Luca Canfora

Luca Canfora (Naples 1972 - Capri 2023) was an Italian costume designer. After graduating from the Filippo Palizzi State Institute of Art in Naples, he moved to Rome, where he began his professional career at the tailor's shop of the Teatro dell'Opera, gaining his first experiences in the field of melodrama and ballet. Here he had the opportunity to start working with Danilo Donati, of whom he was first assistant in Jerusalem - Piergiorgio Gay's staging of Verdi's opera - and, subsequently, in Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio (2002), that represents the beginning of Luca Canfora's film career. Collaborator of Maurizio Millenotti in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004) and Catherine Hardwicke's Nativity (2006), he worked with Gabriella Pescucci in Stephen Sommers' Val Helsing (2004) and with Milena Canonero on Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), a film that won an Oscar for Best Costumes. With Carlo Poggioli he has worked on many projects: the TV miniseries Jason and the Argonauts (2000), Anthony Minghella's Return to Cold Mountain (2003), The Young Pope (2016) and The New Pope (2020) by Paolo Sorrentino, where Luca Canfora signs the costumes together with Poggioli. He also worked on Spike Lee's Miracle at St. Anna (2008), Timur Bekmambetov's Vampire Hunter (2012) and James McTeigue's The Raven (2012). Since 2013, with The Great Beauty, he has started a fruitful ten-year collaboration with the Oscar-winning director Paolo Sorrentino for feature films, short films and TV series, including: the short films The Dream (2014) and Piccole Avventure Romane, for which he signs the costumes as Costume Designer, and the films Youth (2015) and Loro (2018). On the strength of the experience gained with Paolo Sorrentino's TV series The Young Pope, in 2019 Luca Canfora designed the costumes for the Netflix production directed by Fernando Meirelles, The Two Popes, carrying out a consistent and meticulous research work aimed at maximum realism, through the consultation of an extensive photographic archive of L'Osservatore Romano. On September 1, 2023, while he was busy filming a film by director Paolo Sorrentino, he was mysteriously found lifeless in the waters of the sea of Capri. The Naples Public Prosecutor's Office has opened an investigation to establish the causes of death.