On March 25^th 2025, exactly 80 years after the first staging of Eduardo’s comedy at the Neapolitan San Carlo theater, the film will be screened, with the De Filippo family attending the event: it will be the beginning of the celebrations to mark the 2500th anniversary of the founding of the city of Naples.

The program, organized by the committee set up by the city of Naples, will unfold throughout the year, culminating on December 21st, the chosen date for the birth of Neapolis. This year will be filled with events, exhibitions, performances, and cultural initiatives, all paying tribute to the incredibly rich historical, artistic, scientific, and identity-based heritage of the city.

The projects launched this year will serve as a permanent platform for institutional and non-institutional collaboration, with a particular focus on the talents of this region, which boasts an extraordinarily complex and layered history, always embracing new languages, yet firmly grounded in a tradition that still shines brightly.

The symbol of these celebrations could only be Eduardo De Filippo. Born in Naples on May 24, 1900, to Luisa De Filippo, the daughter of coal merchants, and one of the most famous playwrights and actors of the time, Eduardo Scarpetta, Eduardo's parents were never married, as Scarpetta was already married to another woman. Luisa gave birth to Annunziata (Titina) in 1898, Eduardo, and Giuseppe (Peppino) in 1903. Eduardo, like his sister and later his brother Peppino, took to the stage from a young age. As soon as he could, he would wander around the Galleria Umberto I, observing the actors and theater producers who met there. Soon, he left school and, despite his mother’s disapproval, devoted himself entirely to theater. In 1918, he participated in the play La donna è mobile, before being called up for military service and returning home at the end of the war.

Eduardo met an American woman from the upper middle class in Philadelphia, Dorothy Pennington, whom he married on December 10, 1928. Dorothy was cultured and refined, and she would later help translate his plays when they began to receive requests from abroad. During World War II, which created numerous challenges for theaters and companies, Eduardo and Peppino entrusted the Banco di Napoli with distributing funds as subsidies for war victims in Rome. About two hundred people—Romans, Neapolitans, Palermitans, displaced families, and former artists, including a violinist—sought help.

In 1948, Eduardo purchased the ruins of an ancient Neapolitan theater, the San Ferdinando, with the goal of creating an enterprise that would provide jobs, spread the culture of the stage, and introduce both classic and modern Neapolitan and non-Neapolitan authors to the public. He wanted to establish a school for artists and technicians. Eduardo created a modern, cutting-edge theater while respecting the dignity of both actors and audiences. He preserved the memory of the 18th-century building, naming each box after an author or actor rather than numbering them.

Eduardo adopted the popular dialect, giving Neapolitan the dignity of an official language, while also developing a theatrical language that transcended both Neapolitan and Italian to become a universal language. There is no doubt that Eduardo De Filippo’s work and influence were key in elevating the “dialectal theater,” previously regarded as second-rate by critics, to the status of "art theater." In the 1950s, Eduardo also ventured into cinema to support the costs of running the San Ferdinando, and despite facing personal family tragedies in the 1960s, he continued to support the theater scene in Naples, Milan, and Florence.

In the early 1970s, Eduardo and his company, Il Teatro di Eduardo, participated in the World Theatre Season in London, presenting Napoli Milionaria!. He met Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave and later worked with them, as well as with Franco Zeffirelli. In late 1974, he staged Don Pasquale by Donizetti at the Lyric Opera in Chicago, returning in 1978 to work on the revival of Don Pasquale. The 1970s also saw his first collaborations with RAI, Italy’s national public broadcasting company.

In 1980, the University of Rome La Sapienza awarded him an honorary degree in Letters. Following the Irpinia earthquake that struck in the same year, Eduardo organized a fundraiser for the victims. On September 26, 1981, Italian President Sandro Pertini appointed him a lifetime senator. This marked the beginning of his commitment to fighting juvenile delinquency and advocating for a law to protect minors, offering them opportunities to study and learn a trade. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Eduardo passed away in 1984, and thirty thousand people paid their respects at the Senate. A large crowd accompanied him at his state funeral in Rome. He left a legacy to his beloved Naples, Italy, and the global entertainment world, with countless plays, films, operas, radio and television broadcasts, poems, and short stories.