What Happened to Sophia Loren's 2 Children? Their Lives Today

In the winter of 1968, one of the most famous women on earth checked into a hospital in Geneva, having spent most of the previous nine months confined almost entirely to a single hotel room. This is the story of Sophia Loren's two sons and what became of them. The marriage that made her a criminal in her own country.

To understand why Sophia Luren spent nine months of a pregnancy essentially hiding in a Swiss hotel, you have to understand what had happened to her in the decade before it. She was born Sophia Costanza Brida Villani Shikolone on September 20th, 1934 in Rome and raised in genuine poverty in Potswi near Naples during and after the Second World War. Her father, Ricardo Shikolone, never married her mother, Ramilda Villani, and was largely absent throughout her childhood, though he did give her his surname.

Ramilda was herself an aspiring actress who had once won a local contest as a Greta Garau lookalike, and had been offered a screen test in Hollywood that her own mother refused to let her accept. The war years in Potzui were genuinely dangerous. The town had a munitions plant and was bombed repeatedly.

The family sheltered in a railway tunnel during raids, and Lauren has described near starvation, a shrapnel injury to her chin, and the kind of hunger that leaves permanent marks on how a person relates to food for the rest of their life. She was so thin as a child that neighbors reportedly called her a stick. By the time she entered her teens, she had transformed physically and was competing in local beauty contests, which in postwar Italy functioned as one of the few available roots out of poverty for a girl with no money and no connections.

She placed in a MissItalia competition in 1950. She took small uncredited roles as an extra appearing among the crowd in the 1951 Hollywood production Quo Vardis shot at Sinicita in Rome. It was in this period at one of these contests that she was noticed by a film producer named Carlo Ponty, 22 years her senior and already one of the most powerful figures in Italian cinema.

Ponty put her under contract, guided her career, gave her the professional name Sophia Loren, and eventually fell in love with her. There was one very significant obstacle. Ponty was already married to a woman named Juliana Fiestri, and Italy in the 1950s did not permit divorce, not for anyone at any price, under any circumstances.

The solution they attempted was legally creative and as it turned out catastrophic. In September of 1957, Ponty obtained a Mexican divorce from Fiastri and married Luren in Mexico by proxy, meaning neither of them was physically present at the ceremony. Two lawyers stood in for them several thousand miles away in a country neither of them was in at the time.

As far as Mexico was concerned, they were married. As far as Italy was concerned, they were not. And worse, Ponty was now a biggamist under Italian law.

Lauren was 23 years old. She had been in the film industry for 7 years and had just begun working internationally, appearing opposite Carrie Grant in The Pride and The Passion the same year. She was on the verge of becoming a genuine global star and she had just entered a marriage that her own country considered a criminal act.

The Italian courts pursued it. Ponty faced bigamy charges. Lauren, in the eyes of Italian law and of a Catholic church that held enormous cultural authority at the time, was a concubine, and that word was used about her in print.

The couple were publicly denounced from pulpits. Catholic organizations campaigned against her films. She received hostile mail, some of it from strangers who had never met her, condemning her personally in religious terms.

The practical consequences were severe. They could not safely live in Italy together as husband and wife. Warrants were a genuine possibility for a couple whose entire professional lives were built inside the Italian film industry.

Being unable to reside in Italy as a married couple was not a minor inconvenience. By 1962, they had the Mexican marriage enulled simply to end the legal exposure. Leaving them after 5 years of fighting for it, formerly unmarried again and back where they had started.

That same year, 1962, Lauren won the Academy Award for best actress for two women, becoming the first performer ever to win the award for a role in a non-English language film. She was simultaneously the most acclaimed actress in the world and a woman whose own country did not recognize her marriage. The solution took another four years and required them to stop being Italian.

In 1965 with Juliana Fiestre's cooperation which was essential and by all accounts freely given Ponty obtained a legitimate French divorce. All three of them Ponty Fiestri and Lauren took French citizenship to make it legally possible. On April 9th, 1966, Sophia Luren and Carlo Ponti were married in France legally and permanently 9 years after their first attempt.

She was 31 years old. She had wanted a child for most of a decade, and the two years that followed would test her more severely than the courts ever had. Two losses and an obsession.

Lauren had described her desire for children by the time she reached her late 20s as having become something close to an obsession, and the failed pregnancies of the following years did nothing to lessen it. She lost a pregnancy in 1963 and another in 1967. Both losses were devastating and both were compounded by the particular circumstances of her life at the time in which a woman internationally famous for her physical presence was privately dealing with something her own body seemed unable to do.

She later wrote about watching new mothers at a hospital and finding that her entire life as a film star registered as essentially worthless by comparison to what those women had. The second loss in 1967 was especially hard. She was 32, newly and legally married at last after nine years of fighting for it, and the thing she had waited for had slipped away a second time.

She has written that she did not know at that point whether it would ever be possible for her at all, and that the fear of a third failure was almost worse than the losses themselves. When she became pregnant for a third time in 1968, a Swiss gynecologist named Hubert Deatville proposed an approach that was extreme even by the standards of the era. Lauren would remain effectively immobile for the duration.

She took a suite at a hotel in Geneva and stayed there resting for most of the nine months. She did not work. She barely moved.

The most famous woman in Italian cinema spent the better part of a year in a single room waiting. Ponty traveled back and forth. Visitors came to her.

She has described the period as simultaneously the longest and the most hopeful of her life. It worked. On December 29th, 1968, Carlo Ponty Jr.

was born by Cesarian section in Geneva. Lauren was 34 years old. She had an Academy Award on her shelf and a decade of international stardom behind her, and she would later write that none of it had ever mattered to her as much as what happened in that hospital room.

She also wrote that she had not slept at all the night before, and that her real fear was not the surgery, but the ending of the pregnancy itself, a state she had wanted so badly and waited so long for that she was reluctant to see it conclude. Four and a half years later on January 6th, 1973, a second son arrived, also in Geneva, after a second carefully managed pregnancy. They named him Eduardo.

Lauren had achieved at 38 the thing she had spent her entire adult life wanting, and she responded by doing something almost nobody at her level of fame does. the decade she walked away. Lauren substantially stepped back from film making to raise her sons.

This was not a brief pause. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, her output dropped sharply, and the projects she did take were increasingly selected around whether they could accommodate a family rather than around career strategy. She had spent her 20s and early 30s as one of the most in demand actresses in the world working with Victoriao Deika, Marello Mastroyani, Carrie Grant, Charlton H, Peter Cers, and Richard Burton, and winning an Academy Award in 1962 for two women, the first performance in a non-English language film ever to win best actress.

The scale of what she set aside is worth stating plainly. In the years immediately before the boys arrived, she had made marriage Italian style. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, arabesque, and a countess from Hong Kong, opposite Marlon Brando under Charlie Chaplain's direction.

She was at the absolute peak of her commercial value in the period of an actress's career when the offers are best and the window is shortest. She walked away from the momentum of that deliberately and spent the following years in Geneva. The family lived there for practical and legal reasons as much as personal ones, given how thoroughly Italy had complicated their marriage, and the boys were raised Swiss in their daily lives while remaining entirely Italian in their household.

They spoke Italian at home. They ate Italian food, much of it cooked by their mother, who has written two cookbooks, and who has been consistent across decades of interviews in treating cooking as a genuine part of her identity rather than a celebrity affectation. The result was an upbringing that both sons have described in remarkably similar terms across the decades since.

They grew up in a home that was by their own accounts relatively normal in its rhythms with a mother who cooked, who was present, and who did not conduct herself at home as a film icon. Carlo Jr. has said he cannot identify any single moment when he understood what his mother actually was to the world.

He thinks the realization arrived gradually, assembled over years out of small clues, including the fact that the people who occasionally came to dinner were people like Sylvester Stallone. What neither boy did was follow their mother onto a screen. Both went into the arts.

Neither went into acting, and the paths they chose took them in two entirely different directions. One of them almost as far from film as it is possible to get while still working creatively. Growing up guarded.

There is an aspect of the boy's childhood that rarely appears in the affectionate retellings and it has to do with the era they were born into. The 1970s in Italy are remembered as the years of lead, a period of political violence, bombings, and critically for wealthy families, kidnapping. Ransom abductions of the children of rich industrialists and celebrities became genuinely common to the point that certain insurance products and security practices developed specifically around the threat.

The most notorious case, the 1973 abduction of John Paul Getty III in Rome, during which the 16-year-old's ear was severed and mailed to a newspaper to force payment, occurred the same year Eduardo was born. For a family with the Ponty fortune and the Luren name, based partly in Italy with two small boys, this was not an abstract concern. It is one of several reasons the family's center of gravity remained in Geneva rather than Rome, and it shaped the degree of privacy the parents insisted on around their children.

Switzerland offered political stability, banking privacy, geographic distance from the Italian situation, and a legal environment that had never had any opinion about the validity of their marriage. Photographs of the boys as children exist, but they are comparatively rare given who their mother was, and there was no equivalent of the constant managed exposure that other celebrity children of the period experienced. That protectiveness had an obvious cost and an obvious benefit.

The cost was a somewhat enclosed childhood. The benefit was that neither boy grew up as a public figure, which meant that when each of them eventually chose a career, they chose it without an existing audience expecting anything specific from them. Ponty senior was also a significantly older father.

He was 56 when Carlo Jr. was born and 60 when Eduardo arrived, meaning both sons had a father in his 60s and 70s throughout their childhood and adolescence. a man who had already produced Lstrada and Dr Jivago before either of them could walk.

Whatever pressure came with that, it does not appear to have come in the form of anyone pushing them toward the family business. Both have described the household as one where the arts were simply present rather than imposed. Music played, films were discussed.

Neither parent by either son's account ever steered them toward or away from anything in particular. What did intrude on that childhood when Carlo Junior was 13 and Eduardo was nine was the Italian state for the second time in the family's history. The month their mother spent in prison.

There is one more chapter in the family's history with the Italian state, and it happened while both sons were still young. In 1974, the Italian tax authorities came after Loren over her 1963 and 1970 tax returns, alleging she had underdeclared her income. The case ground on for years through the notoriously slow Italian court system.

She maintained throughout that the filings had been handled by her accountants and that any error was theirs, not hers, and she appealed repeatedly. The Italian courts were unmoved. In May of 1982, Sophia Luren returned to Italy and reported to a prison in Caserta near Naples to serve a sentence.

She was 47 years old. Carlo Junior was 13. Eduardo was nine.

One of the most celebrated actresses in the world, a woman who had won an Academy Award for a film about Italian suffering during the war was processed into an Italian prison over a tax dispute in a region not far from the town where she had grown up hungry during that same war. She served 17 days before being released. The episode was covered globally with photographers gathering outside the prison and it sat alongside the bigamy affair as the second time the country of her birth had prosecuted her over something connected to paperwork rather than conduct.

She has spoken about it since without much bitterness, describing it as something she chose to face directly rather than continue avoiding, and the decision to simply return and serve the time rather than continue fighting or remain abroad was widely noted at the time as characteristic of her. The sequence is difficult to ignore. Italy denounced her marriage in the 1950s, refused to recognize it into the 1960s, drove the family to French citizenship, and then jailed her in the 1980s.

Decades later, the same country would award her its highest honors and treat her as a national treasure. Both of her sons were old enough to understand what was happening. Neither has ever spoken about it publicly at any length.

By the time it was over, the elder of the two was already moving toward a career that would take him about as far from his family's world as it was possible to go. The son, who chose the orchestra, Carlo Ponty Jr. , the elder son, became a conductor.

There was no obvious family precedent for it. His father produced more than 140 films across his career. His mother was among the most recognized actresses alive and the boy went into classical music, a field in which the Ponty name carried essentially no weight whatsoever.

He trained seriously and at length. He studied at the conductors institute in Connecticut under Harold Farberman from 1994 to 1996, continued in Los Angeles from 1997 to 1999 and then relocated to Austria to study at the Vienna Music Academy, working through the kind of lengthy technical apprenticeship that conducting requires and that offers no shortcuts regardless of anyone's surname. Conducting is worth understanding as a career choice here because it is almost uniquely resistant to nepotism.

A producer can hire an actor. A studio can greenlight a director. But an orchestra of 80 professional musicians will not follow a conductor they do not respect, and they form that judgment within minutes of a first rehearsal.

There is no famous surname that survives contact with a skeptical string section. Whatever Carlo Jr. built, he built in front of rooms full of people entirely unimpressed by where he came from.

The work that followed was substantial. From 2000 to 2018, he served as associate conductor of the Russian National Orchestra, an 18-year tenure with one of the most significant orchestras of the postsviet era, an ensemble founded in 1990 that had rapidly established itself internationally. He served as music director of the San Bernardino Symphony in California for just over a decade.

In 2013, he founded the Los Angeles Virtuosi Orchestra, an ensemble built around a specific mission of supporting music education, particularly for young people who would not otherwise encounter classical music at all. And he has released recordings of his own work. That educational focus is a recurring theme in how he talks about the work.

The orchestra he founded exists substantially as a vehicle for outreach rather than as a prestige project, which is a somewhat unusual emphasis for someone who could comfortably have built a career purely around high-profile guest conducting appearances. His mother has spoken about his career with evident and slightly amused pride, noting simply that he does very well at it. What is striking about Carlo Junior's path is how completely it sidesteps the industry that made his family famous.

He did not produce. He did not direct. He chose a discipline where the only currency is technical command of an orchestra and he spent decades acquiring it.

His personal life has had its own arc. On September 18th, 2004, he married a Hungarian violinist named Andrea Messeros at St. Steven's Basilica in Budapest.

A wedding attended by his mother that drew significant press coverage in Hungary. The couple had two children, a son named Victoria Leon, born in 2007, the same year his grandfather died, and a daughter named Beatatrice Lara, born in 2012. The marriage ended in divorce in 2022 after 18 years.

In July of 2025, he remarried to a woman named Mariam Shaman Ashley, who has spoken publicly about being struck first by his humility and kindness rather than by anything connected to his name. A remark that says something about how he presents himself to people who meet him without context. While the elder son was building a career deliberately removed from film, the younger was heading directly into it and eventually into a working relationship with his own mother that neither of them could have anticipated.

The son who went behind the camera. Eduardo Ponty, born January 6th, 1973, took the opposite route. He was educated at Alon College in Switzerland.

a boarding school in the Alps, graduating in 1990, and then crossed the Atlantic for the University of Southern California, where he graduated Magna Cumla in 1994 with a degree in English literature and creative writing. He stayed at USC for a master of fine arts in film directing and production at the school of cinema and television, completing it in 1998. That is a genuinely unusual educational path for the child of a major film producer.

Ponty senior could have put his son on a set at 15 and taught him the business the way it had been taught for generations through apprenticeship and proximity. Instead, Eduardo went through a literature degree and then a formal graduate film program, arriving at directing through study rather than through inheritance, and finishing his education at 25 rather than entering the industry at 18. The choice of USC is itself notable.

It is among the most competitive film schools in the world and sits at the center of the American industry rather than the European one his father had dominated. Eduardo built his professional base in Los Angeles rather than Rome or Geneva, establishing himself in a market where the Ponty name carried far less automatic weight than it did in Italy. His first feature, Between Strangers, released in 2002, starred his mother alongside Meera Sino and Deborah Cara.

He has worked steadily since across features, short films, documentaries, and commercials, developing a reputation for intimate, character-driven work rather than for anything resembling the large commercial productions his father specialized in. A pattern emerged early and has held. Eduardo has repeatedly directed his own mother, and the collaborations have generally been small, serious, and emotionally exposed rather than commercial.

In 2014, he directed her in a short film adaptation of Jean Cockto's onewoman play, The Human Voice, a punishing piece in which a woman conducts a final telephone conversation with a lover who is leaving her. It is roughly the least glamorous material imaginable for a screen icon in her late 70s, which appears to have been precisely the point. Working with a parent as a director carries obvious hazards.

A director must give notes, must ask for another take, must occasionally tell a performer that what they just did was not good enough. Doing that to Sophia Luren when you are her son requires a working relationship that most parent child pairs would find impossible to establish. Both of them have spoken about it as functioning unusually well, largely because of how completely each understands the other's instincts.

In 2007, he married the actress Sasha Alexander, born Susanna Drbnyakovich, best known to American audiences for her work on NCIS and Rizolei and Isles. The couple have two children, a daughter named Lucia Sophia, born in 2006, and a son named Leonardo Fortunado, born in 2010. The daughter's middle name a direct nod to her grandmother and the sons a nod to his grandfather whose full given name included Fortunato.

Between the two brothers, Sophia Luren has four grandchildren, and she has been unusually direct in interviews about what they mean to her, describing them without qualification as the most beautiful grandchildren she has ever seen, and stating plainly that she lives for her family. Eduardo's most significant professional achievement, however, arrived in 2020, and it involved coaxing his mother out of an 11-year absence from film at the age of 85. The film that brought her back.

Sophia Loren had not carried a feature film since 2009. She was in her 80s. She had nothing left to prove, and there was no particular reason to expect she would return.

Her son had a project. The Life Ahead was an adaptation of Roma Garry's novel, The Life Before Us, about a Holocaust survivor, a former prostitute living in a run-down Italian port city who takes in the children of sex workers and eventually forms a bond with a 12-year-old Seneagalles orphan who has been stealing from her. It was not a gentle validictory role designed to let an icon coast through a final performance.

The character is ill, declining, sometimes confused, frequently unglamorous, and the film requires the actress playing her to be seen in states that most stars of that stature spend their later careers actively avoiding. Lauren agreed. She was 85 during production.

The film shot in Bari in southern Italy and required her to work opposite a firsttime child actor Ibrahim Guay in scenes carrying most of the film's emotional weight. She has spoken about the physical difficulty of the shoot with characteristic bluntness and about her willingness to appear on screen without vanity as something she had made peace with long ago. Eduardo directed it.

The film was released by Netflix in November of 2020 in the middle of a pandemic that had closed cinemas worldwide and it found an enormous streaming audience as a result. It brought Lauren a Golden Globe nomination and a David Donatello award, the principal Italian film prize for best actress. She was 86 by the time the awards arrived, making her one of the oldest recipients of a major lead acting honor anywhere.

Both of them spoke about the collaboration in terms that were revealing about the relationship underneath it. Lauren said of her son that he knows her extraordinarily well, that he knows every inch of her face, and described that knowledge as extending to her heart and her soul. It is a remarkable thing for an actress of her stature to say about a director, and it points to something about why she agreed to come back at all after more than a decade away.

The film also completed a circle that had opened decades earlier. Lauren had won her Academy Award in 1962 for two women directed by Victoria Dea playing a mother in wartime Italy protecting a child through unimaginable circumstances. Nearly 60 years later, she returned in a film directed by her own son, playing a woman in contemporary Italy, protecting a child who is not hers.

The through line was not accidental and neither of them pretended otherwise. What their father left behind. Carlo Ponty Senior died on January 10th, 2007 in Geneva of pulmonary complications.

He was 94. His career had been extraordinary by any measure, more than 140 productions. He produced Federico Fellini's Lstrada which won the first Academy Award for best foreign language film.

He produced David Lean's Dr Jivago, one of the highest grossing films ever made. He produced Michelangelo Antoni's Blowup. He worked with Victoriao Deika with Jean Luke Goddard with Roman Palansky.

He was made a night grand cross of the order of merit of the Italian Republic, the highest civilian honor available from the country that had once prosecuted him for marrying the woman he spent 41 years with. He had two children from his first marriage to Juliana Fiestri in addition to Carlo Jr. and Eduardo, meaning Lauren's sons grew up with half siblings from a marriage that Italian law had for years insisted was the only legitimate one their father had.

Fiestri herself had been essential to the eventual resolution, cooperating with the French divorce arrangement that finally allowed Ponty and Loren to marry legally, an act of genuine decency that is rarely noted in accounts of the affair. Luren and Ponty had been married in the version that finally held for 41 years and had been together in one form or another for more than half a century since she was a teenager entering beauty contests and he was a producer in his late30s. She has never remarried and has spoken about him consistently since his death in terms that make clear she considers the question closed.

The family had been based in Geneva for decades by then, and both sons had long since built their adult lives elsewhere. Carlo Junior in music and largely in the United States and Europe, Eduardo in Los Angeles. What the two brothers inherited was not a business to run or an estate to fight over, but something considerably less tangible, and in its way harder to manage.

where everyone is today. Sophia Luren turned 91 in September of 2025. She lives primarily in Geneva, the city where both her sons were born and where she spent the years she chose family over Korea.

In 2023, she suffered a fall at her Geneva home, fracturing her feur and pelvis, and underwent surgery. The news generated genuine international concern given her age and her family issued updates as she recovered. She came through it and her family reported afterward that she was doing well, though she has understandably reduced her public appearances since.

Her last credited acting work remains the life ahead. She has continued to receive honors. She holds two Academy Awards, the competitive one from 1962 and an honorary award received in 1991 recognizing her career as a whole.

She has a Grammy, a BAFTA, multiple Golden Globes, the Can and Venice best actress prizes, and honors from both the French and Italian states. Italy, which once prosecuted her twice, has spent the last several decades honoring her more or less continuously, and a museum dedicated to her opened in Potswi, the town where she grew up Hungary. Carlo Ponti Jr.

is in his late 50s and continues to conduct. The Los Angeles Virtuosce Orchestra he founded in 2013 remains active, built around music education outreach. He remarried in July of 2025 to Mariam Shaman Ashvilli following his 2022 divorce from Andrea Mesaros after 18 years of marriage.

Eduardo Ponti is in his early 50s and continues to direct based in California with Sasha Alexander and their two children. He and his mother have spoken in recent years about the possibility of working together again, though nothing has been announced. The four grandchildren are now largely grown.

Lucia Sophia, Eduardo's daughter, made a debut appearance at a formal Paris ball some years ago that drew considerable attention, being the granddaughter of one of the most photographed women of the 20th century. Victoria Leone, Carlo Junior's son, is in his late teens. Beatatrice Lara is in her early teens.

Leonardo Fortunado, Eduardo's son, is in his mid- teens. None of them has entered acting. Two brothers, one name.

The two sons are four and a half years apart, and by all available accounts, they have remained close throughout their adult lives, despite working in entirely different disciplines on different continents for long stretches. They appear together publicly with some regularity, most often flanking their mother at tributes and award ceremonies. When the American Film Institute held a special tribute to Lauren in Hollywood in November of 2014, both sons attended and were photographed on either side of her.

The pattern has held across decades of similar events. Whatever the internal dynamics of the family, the public presentation has been consistent and consistently unified. There is something worth noting in how the two of them have divided the labor of being Sophia Loren's children.

Eduardo, working in film, has become the one who collaborates with her professionally, directing her repeatedly and serving as the bridge between his mother and an industry she largely left decades ago. Carlo Jr. working in music has taken essentially no role in managing or extending her legacy which has left him free to be simply her son rather than any part of her professional apparatus.

That division seems to suit both of them. Neither has ever publicly expressed resentment about the other's position, and neither has ever attempted to claim primacy over their parents' legacy, which is not a small thing in a family where that legacy includes an Academy Award, more than 140 film productions, and a surname with genuine commercial value. Both have also spoken about their mother in strikingly similar terms across the years, emphasizing her ordinariness at home over her stature outside it.

It is the same observation made independently by two people who grew up in the same house 4 and a half years apart, which gives it more weight than either account would carry alone. A family that refused the obvious path. What is genuinely unusual about the Lauren Ponty family is what did not happen.

There is no acting dynasty here. There is no third generation star trading on a legendary name. Two sons were born to a woman who was at the time of their births among the most recognizable human beings on the planet and to a father who controlled one of the most powerful production operations in European cinema.

And neither of them became an actor. One went into classical conducting, a field where the family name is worth nothing. The other went into directing, but arrived there through a literature degree and a graduate film program rather than through his father's office.

Compare that to almost any other family of comparable stature in 20th century entertainment, and the difference is stark. Hollywood and European cinema are full of second and third generations who took the obvious route and full of the predictable consequences when that route did not work out. The Ponty brothers took neither the route nor the consequences.

There is also notably no scandal, no estate litigation, no competing memoirs, no public estrangement, no tell all from a child settling scores with a famous parent for a family assembled under circumstances that included bigamy charges, a 9-year legal battle to be married at all, the surrender of Italian citizenship, two lost pregnancies, and a 17-day prison sentence. The aftermath has been remarkably quiet. The four grandchildren have grown up similarly out of view.

The one moment of genuine public attention any of them has received came when Eduardo's daughter appeared at a debutant ball in Paris. An event that attracted photographers primarily because of who her grandmother is rather than because of anything she had done. Lauren's own explanation for how the family turned out this way has been consistent for decades and is fairly simple.

She stepped back at the height of her career and stayed back long enough to actually raise them. The Academy Award, the international stardom, the hundreds of magazine covers, the status as one of the defining faces of an entire era of cinema. All of it was set down for a stretch of years in Geneva in favor of something she had wanted since her 20ies and had twice been unable to have.

Whether that is the full explanation is impossible to know from outside, but the sequence is at least suggestive. A woman who grew up hungry in a bombed town near Naples without a father in the house, spent nine years fighting a legal system for the right to be married, lost two pregnancies, and then, having finally got what she wanted, walked away from the peak of the most successful career in Italian cinema to be present for it. Nearly six decades after that woman spent nine months in a Swiss hotel room, refusing to move, her two sons are in their 50s, working in music and film, raising four children between them, and carrying a surname that has never once required them to trade on it.

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