In her new memoir, “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,” actress and international ѕех symbol Sophia Loren reveals intimate details about her private life — including her “share of terrible scares” and being sentenced to 30 days in prison.
“Some people wonder why Carlo [Ponti — her late husband] and I eventually moved our family to Switzerland. Simple: we needed to be in a place where we could feel safer and live more peacefully,” the actress, now 80, recalled of often feeling targeted by robbers because of her immense collection of valuables.
While visiting New York in the fall of 1970, Sophia was once robbed at gunpoint in her hotel room while her young son, Carlo Jr. (nicknamed Cipi), then just two-years-old, was sleeping.
“’Move it, and start getting the jewelry out,’ shouted the thief, as he began searching my room. How could he possibly know, I wondered, that Van Cleef & Arpels had lent me a set of jewelry to wear to a gala that evening?” Sophia wrote.
After giving up a borrowed diamond and ruby bracelet, necklace and matching earrings, and then surrendering another bag of her personal jewelry, the thieves eventually left her room leaving the actress and her son unharmed, Sophia explained.
“As soon as they’d gone, I ran to Cipi, hugged him tightly, and collapsed in tears,” she said of the ordeal.
But the international film star claims her “most traumatic experience” was going to jail after being convicted of tax evasion in the early 1980s.
“My sons were 14 and nine when I packed my bags. When they came to say goodbye, I tried to memorize their expressions,” she wrote. “Nothing is more humiliating than the denial of freedom.”
