Women From Italy

"I am proud of my bottom. It is difficult for a white woman to achieve such perfection. And I find that the bottom is very important in contemporary sensuality. It is sexy and modern. And practical. Unlike large breasts, which are old-fashioned and uncomfortable."

"First, I am a Sarkozy supporter. [...] I am an ultra-Sarkozy supporter. [...] I am no longer, at all, on the left."

"I was part of an artistic community. We were bohemians, we were left-wing, but at that time I was voting in Italy. I have never voted for the left in France, and I can tell you, I'm not about to start now. I don't really feel left-wing anymore. There have been certain events, certain comments, particularly following the Polanski-Mitterrand affair. I heard socialist leaders saying the same things as those from the National Front. That really shocked me.""

"That was America in 1992! So Obama's arrival is obviously a source of immense joy. For me, for everyone who loves America. For all French people, including one whom I know quite well. I know how hopeful we all are, full of expectations. On the contrary, when I hear Silvio Berlusconi taking the event lightly and joking that Obama is “always tanned”, it strikes me as odd. You could put it down to humour... But often, I am very happy to have become French!"

"We spent several days in South Carolina for a photo shoot. But Naomi Campbell and I always had lunch in our caravan, even though there was a good restaurant nearby. When I asked why, they told me that Naomi would never be allowed in because she was black. Seeing Obama win was therefore a source of immense joy."

"Royal. I don't really like him, but I will always vote for the left, as my parents have always done."

"She is not only beautiful, but she is intelligent, dynamic and sincere. Every time I saw her, she asked me how the Tibetan cause was going! Moreover, Nicolas Sarkozy is the only French president who met me face to face, perhaps thanks to Carla, who understands Tibetan spirituality."

"What bothers me about ageing is the tiredness, feeling less physically strong. As for aesthetics, I preferred being twenty, but I feel sorry for the crazy battle against age. Besides, I had so many beautiful photos, beautiful moments when I was young, I used my body to the fullest. Obviously, I take care of myself, I'm careful, but more for my health."

"Image is the fracture of contemporaneity. Rereading the myth of Narcissus as an adult, you understand that he dies not because he loves his image, but because he prefers his image to himself. I am convinced that our individual relationship with our image is quickly established in childhood: what is this reflection for you? It is you. Do you accept yourself as you are? OK. But usually we are disappointed or vain, because we are divided: half of us are animals, half of us feel like God."

"Communication works like this: the image of a woman today is that her power is control, but it is a suggestion, it is like showing a beautiful photo."

"I feel as French as I do Italian. Today, my life is in France, but my heart, my roots and my culture belong equally to both countries, and I am proud to have dual nationality. My greatest joy, but also my greatest dilemma, would be if France and Italy met again in the World Cup final."

"My role attracts media attention. Attention that I hope to direct towards important causes, which unfortunately still attract little interest. I hope to draw the public's attention to those who fight exemplarily every day to improve the lives of others. The more visible their work is, the more it will be supported by the general public, and the more likely they will be to obtain the necessary means to continue and develop their activities."

"The unique position I find myself in thanks to my marriage gives me the opportunity to meet people I would never have met otherwise, to give a voice to those who do not have one, and to draw public attention to causes that are close to my heart. It is a unique opportunity that I do not want to pass up."

"I was fortunate enough to grow up healthy, in a privileged and artistic environment. I would like to be able to pass on some of this good fortune to those who have not been so lucky. The fight against AIDS is a cause I have supported for many years. The fashion world in which I worked was severely affected by this disease and mobilised from the outset."

"Human beings cannot be faithful. I take what men believe to be their biological right and, if I feel like it, I go with someone else. I give him the image of fidelity, the same that I demand from him."

"I am an anarchist, this is because I am moved by the suffering of hundreds of millions of workers and I struggle for a world in which such exploitation is no longer possible."

"I studied architecture but it was not my mission."

"It’s impossible to define what is design. You know, it’s like trying to define what art is. It’s everything that we make, if you wish. And some of it is good, and some of it is bad."

"If you do it right, it will last forever. It’s as simple as that."

"I learned an enormous amount from Massimo about how to be a good designer. But I learned how to be a successful designer from Lella."

"If you can't find it, design it."

"I think it [The W Series] will be a revolution and I am sure that thanks to F1, it will show more people the female talent we have. It will show that it’s perfectly normal and that girls are just as competitive as men. At the moment, it is irrelevant to me whether I race against men or women or both. Nothing changes for me."

"There is a long story in the soul that I can summarize in these words, friendship had also become love for me. Our souls understood each other, but we perhaps wanted more. DC [Don Carlo] I write before you, you know that you were my great, my friend; God has taken you away and now you remain for me only in Spirit. But I still feel you so close and all permeating my being. You remain for me eternally for what was most priestly in you. You wrote to me that we were too equal I would say for that union that characterizes the relationship between a woman and a man to exist, I wanted to feel strong, generous like you."

"There are still many places around the globe I would like to explore, and I'm going to trust my modeling career to take me to at least some of them."

"Serve . Our century does not want us to be servants and truly the concept of fraternity and equality does not admit the servant. […] Serving God consists in doing the will of the “Father who is in heaven”. Doing God's will is following his law, which has a fundamentally unique voice for all individuals"

"The first condition, however, is this, to find the director who is a faithful friend. DC [Don Carlo Grugni] I would have obeyed, obeyed with all my soul. Because? Before I spoke, I felt heard by him, the expression of his soul in what lived most generously, they were the desires of my [sic]. We felt united in spirit, in thought of action. What was obedience in me then? If not my greatest and most intimate joy!"

"But approaching the thought, not feeling that every initial act should always have come from the authority of the Church, impersonating the authority of the Pope, was a sin . Who knows how much energy I wasted in this intimate fight! [...] I rebelled: I broke away violently, not without deep pain, great anguish. Yet then I obeyed . What is, my God, obedience to the Director?"

"I wanted to obey my Director, I subjected myself to all the trials; I wanted to help the spirit with mortification of the body, I led an intense life of thought, but I wasn't well; I was always in anguish, after an act of true submission, always the period of rebellion. [...] I was pining, his word weighed on me like the sword of Damocles, for how many years I fought between the idea of ​​submitting or looking for another confessor!"

"But why does St. Francis de Sales want obedience to the guide who is a faithful friend? Isn't it enough that I alone try to place myself in the eternal law? Alone?… My nature seeks help, it seeks it every day in brothers with whom it believes it feels in communion of ideas and affections. And I would be happy – how many times, my God, have I wished to find myself with such a spirit – if I could find in one of the priests I approach, the guiding friend."

"In the confessor I asked for a friend, the soul that loved my soul, that shared I would almost say the nature of my feelings, that participated in my vocation. I was asking conformity to feel ; this seemed to me to be an essential sharing so that he could direct the actions of my spirit, he shouldn't have taken me outside my natural center. It's true, I asked to be able in a certain way to influence the soul of the confessor, to sincerely give him my impressions of my conduct. It seemed to me that our action must in some way be reciprocal. Certainly St. Francis and St. Francesca had this communion of feelings over them."

"I had trouble accepting my being a woman, my changing body. I've always hid under loose clothing, and I still do some of it. From the outside, it is not perceived, the television returns something else and I avoid putting the oversized sweatshirt in public. However, I have always had a tendency to want to hide rather than show."

"Today, the image always comes first, and it is enough to look at the women on our television to realize it. I don't want to make a bundle of all the grass, but having a nice and seductive image is necessary. I don't even know if it is wrong: a beautiful woman is right to be appreciated also for her own aesthetics. The problem occurs when, at an audition and with the same talent, the girl with the dress is taken instead of the girl in the suit. I realized I had a weapon available, my body, and I decided to use it. It is wrong, however, that talent alone is not enough."

"The social world has become more raw than it was a few years ago and, I believe, the credit goes to the new generations. They don't want to see perfection, they hate the stereotype of the all-beautiful always. If my mother or grandmother had seen an advertisement for a cream sponsored by a model with perfect skin, they would certainly have thought they could buy it. Now, thanks to social media, in advertisements and in photos and Stories we can talk about acne problems, about skins that are anything but perfect."

"I discovered that I have a great passion for radio and this is teaching me: I am acquiring great confidence and dialectical skills. I love how the radio enhances the expression of a content and not the appearance of the person who utters it. Having said that, however, I don't want to be hypocritical: if they offered me to run a good TV program, I'd take it."

"In Rome they dress very well. In Milan, they dress more bourgeoisly. But the most avant-garde city... is Naples. The Neapolitan underground youth can easily be compared to a city like London."

"Intelligent men are not ashamed to bring out their feminine side."

"Wealth is a wonderful ticket to freedom."

"All the mistakes I did in my life, I like to keep them private."

"I can’t say precisely. I don’t think anyone really knows how a story takes shape. When it’s done you try to explain how it happened, but every effort, at least in my case, is insufficient. There is a before, made up of fragments of memory, and an after, when the story begins. But before and after, I have to admit, are useful only in answering your question now in an intelligible way."

"Certainly, female writing exists, but mainly because even writing is powerfully conditioned by the historical-cultural construction that is gender. That said, gender has an increasingly wide mesh, its rules have been relaxed, and it is more and more difficult to reconstruct what has influenced and formed us as writers…"

"I believe that they have put a spotlight on what women have always known and have always been more or less silent about. Patriarchal domination, even — despite appearances — in the West, is still very entrenched, and each of us, in the most diverse places, in the most varied forms, suffers the humiliation of being a silent victim or a fearful accomplice or a reluctant rebel or even a diligent accuser of victims rather than of the rapists. Paradoxically, I don’t feel that there are great differences between the women of the Neapolitan neighborhood whose story I told and Hollywood actresses or the educated, refined women who work at the highest levels of our socioeconomic system…"

"I don’t know if my writing has the energy you say it does. Of course, if that energy exists, it’s because either it finds no other outlets or, consciously or not, I’ve refused to give it other outlets. Of course, when I write, I draw on parts of myself, of my memory, that are agitated, fragmented, that make me uncomfortable. A story, in my view, is worth writing only if its core comes from there."

"No, I never plan my stories. A detailed outline is enough for me to lose interest in the whole thing. Even a brief oral summary makes the desire to write what I have in mind vanish. I am one of those who begin to write knowing only a few essential features of the story they intend to tell. The rest they discover line by line."

"I can’t give you a precise answer. It may have had its origin in the death of a friend of mine, or in a crowded wedding celebration, or perhaps in the need to return to themes and images of an earlier book, ‘The Lost Daughter.’ One never knows where a story comes from; it’s the product of a variety of suggestions that, together with others that you are not aware of and never will be, excite your mind."

"Later, every form of religious belief seemed absurd to me, and death was as if disfigured. [...] Today I would never say: he has gone away. I’ve lost the sense of the crossing over: nothing goes up to heaven, we don’t move to another world, we don’t return, we aren’t reborn. We remain definitively immobile; death is the last point on the segment of life that has chanced to be ours."

"(Sitting at the Bar Quadronno in Milan's Quadronno district) I come here all the time! […] It's right next to my apartment, which is in the building where I grew up, and my mother is still there, on the first floor, and my brother is on the third floor, and it's right next to my children's school [...], and it's not too far from my office, and it's open all day and very late, every day. It's cute, isn't it?"

"Cresciuta in Porta Romana, Miuccia Prada vi abita tuttora (risiede nello specifico in Corso di Porta Romana); non ci stupisce quindi che abbia deciso di aprire la sua Fondazione nell'adiacente quartiere di Corso Lodi."

"If everyone wants to make things black, I'll make things red: it's stronger than me. Starting from this principle, I develop my thoughts, which I always express with shapes and colors. Never with slogans, because I believe politics should be approached in a more complex way."

"I'm not really interested in building a reputation for myself. But I do care for what the company stands for. I believe in work and being connected to the world we live in."

"I see myself in the contestants. I’m not the one to tell people, ‘You have to sing this way or that way.’ Talent is something God gave you when you were born. I don’t want to give them technical advice. I love mistakes. When talking about art, the most important thing is to not be perfect, ... I want to be a fan, and to be a fan you have to conquer my heart. I don’t want to give marketing advice."