Rome's city council voted on Friday to rename one of its concert halls after Oscar-winning composer Ennio Morricone, who died last week in the Italian capital.
The Music Park Auditorium will now be called the Ennio Morricone Auditorium.
Morricone won a lifetime achievement Academy Award in 2007 as well as an Oscar in 2016 for the score he wrote for "The Hateful Eight."
At Rome's City Hall ceremony, director Giuseppe Tornatore, whose "Cinema Paradiso" won an Oscar as best foreign language film and featured Morricone's sentimental music, struggled against tears as he paid tribute to the composer.
Tornatore recalled how Morricone liked to say that "in silence, one finds the key to music … the silences, the intervals." Referring to the 91-year-old composer's death on July 6, Tornatore added: "So, maybe the silence that he initiated a few days ago is what will be the hardest for us to listen to, because it will be a silence that's too, too long."
Among Morricone's memorable music for movies was the coyote-howl theme for the iconic Spaghetti Western "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" and the haunting songs in the epic "Once Upon A Time In America." Both films were directed by his former elementary school classmate, Sergio Leone.
