• Film Director Marco Bellocchio, 1939
• Marxist Sociologist and Political Philosopher Antonio Negri, 1933

Born in Bobbio, near Piacenza, Marco Bellochio had a strict Catholic upbringing - his father was a lawyer, his mother a schoolteacher. He began studying philosophy in Milan but then decided to enter film school, making his first film, Fists in the Pocket (Pugni in tasca), funded by family members and shot on family property, in 1965. He made a big impact on radical Italian cinema in the mid sixties, and was a friend of Pasolini. In 1968 he joined the Communist Union, and began to make politically militant cinema. More recently however, in a 2002 interview, he remarked : "I can talk about my personal ideas but Marxism has little to do with it now. Today politics means administration. No party is now proposing a radical change of anything, and radical change is no longer very interesting to me as an artist." He is an atheist.

His films include China is Near (1967), Sbatti il mostro in prima pagina (Slap the Monster on Page One) (1972), Nel Nome del Padre (In the name of the Father - a satire on a Catholic boarding school that shares affinities with Lindsay Anderson's If....) (1972), Victory March (1976), Salto nel Vuoto (1980), Henry IV (1984), Il diavolo in corpo (Devil in the Flesh 1986) and, L'ora di religione (My Mother's Smile, 2002), which told the story of a wealthy Italian artist, a 'default - Marxist and atheist', who suddenly discovers that the Vatican is proposing to make his detested mother a saint.

In 1991, he won the Silver Bear - Special Jury Prize at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival for his film The Conviction.

In 1995, he directed a documentary about the Red Brigades and the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, entitled Sogni infranti (Broken Dreams). In 2003, he directed a feature film on the same theme, Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night). In 2006 his film The Wedding Director was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. In 2009, he directed Vincere, which was in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival. He recently finished Sorelle Mai an experimental film that was shot over ten years with the students of six separate workshops playing themselves. He was awarded with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 68th Venice International Film Festival.

At Bobbio, each year, Bellocchio directed the Laboratory "Farecinema" and "Bobbio Film Festival", with performances throughout the summer in the courtyard of Abbey of Saint Columban.

Laboratory "Farecinema – meet the authors" is the brainchild of Maestro Marco Bellocchio who wanted to create in his hometown, Bobbio, a laboratory for teaching the art of film direction. Already the first edition was held, parallel to the laboratory, an evening film festival open to the public with a film club at the end of screenings where people participated representing the film projected. In 2005 becomes the exhibition Festival, taking the name of "Bobbio Film Festival" and Marco Bellocchio establishing the award "The Hunchback of Gold" in reference to symbols of Bobbio, the medieval Ponte Gobbo, which will reward the film judged the best among those proposed. To review films that work as he moved in the cloister of Saint Columban, where traditionally the event occurs. In parallel, the laboratory continues Farecinema that will become a film school and acting school, and the town of Bobbio that has also become a movie set with the possibility of participation of amateur extras.

Negri is best known for his co-authorship of Empire, and secondarily for his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university. Negri founded the Potere Operaio (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia. As one of the most popular theorists of Autonomism, he has published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness."

He was accused in the late 1970s of various charges including being the mastermind of the left wing terrorist group Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR), involved in the May 1978 assassination of Aldo Moro, two - time Prime Minister of Italy, and leader of the Christian Democrat Party, among others. Voice evidence suggested Negri made a threatening phone call on behalf of the BR, but the court was unable to conclusively prove his ties. The question of Negri's complicity with left wing terrorism is a controversial subject. He was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state" (a charge which was later dropped), and sentenced for involvement in two murders.

Negri fled to France where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he taught at the Université de Vincennes (Paris - VIII) and the Collège International de philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. In 1997, after a plea bargain that reduced his prison time from 30 to 13 years, he returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence. Many of his most influential books were published while he was behind bars. He now lives between Venice and Paris with his partner, the French philosopher Judith Revel.

Antonio Negri was born in Padua, Italy in 1933. He began his career as a militant in the 1950s with the activist Roman Catholic youth organization Gioventú Italiana di Azione Cattolica (GIAC). He joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1956 and remained a member until 1963, while at the same time becoming more and more engaged throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s in Marxist movements.

He had a quick academic career at the University of Padua and was promoted to full professor at a young age in the field of "dottrina dello Stato" (State theory), a particularly Italian field that deals with juridical and constitutional theory. This might have been facilitated by his connections to influential politicians such as Raniero Panzieri and philosopher Norberto Bobbio, strongly engaged with the Socialist Party.

In the early 1960s Negri joined the editorial group of Quaderni Rossi, a journal that represented the intellectual rebirth of Marxism in Italy outside the realm of the communist party.

In 1969, together with Oreste Scalzone and Franco Piperno, Negri was one of the founders of the group Potere Operaio (Workers' Power) and the Operaismo (workerist) Communist movement. Potere Operaio disbanded in 1973 and gave rise to the Autonomia Operaia Organizzata (Organized Workers' Autonomy) movement.

On March 16, 1978, Aldo Moro, former Italian prime minister and Christian Democrat party leader, was kidnapped in Rome by BR. His five - man body guard was murdered soon after. While they were holding him, forty - five days after the kidnapping, the Red Brigades called his family on the phone, taunting Moro's wife about her husband's impending death. Nine days later his body, shot in the head, was found dumped in a city lane. The conversation was recorded, and later broadcast and televised. A number of people who knew Negri and remembered his voice identified him as the probable author of the call, and some months later an American voice specialist made the same assessment.

On April 7, 1979, at the age of forty - six, Antonio Negri was arrested for his part in the Autonomy Movement, along with others (Emilio Vesce, Luciano Ferrari Bravo, Mario Dalmaviva, Lauso Zagato, Oreste Scalzone, Pino Nicotri, Alisa del Re, Carmela di Rocco, Massimo Tramonte, Sandro Serafini, Guido Bianchini, and others). Padova's Public Prosecutor Pietro Calogero accused those involved in the political wing of the Red Brigades, and thus behind left wing terrorism in Italy. Negri was charged with a number of offenses, including leadership of the Red Brigades, masterminding the 1978 kidnapping and murder of the President of the Christian Democratic Party Aldo Moro, and plotting to overthrow the government. At the time, Negri was a political science professor at the University of Padua and visiting lecturer at Paris' École Normale Supérieure. The Italian public was shocked that an academic could be involved in such events.

A year later, Negri was exonerated from Aldo Moro's kidnapping after a leader of the BR, having decided to cooperate with the prosecution, testified that Negri "had nothing to do with the Red Brigades." The charge of 'armed insurrection against the State' against Negri was dropped at the last moment, and because of this he did not receive the 30 year plus life sentence requested by the prosecutor, but only 30 years for being the instigator of political activist Carlo Saronio's murder and having 'morally concurred' with Lombardini's murder during a failed bank robbery.

His philosopher peers saw little fault with Negri's activities. Michel Foucault commented, "Isn't he in jail simply for being an intellectual?" French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze also signed in November 1977 L'Appel des intellectuels français contre la répression en Italie (The Call of French Intellectuals Against Repression in Italy) in protest against Negri's imprisonment and Italian anti - terrorism legislation.

In 1983, four years after his arrest and while he was still in prison awaiting trial, Negri was elected to the Italian legislature as a member for the Radical Party. Claiming parliamentary immunity, he was temporarily released and used his freedom to escape to France. There he remained for 14 years, writing and teaching, protected from extradition in virtue of the "Mitterrand doctrine". His refusal to stand trial in Italy was widely criticized by Italian media and by the Italian Radical Party, who had supported his candidacy to Parliament.

In France, Negri began teaching at the Université de Paris VIII (Saint Denis) and the Collège International de Philosophie, founded by Jacques Derrida. Although the conditions of his residence in France prevented him from engaging in political activities, he wrote prolifically and was active in a broad coalition of left wing intellectuals. In 1990 Negri with Jean - Marie Vincent and Denis Berger founded the journal Futur Antérieur. The journal ceased publication in 1998 but was reborn as Multitudes in 2000, with Negri as a member of the international editorial board.

Negri was released from prison in the spring of 2003, having written some of his most influential works while behind bars.

In the late 1980s the Italian President Francesco Cossiga described Antonio Negri as "a psychopath" who "poisoned the minds of an entire generation of Italy's youth."

Today, Antonio Negri is best known as the co-author, with Michael Hardt, of the controversial Marxist inspired treatise Empire (2000).

The book has had widespread influence in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, but many activists and scholars have been critical of the work.

In March 2008, Antonio Negri, who had been incarcerated from 1997 to 2003, abandoned procedures to obtain a visa for entry into Japan where he planned to give lectures on labor and other issues at the International House of Japan in Tokyo, Kyoto University and the University of Tokyo. The Immigrant Control and Refugee Recognition Law bans entry to Japan by a foreign national if he has been given a prison sentence of one year or longer, except for political prisoners.

In 2009 Negri completed the book “Commonwealth”, the final in a trilogy that began in 2000 with “Empire” and continued with “Multitude” in 2004, co-authored with Michael Hardt.

In May 2012 Negri self - published (with Michael Hardt) an electronic pamphlet on the occupation and encampment movements of 2011 - 2012 called Declaration that argues the movement explores new forms of democracy. The introduction was published at Jacobin under the title "Take Up the Baton."

• "Prison, with its daily rhythm, with the transfer and the defense, does not leave any time; prison dissolves time: This is the principal form of punishment in a capitalist society."

• "Nothing in my books has any direct organizational relationship. My responsibility is totally as an intellectual who writes and sells books!"

• "...it is indeed necessary to recognize as a fact the emergence of the B.R. [Red Brigades] and NAP [Armed Proletariat Nuclei] as the tip of the iceberg of the Movement. This does not require one in any way to transform the recognition into a defense, and this does not in any way deny the grave mistake of the B.R. line. At one point I defined the B.R. as a variable of the movement gone crazy... I state again that terrorism can only be fought through an authentic mass political struggle and inside the revolutionary movement."

• In Empire the expansion of capitalism is supposed to be "internal" rather than "external," in that it "“subsumes not the non-capitalist environment but its own capitalist terrain — that is, that the subsumption is no longer formal but real.”