For me, Claudia Cardinale was always more than a star. She was the girl with a small suitcase, an eternal traveler who never truly returned from her journeys. Every time she appeared on the screen, I felt a new story begin—one that only she could tell with her gaze. Today, the news of her passing struck me like a cold wind on a lover’s heart; it felt as if The Girl with a Suitcase, who had inspired my dreams and my words for so many years, had quietly picked up her suitcase and left without saying goodbye.
In Fellini’s 8½, she was for me the embodiment of the unfinished dream, of beauty that forever remains out of reach. In Visconti’s The Leopard, she stood as a silent witness to the fading of grandeur—an image that has stayed with me in its bittersweet poetry. And in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, she became an almost mythical woman, whose pride and solitude taught me that even in the dust and violence of the frontier, one could still hold on to love and hope.
Now that she is gone, I feel as though the girl who made me fall in love with cinema with just her eyes has passed through a dark station and vanished down an endless road. Yet every time the screen lights up, I feel her return: in her questioning, innocent glance in 8½, in her solemn grace in The Leopard, and in the haunting echo of the train whistle from Once Upon a Time in the West.
Claudia will never die for me. She is part of my memory, part of my love for cinema itself—the girl with a suitcase who left, but whose footsteps remain forever in my heart and on the eternal road of the movies.
