Expect sparks to fly at the Venice Film Festival in late August when Quentin Tarantino presents a special event, The Secret History of Italian Cinema, devoted to one of his favourite genres, spaghetti westerns.

The 40-film programme includes Tarantino's all-time favourite, Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1969), along with such curiosities as Spanish director Jose Romero Marchent's Cut-Throat Nine (1972), which Venice festival director Marco Muller claims to be the most violent western ever made.

However, Tarantino has incensed the Italian film industry by describing its present state as "just depressing". He remarked: "Recent films are all the same. They talk about boys growing up, or girls growing up, or couples having a crisis, or vacations of the mentally impaired."

Sophia Loren responded: "How dare he talk about Italian cinema when he doesn't knows anything about American cinema?"

Italian director Marco Bellocchio, a member of the Cannes jury which gave no awards to Tarantino's Death Proof last month, declared: "Tarantino is a brute." Left-wing Italian newspaper L'Unita said that it is Tarantino who is "mentally impaired".