From the childhood dream of being a hairdresser to the stages of the most prestigious theaters in the world: the biography of the dancer Carla Fracci.
Who was Carla Fracci
The dancer Carla Fracci was born in Milan on August 20, 1936 into a modest family, the daughter of a tram driver.
He described his approach to dance as follows, during an interview:
My approach to dance was completely casual. Some friends of my parents saw me waltz, they recognized that I had a particular sense of music. They proposed my parents to send me to the dance school of the Teatro alla Scala, which did the auditions. The school was free, my father was a tram driver who had escaped the Russian war, he couldn’t have afforded it otherwise. So I found myself for the first time in a theater. The very strict director put me, after the selections, in the group of dancers to be reviewed: ‘she is very fragile, but she has a beautiful face’, she said. So they took me. Imagine that I wanted to do the hair dresser.
From 1946 to 1954 then the future muse of dance studied at the prestigious Teatro alla Scala, to become prima ballerina as early as 1958.
He then starts dancing with foreign companies and renowned as the London Festival Ballet and the Royal Swedish Ballet. He therefore plays important roles in plays, mostly dramatic and romantic. In his life he also directed the corps de ballet of the San Carlo Theater in Naples; of the Verona Arena and the Rome Opera House. Often in her career as a dancer collaborated with her husband Beppe Menegatti who directed many of the operas in which his wife danced.
Fracci’s biography was carefully told in the book Step by step, autobiography released in 2013 at Mondadori. Carla Fracci was also councilor for culture of the Province of Florence from 2009 to 2014.
Private life and curiosity
Not many know that it was dedicated to the beautiful Carla Fracci a poem from the Nobel Prize for Literature Eugenio Montale. The poem is titled The tired dancer and some verses go like this:
Your feet on the scale are enough for you
to measure the few milligrams
that the already deceased seasonal shifts
they could not escape you. Then you can
put the wings back no more nubecola
celestial but terrestrial and it is not said
may the sky notice it. Just have one
be amazed that your flower is reincarnated
wonderfully. It is not everyday
in these snow défilés of death.
As for the love life of Fracci, he had only one great love and that is that for the theater director Beppe Menegatti. The two got married in 1964 and began not only a loving but also a working partnership, since many of Menegatti’s works were then interpreted by his wife. The man has also worked with cinema greats such as Eduardo De Filippo and Luchino Visconti. From Menegatti the Milanese dancer had a son named Francis.
Illness and death
Carla Fracci had been ill for some time and on the morning of May 27 her health conditions had aroused much concern. Fracci died on May 27 at the age of 84.