Angelo Maria Ripellino

Life and career Born in Palermo, the son of a high school professor, in 1945 Ripellino graduated in Slavistics at the University of Palermo. In 1947 he enrolled the filmmaking courses at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia; the same year he married Ela Hlochova, a Czech student of Italian literature he had known during a 1946 study travel in Prague, who would who would become his closer collaborator. Ripellino also had an important academic career, first as a lecturer of Slavic philology and Czech language at the University of Bologna, and later as professor of Russian language and literature and Czech-Slovak literature at the Sapienza University of Rome.

Ripellino suffered from tuberculosis from early age and underwent a pneumectomy. He died because of the consequences of a cardiovascular crisis in 1978.