Late actor, writer and director Paolo
Villaggio, one of the greats of Italian comedy, will lie in
State at Rome city hall early on Wednesday so fans can pay their
respects, sources said Tuesday.
There will be a non-religious ceremony later that day at
Rome's Casa del Cinema (Home of Cinema) centre, his children
said.
Villaggio died in a Rome clinic on Monday at the age of 84.
"Bye Dad, now you are free to fly," Villaggio's daughter
Elisabetta said on her Facebook page on Monday.
Villaggio is best known for the character of bumbling
bookkeeper Ugo Fantozzi, who he played in a series of movies
that produced some of Italian cinema's most memorable moments.
These included Fantozzi declaring that Battleship Kotiomkin,
a parody of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, was a
"cagata pazzesca" - "an incredible piece of crap" - in Il
secondo tragico Fantozzi (The Second Tragic Fantozzi, 1976) .
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