ROME, July 31: Film legend Michelangelo Antonioni, director of the 1960s hit “Blow Up” and one of the last figures of Italy’s golden age of cinema, has died at age 94, his family said on Tuesday.

Antonioni, who made only about 20 films, died at his home on Monday night, the report said.

His body is to lie in state in the elegant Sala della Protomoteca at Rome’s city hall, the Campidoglio, on Wednesday morning to allow friends and colleagues to pay their last respects.

Antonioni will be buried at his hometown, in Ferrara near Venice, on Thursday, city hall said in a statement.

Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni was among the first to pay tribute to Antonioni, saying he was “not only one of the greatest living directors, but also a master of modern cinema.

“Thanks to Antonioni’s cinema, we had another view of reality, another way to look at the face of a woman, the design of a car, even a cloud was not the same thing after having seen his films.” Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli hailed Antonioni as a “lucid and very sensitive intellectual (who) was an acute observer of the ills of the 20th century... His disappearance closes a historical cycle of Italian cinema”. Director Paolo Virzi said Antonioni was “an important reference for cinema and culture, and especially an innovator of language, and made cinema “more adult”.

“Blow Up” won Antonioni the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival in 1967, while the Venice film festival honoured him with the Golden Lion for “Il Deserto Rosso” (The Red Desert) in 1964 and a career Golden Lion in 1983, followed two years later by a career Oscar.

His “Zabriskie Point” – a 1969 drama about a young man who steals a plane and flies it with his girlfriend into the desert of Death Valley in California against a soundtrack including numbers by Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones – was panned by critics but seen at the time as a classic statement of counter-culture values.

Born in Ferrara on September 29, 1912, into a well-to-do family, Antonioni excelled in economics at the University of Bologna.

He started out as a film critic for a local magazine before moving to Rome to study at the Experimental Cinema Centre and to work for Cinema magazine, both considered centres of resistance to fascism.—AFP