No One Believed These Bud Spencer Stories! Until They Watched This!
His real name was Carlo Pedulli. He was an Olympic swimmer twice and the first Italian in history to swim 100 meters in under a minute. He earned a law degree. He spoke six languages. He wrote songs for RCA records. He built roads in the Venezuelan jungle. He founded an airline that still operates today.
[music] He held 12 patents. He logged over 2,000 hours as a commercial pilot. And then almost as an afterthought, he became one of the most beloved movie stars in European history at age [music] 38 because another actor broke his foot the day before filming started. His stage name came from his favorite beer and his [music] favorite actor, Budweiser and Spencer Tracy.
His signature move was an open palm slap so iconic that a video game was literally named after it. He made over 70 films, most of them alongside a skinny, blue-eyed Italian named [music] Terrence Hill, and and together they became one of cinema’s great partnerships. Bigger than butch and Sundance in half of Europe, yet virtually unknown in the United States.
When he died in Rome on June 27th, 2016, his last word was grazi. Thank you. He was 86 years old. And if you grew up anywhere in Europe or South America between 1970 and 1990, you are probably already smiling just hearing his name. The strangest part, acting was maybe his fifth career, and it wasn’t even the most interesting one.
How these are the documented stories. Let’s begin. Number one, the boy whose family lost everything in the bombing of Naples. On October 31st, 1929, Carlo Pedulli was born in the Santa Lucia neighborhood of Naples, [music] Italy. His parents, Aleandro Pedulli and Rosa Faketi were originally from Lombardi in northern Italy, and they came from money.
The family owned a significant factory that [music] had been founded by an ancestor in the 19th century. Carlo had one younger sister, Vera, born in 1934. And [music] then the second world war arrived and it arrived directly on top of them. Naples was among the most heavily bombed cities in all of Italy.
A direct hit destroyed the Pisolei factory entirely, wiped out overnight along with the family’s [music] financial security. The Peter Solis relocated to Rome, reasoning that the presence of the Vatican and the [music] Pope made it a safer city. To survive the war years, they sold the linens from the family truseo piece by piece.
Carlo was 10 when the war began and 15 when it ended. But even amid wartime deprivation, the boy’s physical gifts were impossible to miss. He had joined a swimming club at age 7. By 15, he was defeating adults in competition. His school rugby team won a national championship. He took up amateur heavyweight boxing and by his own account never lost a single fight.
The war [music] had stripped his family of everything. It had also forged an extraordinary physical specimen, a young [music] man who would grow to nearly 2 m tall with the coordination to dominate virtually any sport he touched. And the sport he chose first [music] would make history.
Number two, the first Italian to break one minute. Carlo Peter Sulli’s swimming career was not a hobby or a footnote. It was genuinely elite. On September 19th, 1950, at a pool in Salosoma, the 20-year-old Pisolei touched the wall in 59.5 seconds in the 100meter freestyle, becoming the first Italian in history to break the one minute barrier.
This record is confirmed by the Italian Swimming Federation and by the International Olympic Committee’s own records. He competed at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, reaching the semi-finals in the 100 meter freestyle. Four years later, he returned for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and reached the semi-finals again. Between those games, he collected 14 national titles, seven individual swimming championships, three junior titles, and four relay victories.
[music] Then he pivoted to water polo and won the 1954 Italian championship with SS Latio. With the Italian national water polo team, he took a gold medal [music] at the 1955 Mediterranean Games in Barcelona. The Italian Swimming Federation later honored him with the Kaimano Doro, the gold cayman, in 2005. She, [music] his son, Josephe, would later reveal that his father treasured his sporting achievements far more than any film role.
The [music] Olympics, Josephe said, was perhaps the happiest period of his father’s entire life. But here’s what separates Carlo Peter Sulli [music] from every other retired athlete who drifted into entertainment. Most of them went straight to Hollywood or television. Peter Sulli went to the jungle. Number [music] three, three continents before his 30th birthday.
At just 17, Ishkar Carlo Peters enrolled at the Sapienza University of Rome to study chemistry, one of Italy’s youngest university students at the time. When his family immigrated to Brazil in 1947, searching for a fresh start as immigrants, he went with them. In Recipe, he worked at the Italian consulate.
He fell deeply in love with Brazilian music, a passion he carried for the rest of his life. Returning to Italy around 1948, he switched from chemistry to law. His reasoning was entirely practical. Legal studies left more time for swimming training. He eventually earned his law degree from Sapienza, a detail confirmed across multiple obituaries and biographical accounts.
[music] Along the way, he became fluent in at least six languages, Italian with a strong Neapolitan dialect, Portuguese from his years in Brazil, Spanish from later time in South America, German from formal study, plus English and French. After [music] his competitive swimming career ended in 1957, Miss Pedulli made a decision that baffled everyone who knew him.
He moved to Venezuela for 3 years, not to vacation, to work as a foreman on the construction of a section of the Pan-American Highway. He later worked for Alfa Romeo in Karacas. He was a two-time Olympian, [music] a national hero, a law graduate, and he was voluntarily building roads in South American heat.
When asked why, his answer was disarmingly simple. He wanted to find out whether he was a brave man or a coward. And he was 27 years old. He still had no intention of becoming an actor. Something else would pull him toward the movies, something nobody expected, least of all him. Number four, the songwriter who turned away.
The man who [music] wrote Volol. In 1960, Carlo Perisolei married Maria Amato. Her father was Joseeppe Amato, one of Italy’s most influential film producers whose credits included Federrico Fellini’s Lulchcevita. Through that connection, Pedulli entered the music business, war signing with RCA records to compose and produce Neapolitan folk [music] and pop songs between 1960 and 1964.
He wrote lyrics for established Italian singers including Ornella Venoni and Niko Fedenko. He also formed a band called Glee Asatanati del Ritmo, the rhythm maniacs that played the nightclubs along Rome’s glamorous Via Venetto. And here’s a detail that sounds invented but [music] is documented in multiple sources. One day, a young man from the small town of Pollino Amare auditioned with songs that Peter Souli considered terrible.
He was turned [music] away. That young man was Dominico Moduno, who would go on to win the Sanremo Music Festival and achieve worldwide fame [music] with Volare, one of the most recognizable Italian songs ever [music] recorded. Carlo Pedulli rejected the man who wrote Volare. Then he went back to writing his own songs after his father-in-law died in 1964.
Peter Soule shifted to producing documentaries for RAI, Italy’s national television network. He was 35 years old. He had been an Olympic swimmer, a law graduate, a construction foreman in Venezuela, a songwriter for RCA, and a television producer. Acting was still not on his radar. That required one more accident.
Number five, the man who named himself after a beer and an actor. In 1967, the Italian director Joseph Kolitzi was casting a spaghetti western and needed someone who looked physically imposing. Someone pointed him toward the enormous swimmer and songwriter Carlo Pedulli. Pedulli was 38 years old, had zero interest in an acting career, and agreed to the job essentially as a lark.
But the production required an English-friendly stage name. Italian names were considered unmarketable for international westerns. [music] The entire spaghetti western industry ran on Americanized pseudonyms. Peter Soulie needed something that sounded rugged and Anglo-Saxon. He chose his favorite American beer and his favorite American actor, Bud from Budweiser.
Spencer from Spencer Tracy. Bud Spencer was born. The film was God forgives. I [music] Don’t, released in 1967. Spencer expected it to be a one-time payday. He had no training, no ambitions in and no illusions about his talent. As he said years later, “I have no interest in becoming an actor.” But something about the camera liked him.
The enormous frame, the grumpy face, the natural comic timing [music] that came from being completely relaxed because he genuinely didn’t care whether it worked or not. And then something happened on set that [music] would change European cinema. Not because of anything Spencer did, but because another actor couldn’t walk.
Then number six, the luckiest broken foot in cinema history. [music] The day before shooting began on God forgives. I don’t. The actor cast opposite Spencer. A man named Peter Martell broke [music] his foot. A lastminute replacement had to be found. Someone suggested a young actor who had recently adopted his own English- sounding stage name, Mario Gerotti, now calling himself Terren Hill.
Both Spencer and Hill had actually appeared as uncredited extras in the 1959 Sword and Sandal film Hannibal without ever meeting. Now thrown together by a broken bone and a tight schedule, they discovered something that neither could explain and neither could replicate with anyone else.
The chemistry was instant and effortless. Hill was nimble, quick, blue-eyed, and boyish. [music] Spencer was enormous, slow, grumpy, and bearlike, and together they formed a visual contrast so perfect it barely needed dialogue. Hill later recalled that everything between them felt instinctive. Scenes that normally required multiple takes just worked on the first attempt.
Spencer characteristically shrugged it off. Since I never studied to be an actor, I was more instinctive. They made two more films with Khitzi. The partnership was popular, but nobody, [music] not the studio, not the critics, I not the actors themselves, was prepared for what happened next. [music] Number seven, the film that outgrossed Leolce Vita.
In 1970, director Enzo Barboni cast Spencer and Hill in a low-budget comedy western called They Call Me Trinity. Spencer played Bambino, a hulking, perpetually annoyed horse thief who communicates primarily through grunts, slaps, and enormous plates of beans. Hill played Trinity, his lazy, wisecracking younger brother, who happens to be the fastest gun in the West.
The film was produced for a modest budget. It became the highest grossing Italian film of its era, surpassing Fellini’s Lulolechvita at the Italian box office. Nobody saw it coming. The sequel, Trinity is Still My Name, released in 1971, was even [music] bigger. It sold approximately 14.5 million tickets in Italy alone. In Germany, it sold over 12 million tickets, making it the seventh most successful film in German box office history at the time.
Worldwide, it earned over $30 million. It remains among the top five most attended Italian films ever made. What made the Trinity films revolutionary was their tone. The spaghetti western genre had been defined by Sergio Leon’s oporatic violence. Clint Eastwood squinting through gunsm smoke.
Anyomoricone scores rising to apocalyptic crescendos. Spencer and Hill threw all of that out the window. Their fights were slapstick ballets. Nobody died. Nobody bled. as an enormous man slapped villains unconscious with his open palm while a grinning trickster punched at superhuman speed and the audience laughed until they couldn’t breathe.
Spencer’s signature move, the devastating open palm slapped to the face and the hammerfist to the top of the skull became so iconic that it defined an entire genre of familyfriendly [snorts] action comedy across Europe. The sound effects alone are recognizable to millions. Over the next three decades, and Spencer and Hill made 17 or 18 films together, depending on which source you consult.
Their final collaboration was Troublemakers in 1994. In nearly 50 years of working together, they never had a single argument, not one. Number eight, the actor who founded an airline and held 12 patents. If Bud Spencer had only been an Olympic swimmer turned actor, he would already be one of the most unusual figures in cinema history. But the man simply could not stop doing things.
[music] Well, after filming All the Way Boys in 1972, a comedy in which he and Hill played bush pilots in Colombia, Spencer was so taken with flying [music] that he earned his commercial airline pilots license and his helicopter license. He logged over 2,000 hours in fixedwing [music] aircraft and 500 in helicopters. He called flying the biggest passion of his life for over 35 years.
Bigger than swimming, bigger than movies. On October 29th, 1981, he founded Mistral Air, an actual airline. It began operations in 1984 as an air mail service and expanded into passenger flights, securing contracts with the Vatican to fly Catholic pilgrims to [music] Lurs, Fatima, Santiago, de Compostella, Israel, Poland, and Mexico.
Spencer eventually sold the company through a series of acquisitions. It [music] was absorbed by Post Italan, Italy’s national postal service and rebranded as Postair Air Cargo in 2019. The airline Bud Spencer founded now [music] delivers Italy’s mail. It is still operating today. He also held 12 patents. [music] Among his inventions, a walking stick with a built-in folding table and chair, an electric toy mouse, and a disposable toothbrush with integrated toothpaste.
His proudest invention was an early concept for a batterypowered car, an electric vehicle prototype [music] that proved too heavy to be practical. Years later, watching Tesla and other electric cars take off, he noted with satisfaction that the idea had been right all along. He once impulsively bought an airirstrip in Atlanta during a film shoot, a 2 km dirt road with a wind sock and an office, planning to build airplanes there.
Two FBI agents showed up almost immediately suspecting drug trafficking. He also bought a 36 meter tugboat that he never sailed past [music] the harbor at Porto Santos Stephano. This was a man who simply could not sit still. Number nine. More popular in Germany than in his own country. Here is perhaps the strangest chapter of the Bud Spencer story.
[music] In Germany, he wasn’t just famous, he was a phenomenon. The reason goes beyond the films themselves. When Spencer and Hills movies were dubbed into German, the voice actors, led by a man named Rainor Brandt, didn’t just translate the dialogue, they rewrote it. They added jokes, word play [music] in, and cultural references that made the German versions considerably funnier than the Italian originals.
The result was that German audiences experienced a version of Bud Spencer that was in some ways a different character entirely and they loved him even more for it. The cultural penetration [music] was extraordinary. The word budpenern entered German slang meaning to beat up a group of people in a superior and somehow comical way [music] when the city of Schwabish Gimmund asked citizens to vote on a name for a new tunnel.
Bud Spencer tunnel won the public poll. The city council compromised by naming their public swimming pool [music] the Bud Spencer bad in 2011. Spencer attended the ceremony in person at the very same venue where he had won a swimming competition 60 years earlier. A Bud Spencer Museum opened on Berlin’s famous Unden Linden Boulevard in 2021, yet displaying 500 square meters of memorabilia from the Peter Souli family’s private collection, including the legendary Volkswagen Dune Buggy from the film Watch Out, Were Mad. In
Budapest, a larger than-l life bronze statue was unveiled in 2017. In Hungary, the films held special meaning during the communist era. They were among the few western productions that authorities permitted. Fans explained it simply. [music] Spencer and Hill always fought for the Little People against corrupt institutions.
In fan festivals in Germany grew from 150 attendees to 4,000 by 2019. Across France, Greece, the Netherlands, Eastern Europe, and all of South America. Spencer and Hill were household names. In the United States, they remained virtually unknown. This never seemed to bother Spencer in the slightest. Number 10, the gentle giant who couldn’t see his own fight scenes.
The distance between Bud Spencer on screen and Carlo Pisolei in private was vast. [music] His son Joeppe provided the most intimate portrait in a 2024 interview, describing his father as the least strict person in the world. Spencer only ever struck his son once, [music] a single slap on the leg in his entire life.
Jeppe said his father maintained an almost childlike imagination until the day he died at 87. He once presented his son with a pen that could write upside down, explaining [music] with complete seriousness, “Ast astronauts use it.” Spencer was extremely nearsighted. He wore thick glasses that he always removed before filming, [music] which means he could barely see during his own legendary fight scenes.
He [music] refused to use a stunt double. He once pressed a soft drink vending machine button at an airport, thinking it was the elevator call button. His [music] appetite was mythical. If you gave him 2 kilos of pasta, he could eat them all, Jeppe [music] recalled. He traveled everywhere with spaghetti, olive oil, and tomatoes.
He once topped pasta with corn flakes. His relationship with Terrence Hill was both closer and more distant than anyone imagined. Spencer called Hill Mario, his real name, and was the only person in the world who still did. But off the set, they were two enormous, shy men who barely knew how to socialize with each other.
Jeppe estimated they went out to dinner together perhaps three times in their entire lives. Hill lived in America. Every now and then he would come by for Maria’s spaghetti dinner. But on camera something transformed. There was real emotion between them. A harmony [music] that appeared from nowhere and vanished the moment the director called cut.
Neither man could explain it. Neither ever tried to replicate it with anyone else. Spencer married Maria Amato in 1960. They remained together for 56 years until his death. They had three children, Josephe, Cristiana, and Diamante. [music] His daughter Cristiana later wrote a book about him titled Bud, a giant for a father.
He published four books of his own, including a best-selling autobiography that topped the charts in Germany. He ran for political office once, recruited by Sylvio Berlusonei to stand as a Forza Italia candidate in 2005. His campaign announcement was pure Bud Spencer. In my life, I’ve done everything. There are only three things I haven’t been.
a ballet dancer, a jockey, and a politician. Given that the first two are out of the question, I’ll throw myself into politics. He lost the election. On June 27th, 2016, Carlo Pedulli died in Rome. He was 86 years old. His last word was, “Gradzi, thank you.” When Terrence Hill learned that his partner had died, he was standing in Almria, Spain, the exact location [music] where they had first met 49 years earlier.
After the sorrow and pain came a great calm, Hill said, “Because I realized that nothing happens by chance.” At the funeral held in Rome’s Church of the Artists, fans spontaneously began singing the theme from Watch Out, [music] We’re Mad as the coffin was carried out. The man who always insisted he was only a character and not an actor had made an entire continent sing.
Here’s what stays with you about Carlo Peter Sulli. He was a boy whose family lost everything in the bombing of Naples. An Olympic swimmer who broke national records. A law graduate who spoke six languages. A songwriter who turned away Dominico Moduno. A roadbuilder in Venezuela who was testing his own courage. [music] A man who stumbled into acting at 38 because someone else broke a foot.
Named himself after a beer and an actor. [music] And accidentally became one of the most famous faces in Europe. He founded an airline. He held 12 patents. He wrote best-selling books. He flew airplanes for 35 years. [music] He couldn’t see without his glasses, but refused a stunt double. He ate 2 kilos of pasta in a sitting.
He lost a political election. He bought an airirst strip on impulse and got investigated by the FBI. And through all of it, he slapped bad guys with an open palm, ate beans by the bucketful, and made three generations of people laugh until they cried. All while being by every account one of the gentlest men who ever lived.
Which story surprised you most? The Olympic swimming records? The airline that still delivers Italy’s mail? Turning away the man who wrote Ver 12 patents? The fact that he couldn’t see during his own fight scenes? Let us know in the comments. Like, share, and subscribe for more stories about real people who lived impossible lives.
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