Editing Michelangelo Antonioni (section)

== Early life ==

Antonioni was born into a prosperous family of landowners in [[Ferrara]], [[Emilia-Romagna]]. He was the son of Elisabetta (née Roncagli) and Ismaele Antonioni.<ref name="film-reference-ma" /> The director explained to Italian film critic Aldo Tassone:

{{Blockquote|quote=My childhood was a happy one. My mother... was a warm and intelligent woman who had been a labourer in her youth. My father also was a good man. Born into a working-class family, he succeeded in obtaining a comfortable position through evening courses and hard work. My parents gave me free rein to do what I wanted: with my brother, we spent most of our time playing outside with friends. Curiously enough, our friends were invariably proletarian and poor. The poor still existed at that time, you recognized them by their clothes. But even in the way they wore their clothes, there was a fantasy, a frankness that made me prefer them to boys of bourgeois families. I always had sympathy for young women of working-class families, even later when I attended university: they were more authentic and spontaneous.{{sfn|Tassone|2002|p=6}}|source=Michelangelo Antonioni}}

As a child, Antonioni was fond of drawing and music. A precocious violinist, he gave his first concert at the age of nine. Although he abandoned the violin with the discovery of cinema in his teens, drawing would remain a lifelong passion. "I have never drawn, even as a child, either puppets or silhouettes but rather facades of houses and gates. One of my favourite games consisted of organizing towns. Ignorant in architecture, I constructed buildings and streets crammed with little figures. I invented stories for them. These childhood ''happenings''—I was eleven years old—were like little films."{{sfn|Tassone|2002|p=7}}

Upon graduation from the [[University of Bologna]] with a degree in economics, he started writing for the Ferrara newspaper ''Il Corriere Padano'' in 1935 as a film journalist.

In 1940, Antonioni moved to Rome, where he worked for ''Cinema'', the official [[Italian fascism|Fascist]] film magazine edited by [[Vittorio Mussolini]]. However, Antonioni was fired a few months afterwards. Later that year, he enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia to study film technique but left after three months. He was subsequently drafted into the army, and survived being condemned to death as a member of the [[Italian resistance movement|Italian Resistance]].<ref name="film-quarterly-bachman" />