Silvia Colloca

Silvia Colloca  is an Italian-Australian actress, opera singer, cookbook author, and TV cookery show personality. She has published six cookbooks.

Colloca was born in Milan to Loredana and Mario Colloca. Her only major film role was in Van Helsing, in which she played Verona, one of Dracula’s brides. On 25 September 2004, at the medieval castle of Montalto in Tuscany, Italy, she married the Australian actor Richard Roxburgh who played Dracula in that film. They have two sons and a daughter. The family currently resides in Sydney.

Colloca is an opera-trained mezzo-soprano and worked as a musical theatre performer in Italy before becoming a film actress. She appeared in 2015 as Orfeo in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in Sydney, and as The Queen in Lindy Hume’s production of Snow White for Opera Queensland and La Boite theatre in 2016. Her debut album, Sing Like an Italian, was released by Decca in October 2022. She performs four numbers alongside arias and art songs by international stars singers. The album made its debut at No. 1 on the ARIA Core Classical and Classical/Crossover charts.

Made in Italy with Silvia Colloca, is an Australian 10-part TV series, premiered on SBS TV in November 2014, coinciding with the publication of the book of the same name. Colloca took a film crew home to meet her Italian family, showcasing three picturesque regions of Italy, Abruzzo, specificallt Torricella Peligna, where her family is from, Marche, and Molise, using her mother’s kitchen to present her dishes.

Silvia’s Italian Table, an eight part reality and cooking series debuted on ABC on 6 October 2016. In each episode, Colloca invites a group of celebrities to cook and eat with her and engage in entertaining and intelligent conversation. 

Antonio Piccone Stella

(1905-1996)

Director of Journalistic services for RAI from 1946 to 1962

In the early 1930s he joined EIAR just at the time when the first director of the radio news, Pio Casali (a journalist from IL RESTO DEL CARLINO), was putting together the editorial staff. Piccone Stella in a few years became chief editor and right-hand man of Casali (the gr had been transferred to Rome). in 1935 as director of the radio newspaper he proposed two new editions of the great Piccone Stella went to Ethiopia as a war reporter and landed with the Italian soldiers in Albania to report, day by day, on the invasion wanted by fascism.

On September 8, 1943 he chose not to collaborate with the Germans to escape the possible injunction and took refuge in the house of a friend. He then returned to Abruzzo to move to Bari where he presented himself at the radio station run by the British VIII Army and resumed his work: “I didn’t have a lira, which did not prevent the Germanized Radio Roma from calling me and my collaborators (Alba De Cepedes , Anton Giulio Majano, Diego Calcagno and Pio Ambrogetti). Among the other collaborators Pio Ambrogetti Antonietta Drago, Giorgio Spini, Agostino Degli Espinosa, Vicenzo Talarico.

Antonio Piccone Stella became director of the radio news, replacing Corrado Alvaro the well-known writer, with the arrival of television it fell to Piccone Stella the task of organizing the news whose first headquarters were in Milan, Vittorio Veltroni sent here. Piccone Stella assumed the position of central director of the journalistic services with the dual responsibility of the radio news and the television news. It was he who hired  Sergio Zavoli in Rai.

In 1948 Piccone Stella wrote a PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR THOSE WHO SPEAK ON THE RADIO AND FOR THOSE WHO LISTEN TO IT, which for decades was almost a Bible that journalists newly employed at the radio news station received with the best wishes for their work. With Antonio Piccone Stella the radio language was born, that booklet was a handbook of the perfect and objective radio journalist. At the beginning of the 1950s Piccone strengthened the gr by creating many specials (the one on the Polesine valley is memorable). In 1954, with the advent of TV Piccone Stella, he was appointed director of the Rai news services. Piccone Stella’s long season at Rai ended at the beginning of 1962, in the 35 years until his death in 1997.

Vincenzo Taito

(1910-1970)

Cinematographic producer

Several films with Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Vincenzo Taito is known for Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), Appointment for Murder (1951) and The White Sheik (1952).

You can view his IMDB profile here.

Federico Teti

(1910-1975)

Producer of various successful films. He is best known for Federico Teti is known for Aida (1953), Lost Lives (1959) and La moglie è uguale per tutti (1955).