Totò: The Prince of Comedy Who Invented a New Italian

His real name was Antonio Griffo Focas Flavio Angelo Ducas Comneno Porfirogenito Gagliardi de Curtis di Bisanzio — and yes, he was a genuine Neapolitan nobleman, descending from Byzantine royalty. He called himself Totò, and he was the greatest Italian comic actor of the twentieth century. He made roughly 97 films, was adored by every social class in Italy, and created a form of comedy so uniquely Italian — so rooted in Neapolitan theatrical tradition and Italian linguistic virtuosity — that it is nearly impossible to translate or explain to foreign audiences.

Totò was born in Naples in 1898 and trained in the tradition of the commedia dell'arte and the Neapolitan popular theatre. His physical comedy was extraordinary — rubber-faced, boneless, capable of expressions and movements that seemed to violate normal human anatomy. But what set him apart was his language. Totò played with Italian like a musician plays with an instrument — distorting words, inverting syntax, inserting Neapolitan dialect, inventing expressions on the fly, and deploying a kind of surreal logic that made nonsense feel profound. His verbal comedy was as important as his physical comedy.

Totò was systematically underrated in his own lifetime by Italian film critics, who considered his films too popular and too commercial. It was only after his death in 1967 — almost blind, having made films continuously to the end — that the critical establishment recognised his genius. Directors like Pier Paolo Pasolini had already seen it: Pasolini cast Totò in several serious roles, including the celebrated short film La Terra Vista dalla Luna (1967), and spoke of him as a unique, unrepeatable phenomenon. Today Totò is considered not just a great comic but a cultural philosopher — someone who used laughter to expose the absurdity of authority, hierarchy, and Italian social pretension.

Totò's most extraordinary achievement may be his poetry. At the end of his life, almost totally blind, he composed a poem called 'A Livella' (The Spirit Level) in Neapolitan dialect. It tells the story of a pompous nobleman who disturbs a dustman's grave in a cemetery, insisting on being placed in a more prestigious location. The dustman rises from the dead to rebuke him: in death, everyone is equal. The spirit level of death brings all to the same height. It is one of the most beautiful and moving Italian poems of the twentieth century — and it comes from a comedian who was barely taken seriously as a poet in his lifetime.