Light in the Piazza (film) Light in the Piazza (film) Light in the Piazza is a 1962 American romantic drama film directed by Guy Green and starring Olivia de Havilland, Rossano Brazzi, Yvette Mimieux, George Hamilton, and Barry Sullivan. Based on the 1960 novel "The Light in the Piazza" by Elizabeth Spencer, the film is about a beautiful but mentally disabled young American woman traveling in Italy with her mother and the Italian man they meet during one leg of their trip. Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, "Light in the Piazza" is notable for its extensive location shooting in 1960s Florence and Rome by the award-winning cinematographer
The Piazza Tales to Melville's whaling years, during which he visited the Galapagos Islands, supplemented with material from his reading in at least six books of Pacific voyages, including "The Voyage of the Beagle" by Charles Darwin. A month after the collection was published, Melville's old friend Richard Tobias Greene, on whom Toby in "Typee" was based, wrote him a letter expressing how the Encantadas sketches "had called up reminiscences of days gone by". Assuming that "The Piazza" is Melville's own Pittsfield piazza, critic F. O. Matthiessen suggests that the piece must have been suggested by Hawthorne's manse. As the setting for the