(ANSA) - Pordenone, March 22 - Home movies by Italian boxing legend Primo Carnera between the 1930s and 1950s have been restored after his daughter discovered them in an attic. The 8mm and 16mm footage, restored by the Cineteca del Friuli cinema museum, include shots of Carnera training, playing golf, hunting and playing with his family. In one scene the giant ex-boxer is seen sitting on a horse with just the tips of his huge shoes managing to squeeze into the stirrups. The movies add to a trove of Carnera material collected for the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2006, when a film about Italy's only world heavyweight boxing champ was made. The movie, Carnera The Walking Mountain, got its world premiere at Madison Square Garden, the storied New York venue where Carnera beat Jack Sharkey for the title in 1933, before a gala screening at George Clooney's Lake Garda villa.
The film was made as part of an array of events celebrating Carnera (1906-67) in his birthplace, the small town of Sequals near Pordenone, in Italy's far north-east. A show in Sequals framed Carnera's sporting, film and cartoon incarnations against the backdrop of memorabilia from the period. A documentary used newsreel footage, fragments from Carnera's brief film strongman career - including The King of Africa and Casanova's Great Night - and contemporary press headlines eulogising and vilifying the big man. Carnera was a 2.02-metre (six feet, seven inches) former circus performer in France who got into the US fight game to support his two children in the Depression years and rose to wrest the greatest crown of all from the fearsome 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 featured briefly in the 2005 hit film Cinderella Man. Carnera appeared in several postwar Italian sword-and-sandal epics after playing himself in the 1933 Hollywood film The Prizefighter and the Lady with Myrna Loy. 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 performer 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. Former world middleweight champ Nino Benvenuti, Italy's most popular living boxing star, 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''. photo: Carnera with Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis in the 1950s