60 years of Elena Sofia Ricci, the girl who never stands still

Even though he turns 60 on March 29, Elena Sofia Ricci she is a girl: “A big girl, of a certain age.” Above all, we add, a girl who never stands still. She is able to pass with ease and success from TV to cinema to theater, to then take a leap into advertising and start the tour all over again.

By Mom, Elena Ricci Poccetto, the first woman set designer in Italyhe took the surname of art, because the real one is Barucchieri: his father was the historian Paolo Barucchieri but the parents separate quickly and badly and Elena Sofia Ricci does not attend her father at least until she is 30: “I had been programmed, educated to hate him“.

His, he recalls, was a rigorous education: “Once my grandfather, Leonardo Ricci, a great architect, looked at me and sentenced:”By the age of 25 you either become someone or you will be a failure forever“. I was very young and I took him at his word ». But, like all little girls who never stand still, rummaging through an old family closet at the age of 3 she finds the magic key that opens an enchanted world: an old pair of classic ballerina shoes, of those with the tip, which belonged to his mother. “My grandfather was against the idea of ​​her being a dancer, as she dreamed of. The grandmother, who had bought her shoes, hid them in a closet. I found them, they seemed huge and fabulous, ”she told al Corriere della Sera. This time the grandmother does not give up: she enrolls her in a dance school and then gives her a guitar: “Music was the first source from which I drank.” She understands that she likes to be on a stage, any one: «As soon as there was something that she too only remembered a stage I would go up there. The difference in height of a step in the living room of the house in Florence, where I grew up, was enough: that for me was clearly a stage“.

At the age of 8 she leaves Florence, where she was born, to arrive in Rome, following her mother’s work: “She took me with her to Cinecittà. I remember the sheds where the fabrics were: the sheets reached up to the ceiling and to me they seemed to reach infinity, like Caravaggio’s canvases. I was crazy ».

Learn from the grown-ups, like Mastroianni who, while still a child, held her on her knees «She told me:“ In this profession you have to do everything, because it is a profession that you learn by doing it ”. She starts early with the theater and is noticed by Pupi Avati which makes her act in the film Employees (1985) and gives her the opportunity to win, as a revelation, the Golden Globe. Since then, she has worked in about forty films, including Loose cannons by Ferzan Özpetek e Their by Paolo Sorrentino, where by playing Veronica Lario she gets her third David di Donatello. In between, many TV series awarded by ratings, for example Pride, The Cesaroni And God help us. But Elena Sofia Ricci, as mentioned, never stands still and therefore every time he decides to leave the fiction when they are at the peak of success. And she often does it to return to the theater, to go up again on the stage.

If professional life is so eventful, personal life is no lessmade up of removals and reunions conducted on the thread of a long analysis work that helped her to find his natural father and meet his 3 half-brothers: «Our father had also separated from their mother. Having them in my life has been a wealth, love is elevated to power, it is not a cake to be shared ». Getting to know her biological father did not replace her love for the man who raised her as a daughter, the director Pino Passalacquasecond husband of his mother.

And if love isn’t a cake to share, it means it doesn’t end and Elena Sofia Ricci was able to stay on good terms with her exes. Although, she recalled, the trauma of not having known her father for a long time pushed her towards men who were not suitable for her: “Through those I chose, I always tried to change my father, so I found people who guaranteed me abandonment, in the hope that they would not abandon me“. Her first marriage to the writer was very short Luca Damiani, which lasted from 1991 to 1992; she then she bonded with the actor Pino Quartullo with whom he had his daughter Emma in 1996. After this relationship, she married in 2003 her current husband, the composer and conductor Stefano Mainetti with whom he had the second daughter, Maria.

Then, descending a little further into the shadows that were inside her, Elena Sofia Ricci she managed to confess that she was sexually abused at age 12 by a family friend. He did it, however, when his mother was already dead: «I spared him. Without knowing it, she handed me over into her hands in my executioner, thinking that she was a trusted person ». For her mother she recited until the last of her, after knowing that she would die in a few months: «I realized that she didn’t make sense to tell her the truth. She would have ruined her last months of her life. She, like me, could not bear the certainty that we were about to separate and so I did the only thing I know how to do: act ».

At 60 Elena Sofia Ricci has no intention of staying still: «I want to travel the world: before I die I want to go to Patagonia, Petra, St. Petersburg, Vietnam“. And die? Once they asked her how she would have liked to do it: “It’s useless to be hypocrites: on the stage.” After so much moving and traveling there again, still on stage.