mandolin player.

[duccio]

This picture reminded me of something, and finally I remembered the scene in Pasolini's Decameron (1971) where an artist and a Duke riding in a cart get caught in a rainstorm and hurry to a small shed in the fields where a peasant is sheltering, playing a mandolin. The Duke introduces the artist (Pasolini) as Giotto's pupil. They quickly take some cloaks to keep dry and leave the old peasant to continue on their way, laughing that who would ever guess that they are a Duke and a Great Artist, wearing those rags.

Here is a clip in Italian that has been subtitled in Spanish. The first part is another story about a man from Naples who goes to northern Italy to take care of some business for his father. He's kind of a scoundrel. While he is visiting two business partners of his father in a scene visually recollecting paintings of 'Christ feasting with the money lenders', and Caravaggio's 'Supper at Emmaus', he suddenly collapses. The two hosts are worried they will be blamed, but the sick man piously confesses a pack of lies, the most minor sins imaginable convincing the priest to declare him a saint. Watch closely art historians, the film is full of quotations from renaissance and baroque paintings.

This is a favorite movie of mine since I saw it when it first came out. I thought I better explain how my photograph reminded me of a mandolin player.

Comments

[shinsetsu]

Okay, the guy in the middle is cute, but I dun understand a single word they are saying!!

[duccio]

That's Franco Citti. He was in lots of Italian cinema, and in The Godfather 1 as one of Michael's shotgun guards when he was in Sicily - the one with the white shirt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RycGvpN1vgA&feature=related
Pasolini's Decameron is available in video and DVD and probably you can get an English dubbed version. I saw it in the movies with English subtitles twice or three times over the years, and I have a copy on tape dubbed in English. You might find it kind of offensive because Pasolini took broad swipes at the church (and everything else) but then so did Giovanni Boccaccio. The Decameron was written in vernacular Italian, and the movie followed suit, so the Italian in the movie is here and there unlike what one might learn in school, rather more like what one might hear in the streets of Naples. It's a very funny film.

[shinsetsu]

And your photo looks very Depression era. You are right in time for the next phase of life as we know it--well, as I know it, anyway.