From telephone jokes with the grandmother to the greatest love: Portrait of Emanuela Fanelli, presenter of the Venice Film Festival 2025

In Emanuela Fanelli, Romana, 39 years old, this year the task of conducting the opening and closing ceremonies of the Venice exhibition (August 27 – September 6). It is no longer said godmother, also because it has never been said “godfather” when men were chosen for the same role. But Emanuela Fanelli has his own theory about it and explained it on social media: “As far as I understood this year the role will no longer be called” godmother “perhaps because, choosing me, They feared I could take advantage of the hook to accompany the news with “also available for baptisms and confirmations”. Sorry, a missed humorous avant -garde occasion. ” With Emanuela Fanelli it goes like this: irony wins over everything.

It is a family gift, cultivated with love by parents and grandparents who taught her to laugh: «“I who laugh” is a bit the summary of my childhood. Dad still calls me “gingive” because I laughed even when I didn’t have my teeth yet. Life gave me a happy childhood, which, later, gave me a lot of strength, “he told the Corriere della Sera. Her first memory of a child is, in fact, she laughing with her maternal grandmother: «She had pulled her grandfather’s pants down to make a joke. He was very nice ». It was the same grandmother who taught her the swear words in Calabrian And then he made them repeat to the phone to people called at random.

Momeon tone and accounting dad had very young people: “The first three years have inhabited with the paternal grandmother, adored too, in Largo Preneste, not a” high “neighborhood of Rome”. Then the transfer to Morena, the outskirts of Rome that Fanelli remembers without predictable rhetoric: «It is not a bronx story. It was a cute place, I grew up with cousin, aunts that loved me ». In that house, he says, he learned to love well: «Love is a mother who was bathing and put me The hot pajamas taken by the radiator. He is a dad who returned home tired, but He started making two balls of ball with me. These are the things that make you feel loved and that they taught me to recognize love ». With these examples, little Emanuela could only be a nice little girl: «I was successful in elementary school with the boys, I was lively, I played football. On Valentine’s Day I was full of giftsthey wrote to me the letters of love to respond to “yes”, “no”, “maybe”. I put “maybe” to everyone. I was full of doubts. I think that this success never had it again, “he told in an interview with the newspaper the Republic.

If these were the loves of a child, At 4 years of age he met great love, that is the theaterthanks to the paternal grandmother who led her to see Add a place to the table Di Garinei and Giovannini: «She was the only one to have seen my ironic attitude, but nobody lined up. He said that while he was bathing, I at 2 years old I had made the verse to the advertising of a soap with a woman in the foam tub who said in a flute voice: Camay ». Greater, at school, was highly appreciated for his sympathy: «I was a little bit of everyone, they asked me to tell stories, to make an imitation. It was the way to make me love me ». To follow a guy who had fallen in love, he enrolled in a theater course: «But I had the dream of being an actress insideeven if I kept it for me. I made his debut at the age of 17 at the Parochial Teatro Capocece in the role of Turandot: protagonist, but very boring. It went better the following year: in the3 money workI was Mrs. Peachum, an old tilled baggage who made me understand that making you like laughing like more », he recalled in an interview a Today. With the usual self -deprecating vein he says that at the theater workshops he was caught by atrocious doubts: “Arrivals and 20 strangers, in presenting himself, they begin to tell very private things, like” my father is in jail. My mother has never loved me … “. I was there and I wondered: what do I say? I thought: I can’t do actress, I don’t have painI don’t really have the engine. A year, mom had been bad. I only managed to say that he returned from the care with his head -to -face and we sang them Black face beautiful abyssine. It’s not that I didn’t suffer, but I have modesty of important feelings, both painful and beautiful».

In the years in which the classical high school ended, he enrolled in the university without ending it and began to make some jobs (waitress and call center), he continued to act in theater companies of the Castelli Romani, always with the idea that it was a hobby. The real work at one point became teach kindergarten. She liked it and to do it better that she could also go to the psychotherapist: «I thought: before I do damage and send future serial killer around, I have to give myself about a system too. Among other things, I said to the psychologist who, sometimes, felt that my happiness was elsewhere because I had this actress’s ball». Maestra’s is the job he thinks he can return to do if, as an inner voice often warns it, at a certain point they will no longer call it to recite: «I liked to teach a lot, I did so many trades but that I did it for 10 years and I thought I could do it all my life if I hadn’t succeeded as an actress. If I no longer had to have proposals for things I like, I can always go back to being a teacher. This gives me great strength. I know that I also do well in life and I don’t care if nobody sees me ».

As he taught, he played, stopped acting and then resumed, he began to write monologues and take them to theaters. There he was noticed by Agent Federica Remotti who started to make her auditions. Thus the roles in the cinema arrived: the “first smandrappa” in Not be bad by Claudio Caligari in 2015, Drought And Another mid -August by Paolo Virzì, There is still tomorrow by Paola Cortellesi, Madly by Paolo Genovese. In the middle, a lot of TV: A patch of Lanini, Where is Mario with Corrado Guzzanti, Call my agent. For Drought And There is still tomorrow He received two David di Donatello as a supporting actress. Yet Emanuela Fanelli still cannot say good: «I live in the continuous terror that sooner or later it ends everything. Indeed, it is sure that when I say “I did it” it will be over … ».

The irreverence, which he first reserves to herself, has a lot to do with the continuous doubt of one’s skills and never give anything taken for granted: «Every now and then I still feel the voice that tells me: “Brava, even at this lap you screwed them, even this time they did not notice that you are scarce …”». Behind the irony, the continuous aspiration to do their best, and confesses it openly when he admits that he did not have a good relationship with the failures “having been from a child, in the sense that things were succeeded. For example, I did swimming for many years, from the races I brought home gold medals at home, yet If I won the silver one for me it was a drama. I darkened and stored for not being good enough. My mother said to me: “Give value to the things I conquer”». The doubts have not remained in the past: still recently, when Paola Cortellesi wanted it for the role of the fructiveness Marisa in the film There is still tomorrowwondered if he had chosen it for the friendship that has been bonding for years. No reassurance managed to reassure her: «I shot with a huge weight, I thought crazy things. Type: if I suck, it doesn’t tell me ».

When a consecration seems to arrive, Emanuela Fanelli lights up the Rovelli machinery. But he always manages to make them fun, as when he tells of his participation as a guest of Sanremo Together with the social state, in 2021: “There was the question of flowers: gave them only to women, some got angry. I wondered: if they give them to me? I scream and I take them back indignantly? Or do I take them because I like them? I like them why am I agella from Patriarchate? ». That time the performance ended, she got off the stage, the Valletta dei Fiori no longer found it: “and I solved the problem.”

He is still not sure he has learned to give value to the things he conquers, as he has always advised her to do his mother. He says that the fear is still a bit “of not being enough”. Success, even what they recognize them on social networks, welcomes him with a certain detachment: “The feeling is that they love you madly and then, at the first wrong thing, you odin”. That compliment received is held tight when he was still a kindergarten teacher: «I was talking to a 3 -year -old boy and he said to me: “If the males would look at you, you know what wonder they would see”. I don’t think I will ever forget it ». It is always that family gift, the same one that still today, when he returns home from his, makes his father say: “Eleonora Duse has arrived”.