The most important woman in Carlo Verdone's life has always been his mother, Rossana Schiavina. "A saint like those of the calendars. Respectable, merciful, protective". A wonderful mother for the love she gave. "She loved my father, Mario, a film scholar and essayist and assistant to Norberto Bobbio at the university, immensely, away from her, sunny, funny, emotional. Dad came from a very poor family; a war orphan, his mother mended beads for the nuns. They met through Cesare Brandi, the art critic".
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Carlo Verdone, the memory of his mother
Their house became a cenacle as the Corriere della Sera recalls. "A living room where all the intelligence passed. Fellini was crazy for risotto, Leonard Bernstein of whom I have the photo while Gianna, my ex-wife, feeds him and he, as always, has whisky in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I remember Zeffirelli, Ettore Scola, Bussotti, the director Urbini, the violinist Milstein, that genius of Benedetti Michelangeli who almost lived with the piano tuner and interrupted his silences to tell us to tune ours. Vittorio De Sica at the end of the meal used to chew a leaf from the cedrina plant from the terrace...".
And thanks to her Carlo Verdone created a series of characters: "Mom encouraged me to observe, from there my characters were born".
Carlo was the favorite son, more than Luca and Silvia. A child who was afraid of the dark: "The dark was a problem. Mom bought me a warm, orange light with which I could fall asleep. At Christmas time she prepared the nativity scene in my room and I fell asleep with the lights of the Magi. Mom was protective of us children".
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Death
A mother who left too soon. "At 59, in 1984. She died of a horrible neuralgic disease that begins with insomnia and then becomes depression. She often cried. The doctors - Carlo Verdone still tells the Corsera - took her for depression but it was Richardson, Steele and Olszewski syndrome. It was diagnosed in France, in Italy they had understood nothing. It triggers a slow and inexorable decay of the body, until you can't stand up and it's hard to open your eyelids. She suffered for four years, and we with her. Dad was devastated, he wanted to die".
Then he still remembers: "Dad didn't talk anymore. But I managed to react immediately, I told myself that I had to remember her as she was before the disease. On the evening of the funeral at dinner we started to laugh at the happiest episodes, leaving behind the ordeal of those four years".
The memory
There is a perfume today that binds Carlo still to his mother:, the Roger & Gallet perfume. "When I want to remember her, I open the bottle and the scenery of her bedroom appears, which was inebriated by that fragrance. And almost, even today, it seems to me to see her again"
Before she left, her mother had time to see "my first two films. She came on the set of Un sacco bello. I shot Acqua e sapone in tragic psychological conditions. In the morning I shot and in the afternoon I went to visit her in the clinic. She had a fundamental role for my theatrical debut, at the Alberichino". What did she do? "I had a panic attack, I wanted to cancel the show. Mom took the bag with the objects of my characters, and put it in my hand, she gave me the keys to the car, pushed me towards the door and said: go fregnone, that one day you will thank me. She took me by the ear like you do with children who don't want to go to school. It was a great success".
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