Francesca Neri: “Now it’s better, but I also thought about getting it over with”

The disease, that terrible pain and despair that makes you think even of an extreme gesture. Francesca Neri, an exclusive guest on Sunday 3 October at ‘Verissimo’, talks about her serious health problem that forced her to leave the stage. “Today I am much better, I am much more serene and I have learned to listen to my body. It all started at least five years ago and the acute phase of the disease lasted three years. I have never been afraid of suffering, but the constant physical pain made me lose control and contact with reality ”. And he adds: “This disease, a chronic interstitial cystitis, forced me to look inside myself and take note of my dark side. I consider myself a survivor because I hit rock bottom, but then the ascent began. It was a long journey, very painful at the beginning, but with a lot of satisfaction afterwards ”. A troubled period for the actress who for a moment even thought of ending it: “Slowly you shut yourself up, you distance yourself from everything and everyone and depression takes over. I thought of making an extreme gesture because at that moment I saw it as a liberation, a way out. I felt the pain of weighing on others, I was there but I was not there and I wanted to preserve the other people I was connected to. But this thought lasted only a second, after which I became even more attached to life ”. To Silvia Toffanin who asks her about the relationship with her husband Claudio Amendola, Francesca Neri confesses: “He is a wonderful man, she said that her job was to be close to me but it was not taken for granted that she would stay close to me. I saw his difficulty and his pain and it hurt me. I wanted to keep him away from me to protect him, but he has always been there and this thing surprised me after twenty-five years. “An impotence and suffering also present in the eyes of his son Rocco:” Today we have a wonderful relationship, but I was afraid of losing him: I was afraid that that image of his mother would remain imprinted on him. I put him in front of something bigger than him. In those years he didn’t have a mother but he wasn’t there for me either. I saw him changed and this made me suffer ”. For Neri the future is now more serene, but despite this a return to the set still seems far away: “With this forced enclosure, I rediscovered the true priorities of life. The only thing I miss about my job is the creative part. I don’t know what will happen, I’ll do something even if I don’t know what yet ”.