Franco Rossi was an Italian film and television director who worked across more than five decades in the Italian film and television industry, directing features in the Italian cinema tradition of the 1950s and 1960s and subsequently becoming one of the most accomplished directors of Italian television miniseries productions, including ambitious adaptations of literary classics that demonstrated the quality that Italian public television RAI invested in its prestige productions across the 1970s and 1980s. He died in 2026 at the age of 90.
He was born Franco Rossi on 28 April 1919 in Florence, Italy, and came to filmmaking through the Italian cinema of the postwar period, one of the most creatively fertile moments in film history.