CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
Menu
Research dossier · People & Ideas

Riccardo Freda

Italian film director (1909–1999)

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 4, 2026
Entity authorityQ750983 ↗
Source-derived summary

Riccardo Freda (24 February 1909 – 20 December 1999) was an Italian film director. He worked in a variety of genres, including sword-and-sandal, horror, giallo and spy films.

Freda began directing I Vampiri in 1956. The film became the first Italian sound horror film production.

Biography

Riccardo Freda was born in 1909 in Alexandria, Egypt to Italian parents. Freda attended school in Milan where he took art classes at the Centro Sperimantale. After school he took on work as a sculptor and art critic.

Film career

Freda first began working in the film industry in 1937 and directed his first film Don Cesare di Bazan in 1942. Freda began directing I Vampiri. I Vampiri was the first Italian horror film of the sound era, following the lone silent horror film Il mostro di Frankenstein (1920) A wave of Italian horror productions did not follow until Mario Bava's film Black Sunday was released internationally.

Editorial summary

“Riccardo Freda” enters the record as italian film director (1909–1999). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Riccardo, Freda and Italian can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1909, 1999, 1956, 1937—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1909-02-24. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Riccardo, Freda and Italian.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Riccardo Freda” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Riccardo, Freda and Italian provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q750983. VIAF identifies the subject as 44354845. The Library of Congress control number is n85175872. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1909, 1999, 1956 and 1937.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Riccardo Freda”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Riccardo Freda primary sources, Riccardo Freda archive and Riccardo research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Riccardo Freda”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Riccardo Freda” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.