The end of a 17-year-long love story
Maria Teresa Ruta discovered her ex-husband Amedeo Goria’s infidelities thanks to “a black agenda which her colleagues gossiped about”. She explains in an interview with Corriere della Sera that in this little book he was hiding “at least two thousand phone numbers of women all over the world, with a score marked with stars beside them”. This was the end of their 17-year-long love story. “Of course, perhaps I neglected him too, since I was too busy with work”, admits the 63-year-old journalist and TV presenter, but “sometimes Amedeo was flirting with other women even in front of me, he was incorrigible”. On the other hand, she clarifies that she has always been “very upright and strict, yet I had many opportunities, but I never had any difficulty in saying no”.
Declining an indecent proposal
A no she also said to an indecent proposal made by “a powerful man in TV”. Maria Teresa Ruta tells that he “summoned me to a hotel outside Rome to talk about a programme. The authors were also there. He said to me: ‘I’ll come to your room soon so that we can discuss it better, leave the door open'”. And she, innocently, complied because she didn’t understand the underlying meaning. So he came to the room “and asked me: ‘But why are you still dressed?'”. And she laughed in his face: “I made him go out and locked the door. I never did that show”.
Love at first sight
With her current husband, the record producer Roberto Zappulla, it was love at first sight. Especially on his part, who had been struck by “a blonde castaway who was crying her eyes out one night on the Island of the Famous” but without knowing who she was. And when he found himself facing her at a working lunch at the restaurant – during which he had dressed up as The Godfather to make a fool of himself and induce her to refuse a contract he considered too onerous – it was love at first sight. A love celebrated with no less than nine weddings: “In Mexico with the Maya ritual, on the island of Corisco, Equatorial Guinea, with the benga ritual, on the Chinese Wall in Mandarin, in Tanzania like the Masai, in Ethiopia with the Sun ceremony, on the sailboat in the Caribbean like the pirates, in Sri Lanka with the Moon ritual, in Havana, Cuba and finally in Cana, in Israel”. Only one is missing, the one in Italy that has not yet taken place. And between them, Ruta clarifies, there is a relationship based on trust: “We have connected cell phones, he sees my calls, my photos, my WhatsApp messages and vice versa”, because “trusting is better, it frees you from doubts and anxieties about what might happen and maybe never happens. I have nothing to hide”.
