Sem Benelli was born in
Prato on August 10, 1877. He studied at the
Piarist school in Florence, where his chief teacher was the scholar
Ermenegildo Pistelli. He achieved widespread recognition for his historical dramas in verse. The first of these was
La maschera di Bruto (1908), in which
Lorenzaccio, the murderer of Duke
Alessandro de' Medici, is likened to the Roman politician
Brutus. The second and better known, ''
The Jester's Supper (1909), is a theatrical adaptation of a story by Antonio Francesco Grazzini set in Renaissance Florence. A revenge drama, it caught the popular taste of the period and its leading role, Giannetto, attracted great actors such as John Barrymore and Sarah Bernhardt. The play was a great New York theatre success in 1919 under the title The Jest
, starring Lionel and John Barrymore. In Italy Paola Pezzaglia was considered the best male protagonist of La cena delle beffe
, after an incident in 1913 when the leading man collapsed before playing the character of Giannetto; she took his place achieving resounding success. Ever since Pezzaglia carried on doing the same role again and again. Benelli wrote the screenplay for the 1942 film The Jester's Supper'' based on his own famous play. Benelli's tragedies can be compared to
D'Annunzio's for their use of verse, elaborate sets, and costume, but they had a stronger appeal to middle-class audiences and might usefully be regarded as caricatures of D'Annunzio's more lofty attempts at tragic revival. Benelli also wrote several prose plays; his bourgeois comedy,
Tignola (1908), treated the same themes as
Luigi Chiarelli's
La maschera e il volto (1916) some eight years earlier. After serving in
World War I, Benelli joined the
Fascist movement, but left the party after the
Matteotti affair (1924). The book
Io in Africa (1936) gives his impressions of the
war of Ethiopia, in which he served as a volunteer. At the outbreak of
World War II, however, he rejected Fascism again and emigrated to
Switzerland, returning to Italy only after
fall of the Fascist regime. in 1914, Benelli commissioned the
Sem Benelli Castle in
Zoagli where he would die. ==References==