Italy's only world heavyweight boxing champ, giant 1930s slugger Primo Carnera, is the star of a new show here that frames his sporting, film and cartoon incarnations against the backdrop of memorabilia from the period .
Carnera's championship belt, outsize kit and skipping rope will be on show along with stills from his 17 movie bit-parts, cartoons featuring his gentle-giant character that appeared in US newspapers, commercial products he endorsed, and posters and objects from the famed ocean-going liners he used as a hero of Fascist Italy .
The show will also spotlight a fascinating autobiographical account of Carnera's post-boxing wrestling career, which turned up in a box in his American daughter's house last year .
The exhibit is part of celebrations for the 100th anniversary of Carnera's birth .
Already this year there has been a raft of events including a film, 'Me, Primo Carnera', which sought to set the record straight about an athlete once regarded as a figure of fun .
The documentary on Carnera (1906-'67) used newsreel footage as well as fragments of his brief film strongman career - including The King of Africa and Casanova's Great Night - and featured a montage of contemporary press headlines both eulogising and vilifying the big man .
There has also been a made-for-TV film starring Joe Pesci, numerous commemorative publications and a series of conferences about the colossus who fled dirt poverty, first taking on stevedore jobs in France before fighting his way to fortune in the United States .
Carnera was a 2.02-metre (six feet seven inch) immigrant who got into the fight game to support his two children in the Depression years and rose to wrest the greatest crown of all from the fearsome Jack Sharkey in June 1933 .
He lost his title the following year to the even more ferocious Jewish American boxer Max Baer .
The Carnera-Baer bout features briefly in the Oscar-nominated film The Cinderella Man, in which Russell Crowe plays the man who made a remarkable comeback to take the title from Baer, James J. Braddock .
Carnera himself appeared in several postwar Italian sword-and-sandal epics after playing himself in the 1933 Hollywood film The Prizefighter and the Lady .
He also inspired the 1956 movie The Harder They Fall starring Humphrey Bogart and Rod Steiger, in which his nemesis Baer did an autobiographical turn .
Nicknamed the Ambling Alp, Carnera had an unfair reputation as a lumbering pugilist with massive strength, few skills and a shortlived career .
In fact he fought from 1925 to 1945 - interrupted by wartime service in the Italian Resistance - and had a respectable 88-15 record including 68 knock-outs - 15 of them in the first round. He won 18 straight fights by KO between December 1929 and June 1930 .
He was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990 .
Italy's most popular boxing star Nino Benvenuti has been lyrical in his recollections of Carnera, whom he met at the 1960s Olympics .
"When I was a kid Primo was a legend for me. I saw him as the unbeatable giant in the fairy tales .
Benvenuti was at pains to correct the historical record about Carnera's boxing ability .
"They used to say he wasn't skillful. That's false. He had one of the best jabs I've ever seen in a boxer of that size" .
The previously unknown autobiography was unearthed from a dusty old trunk in Florida by Giovanna Carnera two years ago .
Also entitled "Me, Primo Carnera," it was serialised in Italy's premier sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport .
Carnera says little of the ring and hardly mentions the one big title he won, preferring to talk about the characters he met on the professional wrestling circuit in Japan and other countries .
This second career finally won Carnera economic security .
