That time Angelica arrived in Paris

Mamma mia, what a presence, Claudia Cardinale, even to meet her just once, for a few hours; and yet destined to remain there, in the memory, with the brightness of her eyes, perpetually burning coals. I happened to meet her a few years ago, just before Covid, in Paris, where she had been living for some time. A few months earlier in Milan, in the Kasa dei Libri, we had organised an exhibition on her, as the main interpreter of Italian films of literary inspiration in a long season of our cinema, from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. Not only Il gattopardo, which dominated that era with its dazzling stature, but many, many films of much lesser fame, which formed the backbone of that cinematography, from Ragazza di Bube to Giorno della civetta to Storia, a screenplay for television by Comencini: all works in which she had put her rugged beauty, often bordering on wildness, at the service of the most significant novels of a rich and fervent period of Italian fiction.

The exhibition had been noticed by the then director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, Fabio Gambaro, a well-prepared and sensitive cultural journalist, who immediately proposed to move it to its most prestigious location: that Hôtel de Gallifet inhabited at the time by Tayllerand, which hosts all the main exhibitions of the Italian state in the Ville Lumière. No sooner said than done: time to dismantle it in Milan, set it up again in Paris and there it was, waiting to be inaugurated with her, the Diva Claudia, who had agreed to be there.

Neither Gambaro nor I had ever had the chance to meet her, and neither of us has ever forgotten the moment of her entrance, an hour or so before the opening: a normal woman, of understated elegance, who wore her 80s with extraordinary naturalness, without the slightest attempt to chase lost time. Yet even in that nonchalance, in that simple manner, the charm was totally intact: it was enough to return that gaze that had lost none of the intensity of her twenties. In short, at the Hôtel de Gallifet, as at Donnafugata, Angelica had arrived. And her curiosity was also the same: she was delighted to wander through the showcases of the hall and review the books and magazines of the most famous films. She had lingered over the sheet-sized page of the "Espresso" that portrayed her at the Nymphaeum of Villa Giulia together with Cassola on the occasion of the Strega Prize, and she had been greatly amused by Cara Claudia, a booklet by Longanesi in which Giovanni Grazzini, the young critic of the "Corriere", had collected the most surreal letters sent to her by her fans from all over Italy. And then, in a pause, a question in a whisper to my wife: How's the make-up? Of course more than fine, how could it be otherwise? You know, you get older, she added. Impossible to deny it. But the look is still there, my wife had reassured her.

She had reserved the same simplicity for the audience that came for the inaugural meeting: a compact crowd that filled the main hall of the palace, having booked weeks in advance. And there too, on stage, prompted by our questions, not a diva, but a woman who had a legendary story behind her, but could tell it in the everyday tone of someone who talks about what he bought at the supermarket: Alain Delon? Every now and then he phones me. "Hello Angelica," he greets me. "I'm Tancredi". Luchino Visconti? Yes, it's true: once, when I was commuting between the set of The Leopard and the set of Eight and a Half, he asked me to pretend to get confused and call Fellini Luchino. The anecdote was also masterfully recounted by Francesco Piccolo in his La bella confusione (The Beautiful Confusion); but recounted by her, who had experienced these things, it had the flavour of myth. And the public, then as sixty years earlier, applauded her with the same enthusiasm. Let's just hope they don't applaud her at the funeral: her extraordinary class deserves only a deferential silence.