Natalie Portman tells Vanity Fair the enchantment of our country, the so extraordinarily familiar atmosphere that enveloped her and her family for a whole month in Tuscany. Month he wished would never end.
Paolo Sorrentino, one of the most beautiful minds in our country, Oscar-winning director, writer, screenwriter, directed the special May issue of Vanity Fair Italia. From the dreamlike cover (flamingos in the deserted night of Piazza di Spagna) announces phase 4 to the town. A phase, according to Sorrentino, which could coincide with the return of an idea of possible and different beauty.
Inside the special issue pages of affection for Italy and first-person testimonies of many stars of international cinema. Memories, suggestions that everyone brings with them after contact with our land. Who welcomed them, bewitched.
Testimonies that together are an act of love and a great good luck for the near future.
Really enchanted words are those of the Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman, a regular of our country, as she herself confesses, and unconditionally in love with Tuscany.
A 19 [years] - says Natalie - I shot Star Wars: Episode II in Caserta, where the locals yelled love poems to my blonde colleague [Hayden Christensen] when we walked to work. At 24, I went on a study trip with friends, visiting Rome, Florence and Venice and noticing the different art and flavors between the cities. We ate fried artichokes in Rome, ice cream in Florence, spiced pasta in Venice. We saw the statue of David, Raphael, Michelangelo, Beato Angelico, Titian, Botticelli, Piero della Francesca.
But the memory that warms the heart of the actress most is the vacation in Tuscany with her family in 2014. A month-long stay that actually began not in the best way.
When we got to the house, the first thing that struck me was the heat: the humid, direct sunlight, white, blinding. The streets were empty. "Look, even the Italians leave at this time of the year, what did you have in your head?" I scolded my husband. I spent the first day hiding in the bedroom with the clay walls, reading Elena Ferrante, only stopping to berate my husband again for not renting an air-conditioned house.
But then Natalie tells of when, as evening fell, she went through the Tuscan villages, first timidly and then letting herself be involved in a climate unknown to her. Here they are, the Italians, out on the streets, to take in the cool of the evening.
Time had stopped and expanded equally. We felt like we were transported to another era, where families still lived in the space of the same four blocks, kids could play free in the streets, and the grandmother was the most loved person in the family, along with the children. Strangers patted our son's cheek, played ball with him so that we could have dinner seated, and they said to us in Italian words that, I'm pretty sure, meant: your son is the most beautiful, intelligent, funniest child we ever have. known.
Slowly, Natalie confesses, her mood becomes docile. The Italian climate infects it.
The magic of the place softened me, and I soon began to hug my husband rather than scold him, admiring the volcano he had learned to make to make gnocchi, a mound of potatoes with an egg instead of lava.
As long as she persuades herself to play the role of the'Italian.
We went to that square every night for a month. Those evenings seemed to last forever, and I felt like we were in 1952. I continued reading The Brilliant Friend, with her face in the center of the fan we had bought in a local store, until I was forced to stop, with anguish, because the fourth novel in the series had not yet come out in English. Our son learned to wear the right team shirt to go to the square in the evening and became friends with children with whom he never exchanged a word, thanks only to the language of the feet.
The pages of Vanity Fair return the magic, the spell that our country has been able to exercise on a woman who is accustomed to being well received, pampered in ease, in luxury. But Italy has kidnapped it without pomp, with the enveloping breath of its unique normality. And Natalie's last words explain it as best it could not.
I realize now that the Italians have learned to dominate time, our greatest asset and also the most threatening enemy. That month felt like a lifetime. And I never wanted to go home, even though we had air conditioning.
