“Perhaps those who are born in a city like Istanbul are destined to feel at home in two different places. Perhaps it was my city that inspired this path. Or maybe it simply had to happen this way, as part of my destiny. I’ll ask next time my tarot cards are read. Or maybe the answer will emerge from the grounds of my next cup of coffee.”

Serra Yilmaz, together with Fausto Calderai, will transport us into her world with the book Cara Istanbul (Rizzoli).

The book:

How do you tell the story of the city of your childhood—especially when that city is Istanbul, a legendary place steeped in history? Serra Yılmaz chooses to do so by placing side by side, like in a memory album, the neighborhoods, streets, and homes where she lived, when Istanbul—already vast—had only one million inhabitants, not twenty as it does today. Reading these pages feels like listening to a voice that, beside a tiled stove during a harsh winter or looking out over the Bosphorus from a terrace on a warm evening, reconstructs and brings back to life the sounds and smells of a corner of the world that, like few others, has been overwhelmed and transformed by progress and tourism.

The unmistakable voice is Serra’s: one of Turkey’s most celebrated actresses, deeply loved by Italian audiences who came to know her on the big screen in the films of Ferzan Özpetek. In this kind of “autobiography through people, houses, and neighborhoods,” we discover long summers spent at her grandmother’s home on the Asian side of the city, among beaches and gardens; her relationship with her parents; friendships and youthful loves; her first work experiences; the emergence of her passion for France, for Italy, for theater; and once again departures and returns to a place “whose memory is inseparable from the possibility of any story.”

All of this is richly seasoned with caustic irony, picaresque anecdotes, rings lost and found, women without navels, a certain Levantine superstition against the evil eye, a magmatic and driving rhythm—and, why not, a few traditional recipes (cooking has long been one of Serra’s passions…).

The author:

After studying psychology in France, she joined a small Turkish theater company and began her stage career. She made her film debut in 1983 with Turkish director Atıf Yılmaz, but the film that truly launched her career in Turkey was Motherland Hoteldi by Ömer Kavur, which competed at the Venice Film Festival in 1987. From 1988 to 2004, she was a member of the Istanbul City Theatre company.

An icon of Turkish director Ferzan Özpetek, she has appeared in the cast of all his most important films. In 2006, she served as the official interpreter during Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Turkey. She has never, however, abandoned her theatrical work: she is part of the company that staged L’ultimo harem, directed by Angelo Savelli at Teatro di Rifredi in Florence, which has been running since 2005.