Gina Lollobrigida: Once an Actress, Today a Sculptress

The Italian movie star Gina Lollobrigida will soon expose her sculptures in an exhibition named “Vissi d’Arte”. It will take place in Pietrasanta, a small village in Tuscany.  
In this coastal town more than 30 bronzes, plastic and marble pieces of art will pay tribute to the artist's long career.  
  
The collection is the result of ten years of work and it mostly portraits the diva’s most famous screen characters.      
  
The sculptures will be disposed in two different spots: in the 14th-century Sant’Agostino’s Church and in the central Piazza del Duomo. In particular, in the former, a five-metre bronze statue representing the actress in the role of Esmeralda will stick out. It will be erected in front of the statue of Quasimodo, interpreted in the 1957 edition of the "Hunchback of Notre Dame" by the actor Anthony Quinn.  

The actress playing in "Notre Dame de Paris" (1957)

Gina with Vittorio de Sica in "Pane, Amore e Fantasia" (1953)

 
Among the other pieces of art, two marble statues: one represents Lollobrigida playing “La Bersagliera” in the movie "Pane Amore e Fantasia" (1953), a role that gave her great popularity; the other, named “La Amica”, homages her friendship to Marilyn Monroe.   
  
In the exposition the actress also shows to be deeply concerned with the problems tormenting the modern society. She has in fact put great efforts in shaping a statue called “Il mondo per I Bambini” (the World for the Children). The work also represents her innumerable-year collaboration with UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders.  
 
The diva’s passion for sculpturing is not recent. When she was a young woman she cultivated this inclination, which brought her to finally win a scholarship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. 
Her movie career started only in 1947 when, at the age of 20, she attracted the attention of Italian film directors after having won the Third Price in the Miss Italy competition. As she would often say, “ I studied painting and sculpture at school and became an actress by mistake”.
   
After a long and magnificent career in the cinematography industry, in 1970 she finally decided to become a photojournalist. She had great success also in this case, being one of the few occidental reporters who managed to interview Cuban leader Fidel Castro. 
 
But sculpturing was still on her mind. She turned back to it in 1992 when she represented Italy at the Seville Expo with a sculpture named “Living Together”: it symbolized, through the figure of a girl on a eagle, the harmonization of relationships between humanity and nature. For this work the then French President, François Mitterand, awarded her the Legion of Honour for artistic merit.  
 

After that her works began to be exposed in different countries. A collection of them was also included in an exhibition in Moscow's Pushkin Museum in 2003. 
 
In Pietrasanta, for the first time in her career, the whole display will be dedicated only to her pieces of art.  
 
The exhibition will take place from September 20 until November 16, after which it will tour the US. 

(M.M.)