Italian ballerina Carla Fracci turns 80 on August 20. Lately she performed in late July at the Versiliana Festival with the Balletto del Sud in Fredy Franzutti’s staging of “Scheherazade and the Thousand and One Nights” as Queen Thalassa, the queen of the sea.
Daughter to a tram driver in Milan in 1936, Fracci began dancing at age 10 at the La Scala ballet school and graduated in 1954, having had among her teachers the influential Russian dancer Vera Volkova. Fracci became a prima ballerina at La Scala just three years after her graduation, after having completed some international apprenticeships, and yet she says that she began dancing “by chance”.
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