Lucci Hotel Rome Blog

Our Blogger: Stefano

Ennio Morricone is an Italian composer and musician, born in Rome. His long artistic career includes a wide range of composition genres and he has always produced, as well as worked as a conductor.

He worked at the RAI television company in Italy as a music assistant too. But he became famous working with Sergio Leone, the great Italian director of western films. For Leone’s films he composed the music for: A Fistful Of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More(1965), The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966), Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)and A Fistful Of Dynamite (1971). Many of this films remain very popular in Italy today.

From that time, Morricone has scored over 400 films working with many Italian and international directors, including Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Oliver Stone, Pedro Almodovar, Giuseppe Tornatore, Brian De Palma, Roman Polanski, and Warren Beatty.

Among the most famous films he worked on include: The Battle Of Algiers; Sacco and Vanzetti; Cinema Paradiso, Once Upon A Time In America, and The Untouchables.

Ennio Morricone is an acclaimed Italian Academic at the prestigious Accademy of Santa Cecilia in Rome. Infact, he has conducted many orchestras worldwide, including the Orchestra of the Santa Cecilia Academy for many symphonic seasons. He also conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus of La Scala Theatre, the National Brazilian Orchestra, the Budapest Opera House Orchestra, Orchestra of the Bavarian Radio Munich Rundfunk, the Orquesta Nacionales de España, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra. He was a composer for theatre, radio too.

In his long career, Ennio Morricone has received many awards: a Golden Lion, 3 Golden Globes, 1 Grammy Award, 7 David Di Donatello, 1 European Film Award and after 5 Oscar Nominations. But on February 25 2007 he received an Oscar for his career.

Quentin Tarantino even used several of his compositions for the Kill Bill trilogy and many musicians continue today to make Morricone part of their concerts. The Ramones used the soundtrack from “the good, the bad, and the ugly” as an introduction to their concerts while Bruce Springsteen used “ Once upon a time in the West” for his entrances. If you would like to go to a concert at the Accademy of Santa Cecilia, why not check into our elegant Yes Hotel? Being so well located you can travel with ease.

Our blogger: Raul

If you look for Silvio Berlusconi on Wikipedia you’ll discover he’s “an Italian politician, entrepeneur,  real estate and insurance tycoon, bank and media proprietor,  sports owner  and songwriter".

Berlusconi is a man of many faces, and undoubtedly this versatility is one of the virtues that have allowed him to stay in power for more than ten years.

To understand Berlusconi is to understand Italy: its fears, its dreams. The man owns (successfully) a powerful world-class soccer  team, is the third richest man in Italy and a charming figure who has convinced the Italians to elect him on two different occasions. On the other hand, the initial sources of his wealth are still subject to debate. He is well known for tailoring laws that fit his needs, and has been deemed in more than one occasion “unfit to lead” , in the words of The Economist.

Berlusconi started doing business in his Native Milan, with a huge real estate project called Milano 2. Then he jumped to the media industry and banking and then went on to found his own party in 1994. According to some, he did this to save himself from jail and his interests from bankruptcy, or, in Berlusconi’s version , to become “a public servant because I do not want to live in an illiberal country, ruled by immature forces and by people who are well and truly bound to a past that proved both a political and economic failure”. In the last part of this sentence, he was trying to exploit the Italians fear of communism, a common weapon in his media arsenal..

Even if you don’t agree with his ideas or his life its difficult not to like Berlusconi, and that’s perhaps his most dangerous talent. He is, maybe, the ultimate entertainer: he wrote the anthems for his own party, Forza Italia; of his soccer team, AC Milan, and takes care of his image with the compulsion of an actor: For example, its well-known in Italy that he has had a face-lift and several hair transplants. There is also something dramatic, or better, tragicomic in some of his most famous “Berlusconisms”, the most recent defining Barack Obama, as a “handsome tanned man.” Berlusconi incarnates Italy, as it is right now. And this Italy will live as long as Berlusconi. And Vice-versa.

If you want to have a chance to see Berlusconi while you are in Rome, try taking a walk on Via del Corso: Palazzo Chigi, the seat of the Italian government, lies there. To have easy access to this and many other Roman curiosities, make sure to book a well located hotel. Yes Hotel, and Hotel Des Artistes are two excellent  options.

Mr Wiltshire is not your average Londoner. Born in 1974 from West Indian parents, affected of a form of autism he never was able to communicate with the outside world like the rest of us. He grew up with his mum and sister. It soon became obvious that he had an exceptional talent at drawing and recreating scenes of what he saw.

As early as 1987, he was spotted by the BBC and the very same year some of his works were already published. Since then Stephen Wiltshire became the subject of many Tv documentaries.

If at the beginning Stephen would draw animals, then London buses, he eventually dedicated to landscapes, cities and great buildings of all over the world: In 2001, further to flying over the city by helicopter, he then did a perfectly detailed and accurate drawing of London. Subsequently , he also drew Tokyo in 2005, and at a later stage he drew Frankfurt and Hong Kong.

Stephen Wiltshire, now known as the Human Eye because of his extraordinary ability to memorize all visual details and to recopy them on paper, came to Rome in June 2005. He took a short trip on helicopter during which he admired the Trevi Fountain, Rome St Peter’s Cathedral, the Ancient Rome and the Colosseum and the Venezia Square, and also flew over our My Hotel Rome.

His drawing of the city of Rome took him a couple of days only, and the accuracy of it all is simply amazing.

Watch here for the full video of the Rome trip and drawing: