Call for Puccini’s body to be exhumed

The commemorations to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini are going to be lively. A woman from Pisa, Nadia Manfredi, has come forward claiming that she is the granddaughter of the maestro, a claim that is rebutted by the better-known holder of that title, Simonetta Puccini (pictured).

Manfredi’s claims are put forward in a film to be presented next month at the Venice Film Festival, which asserts that her grandmother Giulia had an affair with the composer .The result of this union, according to Manfredi, was her late father, a night porter also called Antonio, who died in 1988 without knowing for certain his true parentage. According to the Tuscan newspaper La Nazione, she has made a formal request that the composer’s body be exhumed so that his DNA can be compared with that of her father. She said that she was not interested in money - only in "knowing the truth".

Simonetta is outraged, calling the claims "an attack on the private life of the maestro and his family". Insisting that she is the sole heir, she has put up posters at Torre del Lago and Viareggio, where Puccini had a villa, entitled "In Defence of Giacomo Puccini". They ask residents and visitors to sign a petition asking for his memory to be protected against "exaggerations and inventions".

The saga has dragged some of the darker episodes of the composer's life to the surface. Paolo Benvenuti, the director of the film, met Nadia Manfredi while researching a film on her great-aunt, Doria. Doria was a maid in the Puccini household who poisoned herself in 1909 after being accused by Puccini's wife, Elvira, of having an affair with the composer - only for a post-mortem examination to prove that the maid died a virgin. Elvira was convicted of slander and Puccini had to pay substantial damages to the Manfredi family to keep his wife out of jail.

According to Benvenuti, letters and documents found in Nadia Manfredi's house in Pisa show that the composer's mistress was not Doria after all, but her cousin Giulia, an independent-minded woman who ran a restaurant at Torre dal Lago. The director added that he believed Giulia to have been the model for the saloon bar owner Minnie in Puccini's 1910 opera La Fanciulla del West.