Italo and Cinema

“I’d like to use this space to tell you a few things about my father Italo Zingarelli, a film-maker, producer and director, as well as the founder of the Rocca delle Macìe winery, which today I am lucky enough to run, along with my wife Daniela, with the collaboration of my sister Sandra, my nephew Fabio  and with my children Andrea and Giulia.”
A generous man and a lover of life, blessed with great intuition and farsightedness, Italo was a noble example of the self-made man. After a brief early career as a boxer, which saw him reach the final of the Italian Newcomers’ Championship in the middleweight and heavyweight classes, in 1949 he started working in films, initially as an extra and a stuntman, before going on to become a production technician and, from 1954 onwards, a production manager on numerous films.
In 1955 he gets married with my mother Laura Spano, which will support him for all his life in every project he flings himself into.
In 1958, he directed his first feature, The Warrior and the Slave Girl.

It was in the early 1970s that my father felt the time had come to realize the dream that he had nurtured throughout his life: to open a winery in the heart of Tuscany. And so, in 1973, in contrast to all those who at the time were fleeing the countryside to work in the city, he purchased a rundown 14th-century borgo in Castellina in Chianti and set about painstakingly restoring the buildings, thus giving rise to the Rocca delle Macìe winery.
My father, who always gave 100% to everything he was involved in, had the skill and the commitment to make his dreams come true.
My father managed to infuse me, my brother Fabio and my sister Sandra with his great passion for Tuscany and for the art of winemaking, as well as with the desire and enthusiasm to continue writing the never-ending story that binds the art of wine-making to the life of man.”

Sergio Zingarelli