Claudio Santinelli

Dance master, dancer and choreographer

WELL-KNOWN FACE OF THEATRICAL DANCE AND THE SMALL SCREEN BECAUSE HE WAS A PROTAGONIST OF THE GOLDEN YEARS OF DANCE ON TV. THIRD-GENERATION ARTISTIC FAMILY:

The Santinelli family has always represented a guarantee of professionalism and experience in Roman dance: the love for dance begins with Antonio Santinelli, the progenitor of the Santinelli dance masters, who shortly after the end of the Second World War rolled up his sleeves like all Italians and began to teach dance, his great passion. He was one of the first masters of couple dance in Italy. The official dance school that Antonio opened in 1947 was on Via Nino Bixio, in the Piazza Vittorio area of Rome; it involved the entire Santinelli family, whose memories are in the RAI archive films.
In 1957, Antonio formalized dances like the spirù and the samba and formed couples who would spread dance in the capital. It took years of work and tenacity from Enrica Lucia and Antonio Santinelli, who after setting up their school to give dance lessons (among the students were also American soldiers stationed in post-war Italy), thought up, invented, and patented correspondence courses with typewritten handouts; these courses opened the world of dance to many Italians even in remote villages. Furthermore, Antonio, always spreading couple dance, was hosted in the first television broadcasts to demonstrate his invention of the "tecnopasso" (footprints illustrating the steps of various dances), used precisely in correspondence courses. This technique spread in Italy and abroad, and for this, Antonio received many accolades, including participation in Miss World in 1962. The children Luciano, Silvana (Luciano's partner), Carla, and Walter continued to teach those dances they themselves learned from their father. Subsequently, Luciano's children, Claudio and Marco, followed in their father's footsteps, studying classical dance, artistic gymnastics, and dance, and becoming dancers and teachers themselves.