📍Pozzuoli, Naples, Italy
1934 – 1949“Sophia Loren was born Sofia Scicolone in Rome in September 1934. Her father refused to marry her mother, Romilda, and soon after her birth Romilda took her home to Pozzuoli, a poor fishing and industrial town on the bay west of Naples, beneath the smoking craters of the Campi Flegrei. They lived in her grandparents' crowded apartment, where eight people shared a bedroom, and her grandmother Luisa somehow stretched tiny amounts of food into meals; Sofia was so thin that local children called her Stuzzicadenti, the toothpick. The Second World War brought terror. Pozzuoli's harbour and munitions factory were frequent targets of Allied bombing, and the family spent nights in railway tunnels sheltering from the raids. During one raid, Sofia was hit by shrapnel and cut her chin. Hunger was constant, and she has told how her mother sometimes rationed water by the spoonful. Her younger sister, Maria, was born in 1938. Yet she remembered the warmth of her grandparents' home, the sea, and her grandmother's cooking, and she has said that everything she knows about food began there. At fourteen she entered a beauty contest in Naples, the Queen of the Sea, in a dress her grandmother made from the pink curtains in the sitting room. She was named one of the princesses and won a train ticket to Rome, where she and her mother moved to find work as film extras. She became one of the great stars of world cinema, and in 1962 she became the first actor to win an Oscar for a performance in a foreign language, for Two Women, a film about mothers and daughters in war-torn Italy.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
🛰️ Satellite view · © Google