«Dino Risi said it to my face. “Do you want to make films with those eyes that remind you of your grandfather? At least change your last name!'” The short answer was: “Damn…!”. I left the cinema because they never took me. After each audition, the answers were: too beautiful, too ugly, too tall, too thin, eyes too light. Maybe the last name was the truth.” Said Alessandra Mussolini in an interview with Corriere della Sera, in which she shared her experiences on the set, from Ettore Scola to Alberto Sordi, traces and talks about her family, on the occasion of the publication of the book “The Game of Darkness”.
«Dino Risi said it to my face. “Do you want to make movies with those eyes that remind you of your grandfather? At least change your last name!'” he says. “He suggested I call myself Alessandra Zero.” The answer was succinct: “With the f…! And even if I had changed my last name, nothing would have changed. They would have said: “Look at this coward, she will even change her name.” Then when something goes wrong and doesn't work, you can't remain stubborn. After I finished the cinema, I enrolled in literature, where there was always too much chaos and too many demonstrations, and then medicine. “I graduated in 1994 and still pay the fee to the medical association today. After completing a master's degree in angiology, it happened that after an ultrasound scan of the supra-aortic trunks, a patient opened his eyes, looked at me and said: 'Mussolini here? What is this, an open camera?'”.
Then politics: “The Social Movement sent me to challenge Bassolino in Naples and it was an incredible success.” Bassolino and I came to vote and left out the old DC.” Bassolino won. “I loved Bassolino, we had a lot in common. If it had been possible, I would have formed a great coalition with him on the city council. We talk a lot about fluidity these days; “I was already politically fluent back then.” The family chapter with his father Romano Mussolini, a jazz musician who cheated on his mother Maria Scicolone, who in turn was the protagonist of a difficult story, was only recognized upon payment of an amount that her aunt Sophia Loren shared with the Fee provided by “Quo Vadis”: “Riccardo Scicolone, whose lover my grandmother had been, had recognized Aunt Sofia and given her her last name, but not my mother, who actually bore her grandmother's last name, Villani.” They paid him for giving my mother his last name too.
But at home things weren't going well between father Romano and mother Maria: “There was no physical violence, but maybe it was even worse, at home there were constant arguments, without interruption.” They started in the kitchen and ended up in the dining room, often triggered by grandmother Romilda attacking my mother. Grandma had built as much with Aunt Sophia as she later destroyed with my mother. “Grandmother, who was also a musician, noticed my father's betrayal and insidiously reported it to my mother. Mom took it out on Dad. Dad did what men usually do: deny, deny, deny. Maybe it was Sunday when Grandmother, out of spite, poured ladles of boiling ragù onto plates and tossed chops, which she fried until they turned into stones. Happy memories «two or at most three. A day at the EUR amusement park, a Sunday in Latvia watching Laurel and Hardy in their pajamas together, and the game of darkness that gives the book its title and that we played with my father in the little house, that we lived in.”