She was the first Italian ballerina to become étoile of the prestigious Paris Opéra and now directs the corps de ballet of the Rome Opera: Eleonora Abbagnatothe queen of Italian dance after Carla Fracci, talks about herself in a heartfelt interview with Corriere della Sera, where he traces his career and reveals unpublished details of his private life. “My dancers call me Wonder Woman,” she confides, but what made her so strong and resilient was her dance, her great passion and her source of discipline. Over the years, especially when she was just starting out, in fact it wasn’t always all rosy: “I remember that at a competition two girls entered the dressing room and told me jokingly that they hadn’t taken me – she says -. My teacher in Paris pierced my buttocks with a needle because I arched my back too much, I have it very elastic. The great masters entered the classroom with sticks: not to give it to our heads, it was the sense of authority. Still intimidating. It was another era, today mistreatment is not remotely possible, students, especially in America, you can’t even physically touch them until you get a complaint. And it’s exaggerated, you have to explain the rigor in the right way. Today a dance director must also be a psychologist. The negative elements are not the pupils but the mothers. There are exaggerated protagonists”.
And again, he reveals: “At the Rome Opera I received anonymous letters. Then I had death threats in the days when, using acid, they burned the face of the director of the Bolshoi. I was not in Moscow but I was emotionally exhausted. When I was an étoile in Paris, a letter arrived saying: let’s get rid of the Sicilian mafia”. On the private life front, however, Eleonora Abbagnato talks about her large family, the one she built with Federico Balzaretti: together they have two children, 10-year-old Julia and 8-year-old Gabriel; plus the two children he had in his first marriage, Lucrezia is 17 and Ginevra 14.”I’m not the mother of Lucrezia and Ginevra but I raised them. It’s a particular story, Federico had sole custody”, he explains, emphasizing that their birth mom ‘had other things to do’ and to this day he does not see his daughters. What’s it like raising non-his children? “It’s harder, you have the thought that maybe you do something wrong, or that you make them miss something. I love them, it’s like they were my daughters. But if they don’t study I get angry, if they behave badly I scold them and take off my cell phone. I have always loved children, as a child I played at being a mother, my father had six brothers and sisters, a large Sicilian family. I don’t like being called mum, but yes the little one calls me mum, the big one calls me Ele. He was one and a half years old when I first saw her. She is very close to Federico, who is a fantastic father. And he’s been sincere from day one. The first thing he said to me the day we met (through Nino, a mutual friend who is a hairdresser), was that his priority was his daughters. I was wary, he had become a father so young, at 21… I later learned that he had given up on moving to Milan and Naples for his daughters. Federico I would answer him every month ”, he concludes.