Rossini Rocks

Maverick film maker Robert Altman will go to Italy this fall to shoot his next project, a biography of 19th-Century Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini, whom Altman calls “the Mick Jagger of his day.”

“He was enormously successful, popular and sexy,” Altman told us. “Yet, in his mid-30s, he decided to stop writing music and travel and experience life.” Altman will focus his English-language film on that period, he said.

Enrico Roseo is producing, and “there’s not one penny of American money in it,” Altman added.