The mythic American West has been depicted in stories and legends for more than 150 years, and the larger-than-life personalities and epic range wars have been commemorated in hundreds of films, books and songs. One country that has had a longstanding fascination with the Old West is Italy. In fact, Clint Eastwood mostly got his start as a famous cowboy actor in Sergio Leone’s classic Spaghetti Westerns. We feature some of the eminently recognizable scores from a couple of those films, composed by Ennio Morricone. Then, we examine Puccini’s Opera “La Fanciulla del West” (“The Girl of the West”), another Italian homage to this storied moment in time. And resident Western expert Jim Dunham discusses the history of William H. Bonnie, otherwise known as Billy the Kid.

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