Stelvio Cipriani

Stelvio Cipriani learned his first music at the organ of a Roman parish church, taught by a priest, and went on from the Santa Cecilia Conservatory to the least glamorous of apprenticeships — shipboard bands, and then the piano stool behind the singer Rita Pavone. From the mid-1960s he wrote for the cinema and did not stop: more than two hundred scores across westerns, poliziotteschi, horror, melodrama and adventure, composed at the speed those industries demanded and never losing the melodic signature that made them recognisable. The music for The Anonymous Venetian brought him a Nastro d'Argento and remains the score by which he is known, while the theme from La polizia sta a guardare found a second life when later film-makers borrowed it. He died in 2018.