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Alberto Zoppe
Circus artist famed for tricks on horses

    The 1948 exchange was simple: an elephant for a gargantuan talent — Alberto Zoppe, the soaring, death-defying, bareback-tiger- and horse-riding centerpiece of a premier Italian traveling family circus.

    Zoppe, who spent more than seven decades performing, died Thursday from respiratory failure at his home in Greenbrier.

    He was 87.

    Zoppe’s friend, actor Orson Welles, had introduced him to the owner of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and director Cecil B. DeMille, who was planning to film The Greatest Show on Earth, his wife, Sandra Zoppe, said in describing the long-ago trade.

    The Americans wanted Alberto Zoppe to leave Italy for movie stardom in the U.S., she said.

    Zoppe decided that if he left, an attraction had to take his place to make up for lost revenue.

    He eventually persuaded Welles et al to pay his family a circus elephant — an animal that was hard to come by in Italy after World War II, she said.

    Born Jan. 4, 1922, in north Italy, Alberto Zoppe as a child learned the family trade, which began in 1842 when a French street clown and Hungarian equestrian ballerina ran away to Venice, according to a 2005 article in The New York Times.

    Eleven of Alberto Zoppe’s 16 siblings died in World War II, leaving him the second-youngest of the remaining five children, his wife said.

    During bombings, they ran “hand in hand” into the forests and fields, only to return to destroyed tents and menageries. Circus horses, tigers, lions and elephants died, she said.

    The family recovered, going on to perform for European royalty and Pope Pius XII, the greatest honor in Zoppe’s life, said Sandra Zoppe, who performed with her husband.

    The mustachioed 5-foot-3 Zoppe’s signature trick, which he performed in 1952’s The Greatest Show on Earth, was standing on a moving horse before doing a layout somersault back flip onto a trailing horse.

    Alberto Zoppe’s companions on his trip to the United States were his mother, younger sister and adopted cousin, Cucciolo, a midget with whom he performed equestrian tricks, Sandra Zoppe said.

    On moving horses, Zoppe jumped through fiery hoops and balanced as the base of a six-person pyramid with equal ease, friends said.

He performed for various circuses, including Barnum & Bailey, and on the Bob Hope, Red Skelton and Ed Sullivan television shows, his family said.

    “It was like the g uy was just calibrated to perform,” said Jim Distasio, who recently filmed a documentary about the Zoppe family circus. “The little winks, the eyebrow raise — stuff like that, he was a master of, even in his 80s.”

    By the 1980s, the Zoppe family circus was often performing in Arkansas, said Giovanni Zoppe, one of Alberto and Sandra Zoppe’s three children. Alberto Zoppe had two children from an earlier marriage to high-wire-act performer Jenny Wallenda in the 1950s, he said. All of them performed, Zoppe said, according to an unpublished article Distasio wrote five years ago while researching the documentary.

    In Little Rock, the one-ring family circus performed at Riverfest, at a Christmas show at the Robinson Center’s auditorium and for six to eight years Alberto Zoppe produced the Shrine Circus, Giovanni Zoppe said.

    Despite an array of career injuries, including two broken hips, Zoppe stayed involved in his family’s 15-to-25-person shows, typically held in 500-seat tents with wood-plank bleachers meant to evoke early 20th-century circuses, friends and family said.

    He greeted patrons before and after performances, raked sand for horses and until October performed as a straight man to his son’s clown persona, Giovanni Zoppe said.

    The duet taught audience members to do horse tricks, Distasio said. Alberto connected himself to a pulley attached to harnessed children. “He’d fly up on the other end and his pants would come down, and he’d have polka-dotted boxers,” he said.

    “Our father always gave us a choice as we were growing up to do whatever we wanted to do,” Giovanni Zoppe said. “But once you’re here, once you’re standing in the middle of the ring and you’re giving joy and happiness to other people who might not have it, you just can’t explain what that does to your soul,” he said Saturday morning before performing a Chicago show in memory of his father.

    “It’s not a job to us, it’s a life.”