Angelo Cricchi was born in Rome, Italy. After a long career as a professional athlete, his passions turned to photography. As a successful fashion photographer of prominent international clients, celebrities and for magazines, Cricchi created his own company: Lost and found Studio. His artistic photographic work paralleled his commercial photography career, from 2001 he started to make short movies and fashion films. After the “Gloomy Sunday” exhibition at MAK in Vienna (2009) he left his position as a fashion photographer to realise his passion and talents in fine art photography. His works have been exhibited in public and private institutions in Italy, Austria, Germany and Holland. Angelo Cricchi lives in Rome.

Angelo Cricchi is a Creative Director at FLEWID – The book and Head Teacher of the Fashion Dpt. at “Istituto Superiore di Fotografia e Comunicazione Integrata di Roma.”

The photographs which make up the series “Gloomy Sunday” are the representation of several unforgettable women who had complex lives and tragic deaths in common. They are women belonging to the art, cinema, music, literature and history world. Immortal muses such as Sylvia Plath, Jean Seberg, Frida Kahlo, Virginia Wolf, Capucine, Magda Goebbels, Cleopatra and fictional women created from the imagination of writers, like Emma Bovary, Madama Butterfly, Ophelia and Lady Macbeth. Fifty photographs in colour, halfway between reality and imagination, sophisticated, poetic and filled with references and citations made possible by fifty women of today. Actresses, photographers, writers, film directors, artists and common women who have interpreted these perturbing heroines in their own time. The title Gloomy Sunday draws inspiration from a Hungarian song of the 1930’s, banned at the time from both English and American radios, because it apparently stimulated the listeners to commit suicide.

The Moscow theater hostage crisis (also known as the 2002 Nord-Ost siege) was the seizure of a crowded Dubrovka Theater by 40 to 50 armed Chechens on 23 October 2002 that involved 850 hostages and ended with the deaths of at least 170 people. The attackers, led by Movsar Barayev, claimed allegiance to the Islamist separatist movement in Chechnya.They demanded the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya and an end to the Second Chechen War.

Due to the layout of the theater, special forces would have had to fight through 30 metres of corridor and advance up a well-defended staircase before they could reach the hall in which the hostages were held. The attackers had numerous explosives, with the most powerful in the center of the auditorium. Spetsnaz operators from Federal Security Service Alpha and Vympel, supported by a Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs SOBR unit, pumped an undisclosed chemical agent into the building's ventilation system and began the rescue operation.

All forty of the insurgents were killed, and up to 204 hostages died during the siege, including nine foreigners, due to the toxic substance pumped into the theater. The identity of the gas was never disclosed, although it is believed by some to have been a fentanyl derivative, such as carfentanil.

Sylvia Plath was an American poet. Some have suggested that Plath had not intended to kill herself. That morning, she asked her downstairs neighbor, a Mr. Thomas, what time he would be leaving. She also left a note reading "Call Dr. Horder," including the doctor's phone number. Therefore, it is argued Plath turned on the gas at a time when Thomas would have been able to see the note. However, in her biography Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, Plath's best friend, Jillian Becker, wrote, "According to Mr. Goodchild, a police officer attached to the coroner's office, Plath had thrust her head far into the gas oven and had really meant to die." Horder also believed her intention was clear. He stated that "No one who saw the care with which the kitchen was prepared could have interpreted her action as anything but an irrational compulsion." Plath had described the quality of her despair as "owl's talons clenching my heart." In his 1971 book on suicide, friend and critic Al Alvarez claimed that Plath's suicide was an unanswered cry for help, and spoke, in a BBC interview in March 2000, about his failure to recognize Plath's depression, saying he regretted his inability to offer her emotional support: "I failed her on that level. I was thirty years old and stupid. What did I know about chronic clinical depression? She kind of needed someone to take care of her. And that was not something I could do."

Antonia Pozzi was an Italian poet. On 2 December 1938, following a barbiturate suicide attempt, she was found unconscious in a ditch in front of Chiaravalle Abbey, a suburb of Milan. She died the next day and was buried in the small cemetery of Pasturo. The family refused to admit it was a suicide, attributing her death to pneumonia.

Anita Berber was a German dancer. Aside from her addiction to narcotic drugs, Berber was also an alcoholic. In 1928, at the age of 29, she suddenly gave up alcohol completely, but died later the same year. According to Mel Gordon, in The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Debauchery, she had been diagnosed with severe tuberculosis while performing abroad. After collapsing in Damascus, she returned to Germany and died in a Kreuzberg hospital on 10 November 1928, although rumour had it that she died surrounded by empty morphine syringes.

Anne Sexton was an American poet. On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with Kumin to revise galleys for Sexton's manuscript of The Awful Rowing Toward God, scheduled for publication in March 1975. On returning home she put on her mother's old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, ending her life by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Diane Arbus was an American photographer. On July 26, 1971, while living at Westbeth Artists Community in New York City, Arbus took her own life by ingesting barbiturates and cutting her wrists with a razor. She wrote the words "Last Supper" in her diary and placed her appointment book on the stairs leading up to the bathroom. Marvin Israel found her body in the bathtub two days later; she was 48 years old. Photographer Joel Meyerowitz told journalist Arthur Lubow, "If she was doing the kind of work she was doing and photography wasn’t enough to keep her alive, what hope did we have?"

During the Poetic Games at the 42nd Olympiad (about 608 BC) a woman poet named Saffo sings so effectively against the practice of tossing felons and undesirables from a cliff on the Island of Leucadia in the hope that Apollo will catch them before they drown in the sea (the Leucadian Leap) that the god's high priest, Alcandro, is driven away in contempt. He vows to get revenge. The priest come upon Faone, a suitor of Saffo given to jealousy. At Alcandro's prompting, Faone denounces Saffo for preferring the poet Alceo to himself.

Later, with Saffo and Apollo being in conflict, she cultivates a friendship with Climene, the daughter of Alcandro, in order to seek the priest's intercession with the god. Saffo agrees to sing at Climene's wedding, but when she finds that the husband-to-be is Faone, the poet completely loses self-control, tries to break up the wedding, vandalizes Apollo's altar and is driven away.

Saffo turns up on the clifftop at Leucadia, convinced that her continuing love for Faone is a curse from Apollo. She intends to throw herself off the cliff in the hope that the god will catch her and remove the painful love. As required by custom, she identifies herself to Ippias, the curator of the Leap. He gives her the go-ahead to jump but an old man idling nearby has heard everything. He recognizes Saffo as Alcandro's long-lost daughter and therefore Climene's sister. Alcandro, Climene and Faone arrive. There is a happy reunion until Ippias points out that Saffo has made an agreement with Apollo from which she cannot back out. Saffo accepts her fate, bids farewell to everybody, and jumps. Climene faints. Faone has to be restrained from jumping, too. Apollo, still angry with her, allows Saffo to drown.

Rita Atria was a witness of justice in a major Mafia investigation in Sicily. She committed suicide in July 1992, a week after the Mafia killed the prosecutor Paolo Borsellino, with whom she had been working.

On 19 July 1992, a Mafia bomb killed Borsellino, less than two months after his colleague Giovanni Falcone had been killed. Rita wrote in her diary: "You have died for what you believed in, but without you, I too am dead." A week later, on 26 July, Rita locked herself into the apartment and wrote a note, which said: "I am devastated by the killing of Judge Borsellino. Now there's no one to protect me, I'm scared and I can't take it any more." Then she threw herself out of the window.

Jeanne-Paule Marie "Jeannine" Deckers, better known as Sœur Sourire (French for ''Sister Smile'') and often called The Singing Nun in English-speaking countries, was a Belgian singer-songwriter and a member of the Dominican Order in Belgium as Sister Luc Gabriel.

Citing their financial difficulties, she and Annie Pécher committed suicide by taking overdoses of barbiturates and alcohol on 29 March 1985. In their suicide note, they wrote that they had not given up their faith and wished to be buried together with the funeral rite of the Catholic Church. They were buried together on 4 April 1985 in Cheremont Cemetery in Wavre, Brabant, the town where they died. The inscription on their tombstone reads, "J'ai vu voler son âme/ A travers les nuages", a line taken from her 1966 song "Luc Dominique".

Capucine was a French fashion model and actress. On 17 March 1990, at age 62, Capucine jumped to her death from her eighth-floor apartment in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she had lived for 28 years, having reportedly suffered from illness and depression for some time. The police said an investigation left no doubt that she committed suicide. Neighbors said she had led a reclusive life with her three cats, hardly ever leaving her apartment and spending most of her time reading.

The Virgin Suicides (1993) is the debut novel by the American author Jeffrey Eugenides. The fictional story, which is set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan during the 1970s, centers on the lives of five sisters, the Lisbon girls. The authorities come for the dead bodies, as the girls had apparently made a suicide pact: Bonnie hanged herself, Therese overdosed on sleeping pills, and Lux died of carbon monoxide poisoning after sealing herself inside the garage with the car running. Mary attempted suicide by putting her head in the gas oven, but failed. Mary lives for another month, before she ends her life by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. The adults in the community go on as if nothing happened. Local newspaper writer Linda Perl notes that the suicides came exactly one year after Cecilia's first attempt and describes the girls as tragic creatures who were so cut off from life that death was not much of a change.

"The Meek One", is a short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky written in November 1876.

The narrator spares no expense for his wife's medical care, and she slowly recovers. Throughout the entire winter the narrator watches his wife furtively, and a watershed moment happens when she begins to sing in his presence. The narrator kisses his wife's feet and promises to be a changed man. He recounts the story of his shame in the regiment, and he promises to take her to Boulogne-sur-Mer. Several days later, the narrator leaves the house to make arrangements for passports.

When the narrator returns home, he is met with a crowd of people outside his house. His wife has committed suicide: she has jumped out of the window while holding an icon. The narrator is convinced that he was only five minutes too late, even though it was ultimately his narcissistic love that drove his gentle wife to suicide.

Romy Schneider was a German-French actress.

In July 1981, Schneider's son David died at the age of 14 after attempting to climb the spiked fence at his stepfather's parents' home and puncturing his femoral artery in the process. Schneider began drinking alcohol excessively after his death. However, Schneider's friend, Claude Pétin, said that Schneider no longer drank at the time of her death.

Schneider was found dead in her Paris apartment on 29 May 1982. The examining magistrate Laurent Davenas declared that she died from cardiac arrest. Pétin said that Schneider's cardiac arrest was due to a weakened heart caused by a kidney operation she had months before.

Johanna Maria Magdalena "Magda" Goebbels was the wife of Nazi Germany's Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. 

Magda was among the last to see both Hitler and Eva Braun before they committed suicide on the afternoon of 30 April. On the following day, 1 May, Magda and Joseph arranged for SS dentist Helmut Kunz to inject their six children with morphine so that when they were unconscious, an ampule of cyanide could be then crushed in each of their mouths. Kunz later stated he gave the children morphine injections, but it was Magda and SS-Obersturmbannführer Ludwig Stumpfegger (Hitler's personal doctor) who administered the cyanide.Author James P. O'Donnell concluded that although Stumpfegger was probably involved in drugging the children, Magda killed them herself. He surmises that witnesses blamed the deaths on Stumpfegger because he was a convenient target, having died the following day. Moreover, as O'Donnell states, Stumpfegger may have been too intoxicated at the time of the deaths to have played a reliable role.

After their children were dead, Magda and Joseph Goebbels walked up to the garden of the Chancellery, where they committed suicide.

Jean Dorothy Seberg was an American actress.

On the night of August 30, 1979, Seberg disappeared. Hasni told police that they had gone to a movie that night and when he awoke the next morning, Seberg was gone. After Seberg went missing, Hasni told police that he had known she was suicidal for some time. He claimed that she had attempted suicide in July, 1979, by jumping in front of a Paris subway train.

On September 8, nine days after her disappearance, her decomposing body was found wrapped in a blanket in the back seat of her Renault, parked close to her Paris apartment in the 16th arrondissement. Police found a bottle of barbiturates, an empty mineral water bottle and a note written in French from Seberg addressed to her son. It read, in part, "Forgive me. I can no longer live with my nerves." In 1979, her death was ruled a probable suicide by Paris police, but the following year additional charges were filed against persons unknown for "non-assistance of a person in danger."

Gudrun Ensslin was a founder of the West German far-left militant group Red Army Faction.

The Red Army Faction's second generation made several attempts to free Ensslin and her comrades from prison. One attempt involved the kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer on 5 September 1977, and a proposed prisoner exchange. When this failed to work, the RAF orchestrated the hijacking of a Lufthansa airliner on 17 October. After the airplane was stormed by a German anti-terrorist unit, Schleyer was killed in France.

Hours later, in a night that became known as "Death Night", Ensslin, Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in the high security block of Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart. Like Meinhof, Ensslin was found dead by hanging in her cell. Baader and Raspe were found shot. A fourth member, Irmgard Möller, allegedly stabbed herself four times in the chest with a stolen knife. She recovered from her wounds and has since stated that the deaths were not suicides, but extrajudicial killings undertaken by the government of the time, a claim strongly denied by the governments former and present.

The photographs which make up the series “Gloomy Sunday” are the representation of several unforgettable women who had complex lives and tragic deaths in common.

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