Benvenuto Presidente!

Directed by Riccardo Milani, starring Claudio Bisio, Kasia Smutniak, Omero Antonutti, Remo Girone, Massimo Popolizio, Italy, 2013, 100’

What happens if, by mistake, Giuseppe Garibaldi—a librarian who lives in the mountains and is a namesake of the famous “Hero of Two Worlds”—becomes the President of the Italian Republic? Unpredictable events, irregular procedures and unusual behavior completely out of line with the conventions of presidential etiquette are inevitable. Such as walking half naked through the rooms of his official residence, the Quirinal palace, some of whose interior settings (the President’s bedroom and the dining room) were reconstructed in Turin’s Palazzo Carignano.

Riccardo Milani shot almost all of this movie in Piedmont. Other interiors of the Quirinal palace were recreated in the Royal Palace of Turin (the sequence in which the newly-elected President receives letters of congratulation), in the Palazzo della Regione Piemonte (the presidential office) and the Accademia delle Scienze (the library in which the President falls from the bookshelves).