A Romantic story of Marcello Mastroianni’s mother’s meatballs

Jul 28 2025, 16:25
Meatballs represent the ultimate comfort food, tied to grandmothers and old-style mothers. Here's what it meant for the Italian actor to come home and eat them

Sophia Loren’s spaghetti, Alberto Sordi’s Sunday lunch, Nino Manfredi and Vittorio Gassman’s lesso alla Piacchiapò in Ettore Scola’s film We All Loved Each Other So Much. When these giants of cinema are evoked—who portrayed a poor yet authentic Italy, especially through food—it feels like being catapulted into a distant era. A country that no longer exists, where the peasant culinary tradition was simple, genuine, and capable of restoring even the brightest film stars, weary between one take and the next. As was the case for Marcello Mastroianni, who found comfort and relief in the meatballs prepared by his mother.

Marcello Mastroianni and the meatballs

Hair slicked back like a true tombeur de femmes, elegant jacket, impeccable white shirt, and a cigarette between his fingers. It’s 1966, and Marcello Mastroianni is being interviewed by RAI during a break on a film set. The journalist, who had just met his mother and discovered the actor’s fondness for her meatballs, asks him about this attachment.

Mastroianni’s response is heartfelt and affectionate: “Because going back to my mother’s house means diving back into a certain atmosphere, that of adolescence, of youth.” For him, that act is a form of purification: eating meatballs is like “purging himself,” as he puts it. “After all the troubles, torments, hassles, the good and bad things one faces throughout the day, going back in time helps me find a freshness, a virginity… actually, a purity, yes, and that enthusiasm which is lost over time.”

And the confirmation comes directly from Marcello Mastroianni’s affectionate mother, who shares: “Maybe the meatballs remind him of when, as a little boy, he’d come home from school with his brother and find them ready on the table—it was always a big celebration. Maybe, eating them makes him feel like a child again… and he really does brighten up!” She’s careful to point out that those meatballs were strictly “made with boiled meat!”

Mastroianni and food

He loved soups, seafood risotto from a place in Ostia, and in the kitchen he managed simple dishes to eat, but ones that required meticulous preparation: “I can only make fried eggs, which I really like, because I like the whites to be cooked—in fact, the edge has to be golden, almost burnt—but the yolk mustn’t be cooked, just barely set, otherwise they taste like hard-boiled eggs.”

In an interview given to la Repubblica in 1993, the actor admitted: “I really love eating, I’ve always enjoyed it. In fact, I’ve never understood people who don’t like to eat. I get very suspicious when I see someone at the table who doesn’t eat.” For Mastroianni, food was much more than nourishment: it was conviviality, culture, and pleasure.

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