It’s a return to the country, marked by emotion and memories… Claudia Cardinale, 84, inaugurated this Sunday a street in her name in the port city of La Goulette, in the suburbs of Tunis. The ceremony took place near the town’s small railway station, with a traditional orchestra, presentation of gifts and the unveiling of a mural that displays his huge portrait. The party was organized by the town hall, on the initiative of the association La Piccola Sicilia, which aims to preserve and revive the history of the district, forged by the massive arrival of Italians in the port from the 19th century, forming a real community mixing.
It was there that the ancestors of Claudia Cardinale landed one day, Sicilians from the side of Palermo who had left their island, with dreams in their heads, to join Tunisia just opposite, then a French protectorate: its great – father settled in La Goulette to build boats, the father of the actress will then work as an engineer in the train company. Little Claudia was born in the center of the city of Tunis in 1938, the eldest of four siblings. “We spoke the language of Molière, including at home, we did not claim our roots, the actress once explained in an interview with Afrique Magazine. Less than ten years after the end of the war, Italy remained for many French people a fascist country which had sided with Germany. We were keeping a low profile…”
Claudia Cardinale has kept very precise memories of this time: the smells, the colors, the sea and its fishermen, the social mix, between Jews, Arabs, Italian immigrants, Russians, Spaniards or Maltese… She grew up like a real tomboy, never not hesitating to sometimes get involved in fights on his way home from school, to show that girls are as strong as boys – his father will make him a wooden satchel to defend himself. With her brown hair and black eyes, she is nicknamed “the Berber”, and if her sister dreams of glitter and cinema, she prefers to imagine herself as a teacher in the desert or an explorer traveling the world. To go to school in Carthage, she did not hesitate to jump on the bandwagon…
It is also in Tunis that her destiny will be decided, when she wins the city’s beauty contest by chance in 1955: she simply accompanies her mother to sell raffle tickets when she registers her at the last moment. The reward ? A stay in Venice for the Mostra, where she caused a sensation by posing on the Excelsior square in a bikini. Journalists and producers notice her, harass her, she hesitates, then ends up going into the business with the success that we know.
Her family moved to Italy after independence, but the Cheetah star will always keep ties with her native Tunisia – she regularly returned for holidays and still enjoys her couscous on New Year’s Day. Decorated with the Tunisian National Order of Merit, she has shot several films there, including recently L’Île du Pardon by Ridha Béhi, currently in post-production. A story that precisely allowed him to revive on film the middle of his childhood in the 1950s, like a real bath of youth…
