Tunisia | Claudia Cardinale inaugurates a street in her name

(Tunis) “I’m still a little Tunisian”: actress Claudia Cardinale, who on Sunday inaugurated a street in her name near Tunis, underlined her attachment to her native land, whose sense of hospitality is, according to her, a model for the reception of migrants in the West.

“I am very honored, because this is where I was born and where I spent my childhood,” said the 84-year-old Italian-Tunisian actress at the start of a ceremony in her honor in La Goulette, a port city in the northern suburbs of the Tunisian capital.

Visibly enchanted, the actress danced to tunes played by a traditional orchestra, then was presented with multiple gifts including portraits by local painters.

A mural with a giant portrait of the actress was unveiled just before the inauguration of a plaque in her name, near the small La Goulette train station.

“We love Claudia very much and she loves Tunisia, she is returning home, we wanted to spoil her with a street that will bear her name for eternity,” the mayor of La Goulette, Amel Limam, told AFP.

“I keep a lot of things from Tunisia in me, its landscapes, its people, its sense of hospitality, its openness”, confided the actress, before these ceremonies, in an interview with AFP by email.

This descendant of Italian emigrants said she was “very grateful” to the town hall and the association La Piccola Sicilia, co-organizer of the ceremonies in her honor. This “Little Sicily” was the district of La Goulette where thousands of Italians from Tunisia gathered, mostly from Sicily, and where “la Cardinale” was born.

At independence in 1956, the Italian community, including many emigrants who arrived before the French protectorate (started in 1881), numbered more than 130,000 members.

“Great cultural diversity”

“It’s an important past: the Tunisia of my parents, of my grandparents, was an extraordinary Tunisia. A land of sharing, of joy, of exchange”, she confided, stressing that she had “grown up in a very great cultural mix”.

Elected in July 1957, “most beautiful Italian woman in Tunisia”, at just 19 years old, her reward was a trip the same year to the Venice film festival where she was noticed by the profession. In particular by the director Mario Monicelli who will give him his first role the following year in Pigeon.

Shortly after, her family moved with her to Rome where her career took off, with legendary roles in Cheetah by Luchino Visconti or Once upon a Time in the West by Sergio Leone.

The actress, who has lived in France for many years, has never stopped filming and plays the grandmother in the latest film by Tunisian Ridha Behi, The Island of Forgivenesscurrently in post-production.

Like the protagonists of the film centered on Italian immigration, his parents never recovered from their departure from Tunisia, experienced as an exile.

“It was very hard. My father never wanted to come back, as he dreaded the pain of what was a real heartbreak for him”, she underlines.

“My mother recreated Tunis in Italy. She planted the species there,” bougainvillea, jasmine, prickly pears, “and continued to cook” Tunisian style.

For this descendant of Sicilian migrants who left to seek a better future in Africa, Tunisia “must be proud of its history”.

And faced with the migrations that often take place today from south to north, the actress deemed it “important to remember this common past”. “Tunisia has been a land of welcome for us, I wish all those in the world who need to leave, to find the same welcome”.