Franco Zeffirelli, master of the Italian cinema, was born in Florence on February 12, 1923, and this year the Foundation that bears his name organized, in his home town, a series of appointments to celebrate his 96th birthday. To start with, all the residents on the Florentine metropolitan area had the opportunity to visit for free the Zeffirelli Museum, which, in 22 rooms, illustrates the director’s seventy-year long career including costumes used in his films. Moreover, special tours of the museums have been guided by Maria Alberti, theater historian and director of teaching of the Franco Zeffirelli Foundation, and by Alessandro Massini, who works for the director’s personal archive.
The day of appointments in honor of Franco Zeffirelli will end at 8.30 pm in the Music Hall in Piazza San Firenze, where the Foundation is located, with the accordion concert of the young talent Lorenzo Albanese, winner of ‘Amadeus Factory‘ 2017, the first and only talent show in Italy dedicated to classical music and jazz. Class 1997, Albanese has already been applauded as soloist at the Milan Quartet Society and at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He will propose a program with pieces of overwhelming virtuosity: transcriptions by Pachelbel, Albeniz, and Rossini (the famous ‘Largo al factotum’ from the Barber of Seville), and original works of Angelis, Voytenko, Pusharenko, Semionow expressly written for the accordion. This last event confirms the Fondazione Zeffirelli’s vocation to promote young artists and marks the beginning of the new series of concerts called ‘Concerti di San Firenze’ organized by the artistic director of the activity cultural Francesco Ermini Polacci.