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6<br />
My Sicily<br />
Maria Grazia Cucinotta<br />
was born in Messina<br />
in the summer of 1968.<br />
During her career she<br />
has worked with Woody<br />
Allen, Sharon Stone,<br />
Spike Lee, Ridley Scott<br />
and John Woo.<br />
mainland. It seems like we’d done a great<br />
journey, like we’d discovered the world.”<br />
Did you speak dialect in the family?<br />
“Yes, we did, and I still like speaking it<br />
because dialect’s part of our DNA, our<br />
roots. When I went to the United States for<br />
the first time and didn’t know the language<br />
they started to speak to me in dialect and I<br />
immediately felt like I was at home”.<br />
Do you like cooking dishes from the<br />
Sicilian cuisine?<br />
“When I invite friends to dinner they always<br />
ask me to make pasta with aubergines.<br />
But I’m good at parmigiana too, and<br />
caponata which I try to reinterpret. But<br />
there’s no getting away from it, the food we<br />
eat in Sicily has another taste entirely”.<br />
Does your work ever take you<br />
to Sicily?<br />
“I try to bring almost all the films<br />
I produce to Sicily, because it’s not right<br />
to turn my back on the young people on<br />
the island, we need to create work.<br />
And then there are wonderful landscapes,<br />
but we need to create structures and<br />
educate the young people. Films<br />
are a fundamental way of making the<br />
territory known”.<br />
What do miss most of your island?<br />
“I miss everything of Sicily because<br />
its part of me and of my being. I owe<br />
so much to my land”.<br />
And what advice would you give<br />
to young Sicilians?<br />
Tasting Sicily n.01/2013
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