The Ugo Tognazzi House Museum, lovingly called “Casa Vecchia”, is located in Velletri (Rm) on the La Tognazza estate, bought by the actor in the early 1960s, and where he lived until his death in 1990. The Tognazzi family still lives here today.
The house was the fulcrum of all the artist’s private and professional life, for example the mansion was the location where, in August 1972, Ugo Tognazzi married Franca Bettoja. Ugo used to invite his friends, colleagues, actors, directors and screenwriters, creating a climate of “professional conviviality”, which promoted the creation and realization of some of the screenplays of some of the most important movies in the history of Italian cinema.
Prestigious examples are The Ape Woman, The Big Binge by Marco Ferreri, Romanzo Popolare and Amici Miei by Mario Monicelli, In The Name Of The Italian People by Dino Risi and Il Vizietto by Eduard Molinarò up to The Tragedy Of A Ridiculous Man by Bernardo Bertolucci, which earned Tognazzi the Golden Palm at Cannes Festival for the best male performance in 1981.
In this evocative place Ugo has cultivated his greatest passions, besides movies: crops and cooking, and this inspired him to create his own personal farm, turning him into one of the pioneers of the “km 0” and organic philosophy in Italy. Tognazzi has been one of the first to divulge on a national scale, through cinema, radio, TV, books and interviews, his gastronomic philosophy “from the garden to the table and from the grape berry to the bottle”.