(ANSA) - Roberto Benigni turned in another memorable performance on Monday when he was awarded Italy's highest civilian honour.
The Tuscan actor-director-comedian was named 'Cavaliere di Gran Croce' by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in a VIP-packed ceremony at the presidential palace. The normally sober knighting event slid into a comic number as the irrepressible Benigni leapt up, swept to the ground in an ostentatious bow before Ciampi and then attempted to hang his newly-received medal around the president's neck.
The Oscar-winning film-maker also picked up a special Italian cinema prize, the De Sica Award, which he was given two years ago in honour of his career but had failed to collect.
After receiving the award from Ciampi, Benigni began kissing and shaking the hands of all the people standing next to the president including the towering members of the presidential guard.
When it was noticed, however, that a mistake had been made in the wording of the award, Benigni gave his medal back to Ciampi and repeated the entire performance.
Benigni shot to international fame in 1999 with his Holocaust movie Life Is Beautiful, which he wrote, starred in and directed.
The picture won three Oscars, for best foreign film, best actor and best music, and Benigni's exuberant clowning at the Academy Picture award ceremony won him fans around the world.
Benigni's new film La Tigre e la Neve (The Tiger and the Snow), a romantic comedy set against the backdrop of the Iraq war, recently opened in Italy and has proved a hit with the public.
Meanwhile, President Ciampi used the De Sica award ceremony to appeal for more investment in Italian cinema and culture.
"Investing in culture, believing in culture is a necessity for Italians. If our museums, films, theatre and music work then the whole of Italian society works better and with that the economy," said the 84-year-old president.
On a brighter note, he observed that more Italians were going to see home-made films.
He said that over the first ten months of the year, the number of people who went to see an Italian movie was up by more than a million over the same period in 2004.
The annual De Sica awards commemorate Italian movie great Vittorio De Sica who starred in and directed a series of hit films in the 1940s and 1950s, a time considered by many a heyday of postwar Italian cinema.
This year's recipients included award-winning actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, popular TV and film star Luca Zingaretti and acclaimed South Korean director Kim Ki-Duk.
