Francesco “Citto” Maselli, an influential Italian auteur who collaborated with Lucia Bosé, Claudia Cardinale, Shelley Winters, and Valeria Golino on films that merged his political zeal with his penchant for female-centered dramas, has died in Rome.
Francesco Maselli also known as Citto Maselli was an Italian film director and screenwriter. He directed 38 films since 1949. Continue reading to find out his cause of death.
Francesco Maselli’s cause of death: How did Francesco Maselli die?
Maurizio Acerbo, chairman of Italy’s minuscule Communist Refoundation Party, the group of die-hard Italian leftists that Maselli championed, revealed the director’s death to Italian news agency ANSA, and the director’s widow confirmed it. However, the cause of Maselli’s death was not disclosed.
Meanwhile, Maselli was born into a sophisticated family from Italy’s Southern Molise area and reared in an intellectually stimulating atmosphere – his father was an art critic – and engaged in Italy’s partisan Resistance movement against fascists and German occupiers at a very young age.
Maselli made his feature film debut with the World War II drama “Gli Sbandati” (“Abandoned”), starring Lucia Bosé, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1955 after graduating from Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and working as an assistant to Michelangelo Antonioni.
