Forty years three months ago, supermodel, actress, mother. Particular signs? Palermo with a German face. Eva Riccobono was the star of a beautiful interview given to Corriere della Sera in which she talked about everything. She considers herself a “daughter of immigration.” In fact, the father, Giacomo, left Palermo to go to work in Germany with his brother and there they met two sisters. Eventually, the two brothers married two sisters.
“My mother – Eva Riccobono told me – told me that at that time many Italians came to Germany, they promised heaven and earth, and then they left getting their German girlfriend pregnant. When dad said: ‘I’m going back to Palermo, I already I’ll fix everything and then I’ll come back” my mom thought “here’s another one”. Instead, he really came back, married her and they had four more children.” Among them Nicolás. “My brother Nicola, the eldest, died at the age of 19 in a motorcycle accident. When you lose a child, families break up However, mine has found a new balance. I reflected on this loss and understood that Nicola’s death had different consequences for us sisters, I was the “mourning” daughter: I was the little one, I felt the duty to make life easier for everyone, Nicola and I were the Germans of the family, blonde, light-eyed, also characteristically similar.”
Many references in the interview to his childhood. “A little curtain from my house in Palermo? My father, sincere, who calls my mother, elegant as a swan, with an open “e”: “Elisabèèètta, come down and bring some oil”. And she: ‘Giacomo Please, you can’t yell…” My father had the typical warmth of a Sicilian man. He sometimes asked us daughters to translate his spicy jokes for mom. And she: ‘Better not, I don’t know if we would have had a long relationship if he had understood what she was saying’ “.
Since 2004 Eva Riccobono has been in a sentimental relationship with DJ Matteo Ceccarini, with whom she lives in London. The couple have two children: Leo, born on May 30, 2014, and Livia, born on July 20, 2020. “We met at the Life Ball in Vienna. It was a moment in my life when I decided to do everything wrong: “I was 21 years old and had always been good and calm. At one point I wanted to try everything, even “one night” with a guy I had just met that I liked. It was him”.
A career, that of Eva Riccobono, which began when she was very young. “How did I find out? I was engaged to a guy who worked in a production company. One day I went to visit him at the Florio family home, where they were filming for Vogue. I was sitting on the sofa like a ‘piunca’ and they told me that they wanted to take a picture of me. ‘Piunca’ means boiled fish, in Palermo. That attention bothered me: I gave a look like “but what do you want from me”. A nice thing about my job? Finally my being tall, thin and flat now it wasn’t a problem. As a child they called me ‘four chained bones’ or ‘Pianura Padana’. I’m proud I never had breast surgery again.”
Many references to Palermo in the long interview. “In Palermo, when you come, you say ‘I ate a piece of meat’. Well, I ate a lot of pieces of meat. When I get angry, do you speak in Palermo? No, but all the open ‘e’. What Sicilian saying did I get? like? Cchiù longa is a pinsata, cchiù grossa is a minchiata: the more you think about it, the more you risk being wrong. Fiorello also said it when we did a gag about Stasera pago io”.
