Sophia Loren, who turned 90 last September 20, was chosen as Character of the Year 2024 by Treccani who considers her an absolute symbol of being a woman. In a text written by Gianluca Nicoletti for the Treccani 2024 Book of the Year, the great Neapolitan actress is indicated as a model of feminine Italianity in all its dizzying splendor, as well as in all its possible fragilities.
The most famous emblem of Italian femininity in the world, never tarnished and never surpassed by the peremptory change in aesthetic fashions. Of humble origins, to the point that the memory of her mother begging to feed her remains alive, Sophia Loren finds in cinema the great opportunity for redemption from the rubble of post-fascist Italy; and cinema was the enchanted mirror of his life and consecrated it into a myth.
There is an unspeakable part of the culture of which we are children in the faithless pizza girl in L’oro di Napoli (1954) whose husband, suspicious of her prolonged absence from home, asks: “But how long did this mass last?” And she responds with the innocence of the most arrogant immodesty “Eh, but there was also the blessing…”, in an era of suffocating bigotry where adultery was criminally punishable.
Unattainable sex symbol and exemplary mother for her children, Sophia Loren was able to add glorious sensuality to the battle for the dignity of the former prostitute Filumena Marturano – who deceives her pusillanimous lover to give her children a surname – and to restore a semblance indelible to the maternal tragedy of La Ciociara, an unspeakable story that testifies to the war rape, which earned her an Oscar; and to express in A particular day by Ettore Scola – that of Adolf Hitler’s visit to Rome on 6 May 1938 – the delicacy of an impossible passion that suggests the horror that will follow that visit. Loren was a hymn to lightness and the joy of the senses.
Even the cliché of the sentimental bond with the great producer Carlo Ponti has become for her an eternal love story, indubitable, unassailable by gossip and shadows. Sophia Loren also remains exemplary on that morning in 1982 when she took a plane from Switzerland to turn herself in in Rome, knowing that prison awaited her: she landed in Fiumicino where there was a crowd of photographers and journalists waiting for her and she got off the plane with a dazzling smile hugging a bouquet of flowers, as only a true diva can do, to get arrested and serve 17 days in prison; innocent, as the Court of Cassation later established in 2013, more than 30 years later.
What is the Treccani Book of the Year
The Book of the Year Treccani 2024, directed by Marcello Sorgi, reconstructs the 365 days that have just passed – news and politics, but also much more: from the achievements of science and technology to the Nobel Prizes awarded, from the events of art, music and cinema to all the protagonists of the national and international scene, up to the new president of the United States – through 1040 insights, 90 articles by great names in journalism, culture and economics, 74 boxes editorials, 100 graphs and maps and 487 images.i, 90 articles by big names in journalism, culture and economics, 74 editorial boxes, 100 graphs and maps and 487 images.