Is Rome Burning?

The Pope, after all, once emigrated as far as Avignon, and the Louvre long ago claimed the Mona Lisa. But for modern, still macho Italy, the coup de grâce came when La Sympatica, Sophia Loren, the consummate incarnation of Italian sensuality and elegance, expatriated herself to France.

It’s not that Sophia has wearied of the 50-room, 16th century “most beautiful house in the world” that her producer-husband, Carlo Ponti, created for her outside of Rome. Or that, as the local scandal sheets would have it, the Pontis are splitting. “What do you expect?” Sophia shrugs, “they have to sell newspapers.” “What rubbish!” snorts Carlo less patiently. In truth, it’s the Neapolitan earth-mother instinct that’s brought her reluctantly to Paris. Her two sons—Carlo Jr. (“Cipi”), 7, and Edoardo (“Eli”), 4—are being educated there, and no force in the world, or in Italy, can separate La Loren from her bambini.

Their Roman exile began three years ago when Sophia enrolled Cipi in a Paris kindergarten while on location. The family has stayed there ever since, she explains, “so Cipi can have a stable school atmosphere.” Now Italy’s political and social turbulence makes their repatriation even less likely. While stirrings about the abolition of private property are unnerving enough (Loren is probably the world’s wealthiest actress, and Ponti is one of the most propertied of socialists), her deepest worry is over crime, so commonplace in Italy that many other monied families have fled. Carlo himself was the object of one kidnap attempt, thwarted by his omnipresent police bodyguard, and they have been robbed four times. Thus, Sophia, approaching 42, and her children have become contented prisoners in an antique-filled triplex penthouse on Avenue George V, and she is a willing, if sometimes lonely, homebody. Carlo spends the work week swinging film deals in Rome, but faithfully telephones Sophia three times every day. On weekends he commutes to Paris.

The Pontis rarely go out. Instead, reports Ines Bruscia, Sophia’s secretary for 17 years, “They spend evenings hand in hand, lying in bed watching television. Sometimes they’re in dressing gowns all weekend. On Sunday mornings the boys love to climb in bed with their parents. Sophia just loves beinq with him and the children.”

For Sophia, the satisfactions of her secluded family life came only after a series of miscarriages made her fear she’d failed as a wife. “I was made to have children,” she says. “Becoming 30 was a crisis for me, because I didn’t have children then and couldn’t stand it. I had all this love bottled up inside me. Now,” she muses, “perhaps psychologists would say I spoil them, but I can’t measure the affection I give, and to me it never seems enough. Children are mysterious creatures and who can be sure of making them happy?”

Her day begins at 6:30 or 7 a.m. when she rises from her queen-sized bed and, after espresso and gymnastics, plunges into her chores like any other haute bourgeoise. On the cook’s days off, Sophia fixes meals and washes dishes. The maid comes in only twice a week, so Sophia makes her own bed and washes her own lingerie. She tries to cope with some of the nearly 500 fan letters, saving the stamps for Cipi’s voluminous collection. Twice a week she takes him to his swimming lessons. (The boys are complete opposites: Cipi is shy and quiet, while Eli is the family extrovert.) Bedtime is around 7:30 p.m., and by 9 even Mama is asleep.

For all her workaday rounds, Loren is as stunning as ever in middle age. Once as voluptuous as a Botticelli maiden, she is more refined now at a slimmed-down 135 pounds. Around the house she swathes her 5’8½” (not counting her three-inch heels) in flowing caftans. In public, she’s still dressed by Dior. She wears less makeup now (“Maybe I wore so much when I was younger because I was more insecure”) and is more restrained than in her admittedly “eccentric periods” when she made some worst-dressed lists. Simultaneously, she’s given up her craving for expensive jewelry after the robberies. First, she lost $370,000 worth of gems in a London heist, and then $700,000 in New York when four thugs put a gun to her head and threatened her child. “When I held Cipi in my arms again, I was taught the biggest lesson in my life,” she recalls. “Believe me, I have deleted the word jewelry from my vocabulary. To own something which could make people resort to murder and kidnapping,” she has decided, “is a threat not a possession.”

A friend says simply of Sophia’s new serenity, “She is blooming. When a woman is happy she is beautiful.” Sophia will tell anyone who asks—and even those who don’t—that the secret of her happiness is her unlikely, 25-year union with Ponti, 21 years her senior and several inches shorter. “The world has lost its taste for simple things like the love of a woman for only one man,” she explains, “but not me.”

Carlo has been the only man in Sophia’s life since the day he spotted her at 17 in the crowd at a beauty contest in Rome. The illegitimate daughter of a failed actress, Sofia Scicolone had grown up as a street waif in a war-ravaged suburb on the Bay of Naples. For some 10 years their marriage was blocked by Italy’s archaic divorce laws, which refused to recognize Ponti’s Mexican divorce from his first wife and threatened him with a jail sentence for bigamy. The Vatican declared Sophia a public sinner in the process. It was not until Carlo expended some $2 million in legal fees, and he, Sophia and his cooperative first wife all became French citizens (thanks to the intercession of their late friends Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou) that they were free to marry in 1966. In accounting for “the great love and sacred respect between them,” her secretary notes that “he has the coldness of the North, Milan, and she has the heat of the South. What he lacks she has, and what she lacks he has. But Italians cannot conceive of such a marriage.”

The old line that Ponti is a “pizza Pygmalion” is an injustice to them both. Though he is a lawyer and she is not formally educated, Sophia is today the reader of properties (including those in French and English) in the partnership, playing David Brown to his Dick Zanuck. “I value Sophia’s opinions,” he says, “because my father would have done a lot better in life if he had listened to my mother.” Carlo, in addition to discovering the likes of Mastroianni and Zeffirelli, has produced many of Sophia’s 50 films, including her 1961 Oscar-winner Two Women and, they concede, too many esthetic embarrassments (if European moneymakers) since. Currently, following an 18-month hiatus to play mother (her first real vacation since she was 15), they are at work on The Cassandra Crossing, an $8 million epic financed in part by Ponti’s new backer, the Shah of Iran.

For all of Sophia and Carlo’s international mobility—in addition to their Paris apartment and Roman villa, they have apartments in New York and Geneva, a farm in Tuscany and a chalet in the French Alps—their world remains strangely circumscribed. “It’s a hard life,” says one friend. “I often hear them say, ‘Siamo senza terra’ meaning that they have no place of their own, where they feel safe.” Loren acknowledges, “Sure I miss my mother and sister. And I miss the villa. seeing all the trees we planted grow.” Not to mention her longstanding Sunday afternoon poker game with old male cronies.

But, she adds, “When I was little I used to dream of having a wooden pencil holder like my companions at school. I dreamed of simple accessible things, and—even if no one believes me—I’m still like that today. Inner peace,” Sophia has discovered, “is a gift nobody can buy. The world changes, while the family is the only true thing.”