Antonio Monda (born 19 October 1962) is an Italian writer, filmmaker, essayist, and professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He is a promoter of the arts, in particular film and literature.
Monda was born in Velletri (Metropolitan City of Rome Capital) into a family of liberal Catholic politicians, and currently remains a practicing Catholic himself. His father, who died of a heart attack when Monda was 15, was mayor of Cisterna di Latina, a city south to Rome, and helped finance films, including some by the Taviani brothers, who employed the young Monda in 1981. His brother Andrea, currently editor of L’Osservatore Romano is also a writer, and has published several books on Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Chesterton. His daughter, Marilù, published the fantasy saga "L'eredità dell'ombra".
Monda earned a law degree at the University of Rome La Sapienza. In 1994, he moved to New York City where, in exchange for an apartment on the Upper East Side, he worked as a superintendent, and began writing for La Repubblica as well as teaching at NYU. Susan Sontag, whom he interviewed, wrote a letter of support to help him gain tenure. From 1999 on, he also worked for various Italian government cultural institutions.
In an interview with The New York Times , Monda stated "I was the worst super in the world".
Antonio Monda started as an essayist and film critic. His first book on American cinema, La Magnifica Illusione (The Magnificent Illusion), won the Efebo d'Oro as the best film book of 2003. His book Do You Believe? was translated into several languages. His debut in fiction was Assoluzione , which was originally published in Italy in 2008. With L'America non esiste , winner of Cortina D'Ampezzo Prize, he started a ten-novel project, with recurring characters, on New York in the twentieth century. The second volume was La casa sulla roccia (2014), followed by Ota Benga (2015), L'indegno (2016), L'evidenza delle cose non viste (2017), Io sono il fuoco (2018), Nel territorio del diavolo (2019), Il principe del mondo (2021) and Il numero è nulla (2023). Among his other books are the collection of short stories and photos Nella città nuda , the anthology The Hidden God (curated with Mary Lea Bandy), Lontano dai Sogni , a long interview with Ennio Morricone, and Il Paradiso dei lettori innamorati , a collection of interviews with great writers about their favourite films.
On the occasion of the American publication of Unworthy (Penguin Random House) several novelists enthusiastically praised the book: Daniel Mendelsohn, Cathleen Schine, Mary Karr, Colum McCann and Philip Roth who wrote "With storytelling finesse, Monda has written a compact and forceful book that might be a morbid erotic tale out of Boccaccio, exposing the tormented lust of the clergy."
Monda has directed documentaries, commercials, and a feature film, Dicembre, presented at the Venice Film Festival, and the winner of such prizes as the Carro d'Oro, Premio Cinema Giovane, Icaro d'Oro, and Premio Navicella. In 2012 he co-produced Enzo Avitabile Music Life directed by Jonathan Demme, and also presented at the Venice Film Festival.
He was a film critic for both the New York Review of Books and La Rivista dei Libri . After eight years with the daily newspaper Il Mattino, he became the US cultural correspondent for La Repubblica (1994 until now). At the beginning of 2019 he joined La Stampa and in 2023 he started to contribute also with The Hollywood Reporter. After collaborating with the Italian TV channel La7 he began in 2013, the video column Central Park West on RaiNews24 and, in 2020, I film della mia vita on RaiPlay. His essays have appeared on the Paris Review and he collaborates also with Vanity Fair and Uomo Vogue .
Monda's interviews for La Repubblica have gained a status all of their own; he is known for asking deeply profound questions in a very direct manner, such as "Comment on Dostoyevsky's assertion that 'If God doesn't exist, everything is permitted'."
The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Monda connected with New York viscerally, though his particular affinity was for the city's Jewish-American experience. It might seem curious, since Mr. Monda is a practicing Catholic, educated by Jesuits. Today he still seems surprised by the attraction. "All of a sudden I discovered everything I like – music-wise, novel-wise – is either written, composed, or directed by a Jew", he said. He immersed himself in the writing of Singer ("my hero"), Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and Mr. Roth, as well as in Mr. Allen's films, in Arthur Miller's plays and in George Gershwin and Bob Dylan. Next, he had an idea, to make a documentary for Italian audiences on Jewish-American authors. He interviewed as many of them as he could and in each case began with a blunt question: "Why do I like you?" [1] This style caught the attention of director Wes Anderson, who cast Monda as himself in the film The Life Aquatic and included a parody—a DVD extra called "Mondo Monda" in which Monda asks such questions of Anderson and his associate, co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach, to befuddled reactions.
Monda often manages to use his interview connections for book topics, classroom speaker series, or social gatherings.
Amongst those he has interviewed are: Saul Bellow, Jonathan Franzen, Nathan Englander, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Don DeLillo, EL Doctorow, Annie Proulx and Elie Wiesel appear in his books Do You Believe? and Il Paradiso dei lettori innamorati. [2]
A promoter of Italian-American cultural relations, he is a champion of anglophone writers in Italy and, according to The New York Times, a "one-man Italian cultural institute". [3] Monda is also famous for his writers' and artists' salon in his Upper West Side, Manhattan apartment, where Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Tom Hanks, Don DeLillo, Bernardo Bertolucci, Derek Walcott, Paul Auster, Martin Scorsese, Philip Roth and Arthur Miller have mingled. The New York Times wrote: "In his Upper West Side apartment, Mr. Monda reigns as the host of the city's liveliest, some say only remaining, cultural salon". However, the word "salon" makes him wince. He prefers "laboratory of ideas." (...) "Mr. Monda's history, in all its facets, has molded him into more than a genial host and more than a champion of cultural networking. Having abandoned much of his own past, he has embraced the task of preserving Manhattan's cultural memory of itself through what he calls "my two great passions, American literature and films. (…) Mr. Monda, the Italian expatriate, has become a custodian of New York glories". [1] On March 4, 2015, Il Foglio published a profile by Annalena Benini entitled "The art of being Antonio Monda". [4] Antonio Di Bella has dedicated to his cultural salon the song "85th and Central Park West".
In 2006, he founded with Davide Azzolini Le Conversazioni, a global literary festival that takes place in Capri, New York, Bogotà, Palermo, Napoli and Rome. David Foster Wallace made his last public appearance there in July 2006.
In 2020, Le Conversazioni initiated an online project called Writers on Writers, in which 180 amongst the most important personalities in the world of art and culture read on video a favorite passage. Amongst the participants are: Woody Allen. Martin Scorsese, Marina Abramović, Orhan Pamuk, Marilynne Robinson, Francis Ford Coppola and Frances McDormand.
He is the founder and co-host, with Mario Sesti, of Viaggio nel Cinema Americano (A Journey into American Cinema) a series of public interviews at the Rome Auditorium with major film personalities such as Tim Burton, Spike Lee, Joel and Ethan Coen, Milos Forman, Sidney Lumet, Sean Connery, Jane Fonda, Susan Sarandon and Sydney Pollack. Terrence Malick made his first and only public appearance here in October 2007.
He has curated shows for the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, the American Museum of the Moving Image, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
He is also the co-founder and the artistic director of "Open Roads: New Italian Cinema".
In February 2015 he was appointed artistic director of the Rome Film Festival. His tenure was renewed for a second mandate in 2018 and ended at the end 2021.
Antonio Margheriti, also known under the pseudonyms Anthony M. Dawson and Antony Daisies, was an Italian filmmaker. Margheriti worked in many different genres in the Italian film industry, and was known for his sometimes derivative but often stylish and entertaining science fiction, sword and sandal, horror/giallo, Eurospy, Spaghetti Western, Vietnam War and action movies that were released to a wide international audience. He died in 2002.
Eugenio Montale was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, and recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Giovanni "Nanni" Moretti is an Italian film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor.
Niccolò Ammaniti is an Italian writer, winner of the Premio Strega in 2007 for As God Commands.
Ferzan Özpetek is a Turkish-Italian film director and screenwriter, residing in Italy.
Gianrico Carofiglio is an Italian novelist and former anti-Mafia judge in the city of Bari. His debut novel, Involuntary Witness, published in 2002 and translated into English in 2005 by Patrick Creagh, was published by the Bitter Lemon Press and has been adapted as the basis for a popular television series in Italy. The subsequent novels were translated by Howard Curtis and Antony Shugaar.
Raffaele La Capria was an Italian novelist and screenwriter.
Roberto Carifi, is an Italian poet, philosopher, and translator, supported since the beginning from Piero Bigongiari, one of the major exponents of Florentine Hermeticism. Considered one of the most important poet and intellectual of his generation he has been influenced by having a very difficult illness to cope with.
Carmine Abate is an Italian writer. He has written numerous short stories, novels and essays, mainly focusing on issues of migration and the encounters between disparate cultures.
Giulio Petroni was an Italian director, writer, and screenwriter, best known for his spaghetti westerns Death Rides a Horse (1967), with Lee Van Cleef in one of his first starring roles, A Sky Full of Stars for a Roof (1968), and Tepepa (1969), with Orson Welles and Tomas Milian.
Alberto Cavallari was an Italian journalist and writer.
Cesare Garboli was an Italian literary and theater critic, translator, writer and academic.
Notes of Love is a 1998 Italian-French romance film directed by Mimmo Calopresti. For her performance Valeria Bruni Tedeschi won the David di Donatello Award for best actress. The film also won the Nastro d'Argento for best script and the Ciak d'oro for best supporting actress.
Gianfranco Pannone is an Italian film and television director.
Biancamaria Frabotta was an Italian writer. She promoted the study of women writers in Italy and her early poetry focused on feminist issues. The main themes of her later works are melancholy, the dichotomy between Nature and History and between Action and Contemplation, the relationship between the body and the self, and conjugal love. Besides essays on feminism and academic works on poets such as Giorgio Caproni, Franco Fortini, and Amelia Rosselli, she wrote plays, radio-dramas, a television show on Petrarch, and a novel. Until her retirement in 2016, she taught Modern Italian Literature at the University of Rome La Sapienza, where she previously received her Laurea degree.
Giovanni Orelli was a Swiss poet and writer who worked in Italian and the Ticinese dialect. His cousin Giorgio Orelli was a poet and literary critic.
Roberto Montanari was an Italian painter. Known as “El Pintor de Los Toros,” he painted mostly Spanish bulls and landscapes and he was a pupil of Salvador Dalí. He held over 300 exhibitions. In 1970, 1971 and 1972 he exhibited with Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalì.
Antonio Ricci is an Italian television writer and showrunner.
Carmelo Samonà was an Italian academic and writer, as well one of the most important Italian Hispanists.
Aniello Petrucci, known professionally as Nello Petrucci is an Italian artist and film director. He specializes in painting, street art, and sculpture, and works in both collage and halftone. Petrucci lives and works in Pompei and New York City.