Born in Rome on 20 September 1934, Sofia Villani Scicolone had a troubled childhood. Her mother Romilda Villani, a piano teacher, and her father Riccardo Scicolone, an employee of the State Railways, were not married. Her father was a largely absent figure, which forced her and her mother to live in precarious economic conditions. In 1932, her mother won a competition in Hollywood as a lookalike for the Italian actress Greta Garbo. However, when she became pregnant, she gave up on leaving Italy. Indeed, she was forced to return to Pozzuoli by her family due to economic difficulties. Sofia spent her childhood and early teenage years there, experiencing the bombings of the Second World War at first hand.
