Ciro Giorgini, a leading Italian scholar of the film works of Orson Welles and John Ford, has died.

He  passed away on Monday at 2 a.m., according to Wellesnetter Massimiliano Studer, who conducted an insightful interview with Giorgini last year. The funeral will be held on Wednesday, April 8, at Campo Verano cemetery in Rome.

His death on April 6 comes a month before the centenary of Welles’ birth on May 6.

Giorgini worked on the Welles written and directed travelogue series Nella Terra di Don Chisciotte (In the Land of Don Quixote) for RAI in 2005.  More recently, he is credited with identifying the previously lost silent footage of Too Much Johnson, which was discovered in an Italian warehouse in 2010.

“(It) was like finding an important, lost painting — like seeing a painting of Caravaggio that no one knew about,” he told the Associated Press in 2013.

Giorgini led a Welles conference in Rome in 1992 and directed the documentary Rosabella:  Orson Welles’s Years in Italy the following year.  On occasion, he would generously share his opinions on the Wellesnet Message Board

Italian social media was abuzz with tributes to Giorgini in the hours after his death.

“Farewell to the great Ciro Giorgini. A privilege to have known you,” one admirer tweeted.

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