A Childhood Romance
The first boyfriend asked me to go out with him in a very trashy way. If I found one like that today, I would adore him. We were eight years old, we went to school together, I had a pink bike, he had a red one. He said to me: “So, are we Roma-Roma, or Roma-Torino?” What? He wanted to know if we were on the same team or not. Romanaccio. I lived in Palmarola. North Rome suburbs. Things that today if you want to buy a house, it will make your hair white, but then it was a popular neighborhood with the pizzicagnolo and the greengrocer.
The National Popularity of Ambra Angiolini
Gianni Boncompagni says that you certainly didn’t pull away from the Sorbonne courses at Non è la Rai. True. I didn’t like studying so much. And we mostly came from simple families. My dad was the director of a salami company, my mom helped him with the accounting. For them, the television was the one they kept in the living room. Then, one day, fourteen-year-old Ambra Angiolini went to an audition and television was no longer the same. It was 1991 and the hundred girls of Non è la Rai were looking for the camera all in bikinis and little movements. When in 1994 Ambra appears on the posters of Rome alone under the heading “I want you”, at the casting, in one day, 15 thousand girls present themselves. About twenty have nine years. Boncompagni had elaborated the “theory of the reachable girl”. He said: “If I take beautiful or professional dancers and actresses, the relationship of empathy with the public will break”. Veline, letterine, reality shows like Big Brother and programs like Saranno Famosi are children of that intuition.
A Woman at Last
Today Ambra is 28 years old and has a 16-month-old daughter, Jolanda, born to singer Francesco Renga, the winner – with Angelo – of the last Sanremo. From May 29th she returns to video (on Mtv) with Elio delle Storie Tese to host the Cornetto Free Music Festival. She is a woman, now. Survived herself and the monster against which thousands of young feminists took to the streets on an 8th of March many years ago with the cry of “We are not ‘Ambranate’, we are committed students”. Rescue, and complex path. But somewhere you have to start. For example from the Roman slum from which she left and the Brescian condominium where she ended up. Did Renga propose a Roma-Brescia or a Brescia-Brescia? “For two years we only wrote each other letters. Then we saw each other again and he was something different from the drawing I had imagined of him. I had always liked those with the eyes of ice, who then smell the bed and run away. Instead in front of me there was a sunny one, with the disheveled curl, one who stays at home with old slippers that I still don’t understand where he finds them”. So? “The Timoria, of his old band, told him: ‘You can’t stay with Ambra. You are too rock and she is nationally popular'”. They were wrong. “Maybe he is also pop. Maybe I’m rock. I know that Francesco immediately warned me that if I wanted to be with him we had to have a child, because he had already passed thirty years. And I felt like a woman”.
