).
Born in Rome on August 28, 1938, Maurizio Costanzo began as a reporter of Country Evening in 1956. Another seven years to make his debut as a radio author on Rai con Songs and clouds, conducted by Nunzio Filogamo. These are small steps that lead him to television.
His is the first talk show on Italian TV — a genre that will later become as essential as it is inflated: Goodness them (Rai1, 1976 – 1978) is the first seed of a series of programs that will have their final flowering in 1982 with the Maurizio Costanzo Show, on stage from the Parioli Theater in Rome.
If Bruno Vespa reproduced the Third State Chamber on television, Costanzo invented the “media lounge” which starts on Rete4 and then expands on Canale 5, a place of transit and discussion, sometimes high-stakes, sometimes less so, where it’s quicker to list those who have never been invited rather than the other way around: in the end there will be 32,800 guests. Ordinary people and established characters.
For many it was a springboard, those 15 minutes of fame that if you managed to pierce the screen could be repeated in an instant which became a success: this was the case for Enrico Brignano, Gioele Dix, Giobbe Covatta, Enzo Iacchetti, Dario Vergassola , David Riondino, Daniele Luttazzi, Alessandro Bergonzoni, Valerio Mastandrea, Ricky Memphis, Platinette, Giampiero Mughini, Vittorio Sgarbi… A lot of disengagement but just as much commitment, like the campaigns against the mafia (he was a friend of Falcone, a guest in his programmes) which on May 14, 1993 they lead to an attack (failed): a car with 90 kilos of TNT explodes in via Fauro (near Parioli). A “medal” to be proud of. Minus the story of a decade earlier.
In 1980 in the list of Freemasons linked to Licio Gelli there is also his name. First he denies, then he scrambles (“I was registered without my knowledge”), then he admits his link with P2. An intense professional life. As much as the sentimental one.
Serial Matrimonialist, he has been married four times: con Lori Sammartino in 1963, with Flaminia Morandi in 1973 (two children: Camilla, screenwriter in Rai, and Saverio, the director). So a long coexistence with Simona Izzobut in 1987 he marries Marta Flavi. The fourth time is the right one: in 1995 she gives the ring to Maria De Filippi.
At the same time as Costanzo Showthe journalist and guide conductor for various editions also Happy Sundayat the beginning (1985) in tandem with Corrado, in the end with Loredana Lecciso (2006), in a path that from national-popular borders on trash with too much space gradually given to dubious characters from reality shows.
But it is also the thermometer of how the tastes of viewers have changed and so the success of his symbolic program gradually diminished: the audience thinned out, the broadcast evenings thinned out. It is the alleged epilogue, which arrives on December 9, 2009: the last episode with some of the most representative guests in the history of the broadcast: Raffaele Morelli, Afef, Katia Ricciarelli, Andrea Camilleri, Gino Strada and Enzo Iacchetti. He didn’t like amarcords. He recalled that he had been able to make a free program and that Berlusconi got angry only twice: when he invited Di Pietro, but he didn’t tell him directly, he let him know.
In an interview he chose to recall two moments of that very long experience: «Beauty is the feeling you get when you do something concrete: like when spectators in 1994 raised the money to rebuild a bridge destroyed in the Piedmont flood or when they helped set up hospitals for Emergency or finance projects to neutralize landmines. Sad was the farewell to Isabella Ceola, a woman who died of old age at 28, of premature senility. She had been on the show three times, she had been given strength by the fact that when they saw her on the street they no longer called her ET, but “Costanzo’s” ».
Once his show is over, he understands that there is no longer a place for him in Mediaset, perhaps not even gratitude, and the much-mistreated Rai (not by him) offers him a television pension: His goodness, Maurizio Costanzo Talkuntil Night has come with Enrico Vaime, a misunderstood program, a program of the past but out of time.
After all, TV is like that. He knew it. When the shadow seems to fall, suddenly something turns on again: the Costanzo Show turns on again on Rete4: è ithe myth of the eternal return to the same pointwhich is departure and arrival.