«I suffered violence but I never gave up. Cristiano Di Luzio? He doesn’t give me the problems of a partner my age”

Rita Rusic doesn’t look 65 years old. Just look at his Instagram profile. «They say I wear them well! – she says smiling to the weekly magazine F – But it seems to me that I’m 150, with all the lives I’ve lived.” And in all these lives his motto has always been one: “I don’t give up”.

He confesses to the weekly magazine F that he doesn’t miss the comforts he enjoyed with Vittorio Cecchi Gori: «There are indispensable things, such as health and happiness, and others that are not. Of course, happiness, as well as love, includes a little money to live without the anxiety of making ends meet: I experienced that as a child and it’s really painful. But objects don’t bring happiness.”

What is he doing today

Today, for her, happiness means producing a film.

Not necessarily successful. The relationship with your father-in-law Mario? AF remembers him saying: «”You were wrong Cecchi Gori, you should have chosen me”. He liked me as a woman, but also because I am tenacious and square. Vittorio is crazier. Of course, they would have preferred me to be a housewife, but I had to do, go out. And for my husband it was more reassuring that I was a producer rather than an actress.”

She recalls her childhood as an Istrian refugee to the women’s weekly. «I became an Italian citizen at 8 years old, after living for three and a half years in refugee camps, where we lived closed with barbed wire. Then they gave us a small one-bedroom apartment, in a village of Julian and Dalmatian children. It was a place to start from. Today I think that if we let in foreigners in need of help – and we need them too – we must allow them to live decently, without being forced to commit crimes.”

Violence

Then she talks about a friend who was beaten by the father who she also protected at her home. «When I was older, I experienced a lot of violence. A madman chased me in a car, I saved myself by entering the room of a doorman I didn’t know. In Milan they pointed a gun at my forehead. At 17, during a photo shoot, I found myself alone with the owner of the company, who grabbed me by the wrists. I went to the bathroom and ran away: it was February, I was only wearing a silk shirt. Even today, if a man hugs me too tightly, I faint, I’m scared.”

Direct question from the weekly F: “Did you also suffer violence from men you knew?”. Answer: «Yes. Victor? Let’s leave it alone. Violence is a horrendous signal, we should leave immediately, but sometimes we don’t have the courage. I also went to the police, but I had the feeling that I wasn’t accusing enough, I didn’t feel completely believed.”

The new love

But despite everything Rita still believes in love. A love with a 35 year old boy, Cristiano Di Luzio. «We just did 5 years. It is a story born lightly, but which has enormous power. We have a beautiful, free relationship, if I tell him that I have to go away for work he doesn’t investigate like Vittorio did: there is the joy of being together, the happiness of separating and then finding each other again. I would love him very much even if one day he told me he was leaving. He plays PlayStation and it brings me joy, not the problems of a friend my age.”