On the one hand Mondaini who showed his blue eyes, on the other a Mondaini covered with huge smoke lenses, capable of becoming a cult object and a real distinctive trait. Two opposite images, which in the collective imagination bind to a black and white TV respectively and to a more modern proposal, in color and largely identified with the adventure in Silvio Berlusconi’s commercial networks.

Sandra Mondaini left us on September 21, 2010, five months after his sweet half Raimondo Vianello. Five months never really existed, during which the actress had simply dragged herself, devoured by pain and despair. “For me Raimondo is like the liver, it is part of me, it is something I have, which belongs to me,” he confided once. “By now we are a single person, I often forget that there is.”

Sandra, before Raimondo

Sandra obsessively repeated that the day had known him and not to remember his previous life. Yet an artistic existence before crossing Vianello had had it. Daughter of Giacinto Mondaini, a well -known painter and humorist of the satirical magazine “Il Bertoldo”, became famous from a very young age when the father launched her as a testimonial of the awareness campaign against tuberculosis. Commitments as a model followed, the first steps in the theater with Marcello Marchesi and the experience as soubrette in the company of Erminio Macario magazine.

“I love this profession because it came to meet me, if it was I would never have chosen for me. It was my father, who was a crazy, who made me be an actress.”

The meeting with Raimondo, in 1958

Raimondo crossed his path ‘only’ in 1958. Four years later they married the marriage proposal arrived at dinner, at the home of his friend Gino Bramieri, in front of a cutlet. “We had something that united us: the same attention to important values, such as respect and honesty”.

He the cynical, she the eternal collector who occasionally knew how to return the blow. A union that has always resting on irony, both in private life and on the stage.

Next to Corrado in “The stage”, the success of a couple in Rai definitively exploded in the seventies with “Do you know what I tell you?”, “So many apologies”, “again many apologies”, “Noi … no” and “Tonight nothing new”.

Pungent, desecrators, never vulgar. “We are of that generation in which the actor knew that he entered the houses without playing the bell and then he entered us with a tie and gracefully”.

Fifteen years without Raimondo Vianello. And we all hear them

Silvio Berlusconi’s call

In the 1980s, Fininvest interference and Sandra and Raimondo responded ‘present’, putting petrol together with Mike and Corrado to the ambitious project of the Knight. “We did not know him and we received it in our house – he loved to tell Vianello – they talked about a very rich man, but the first thing he asked for as soon as he arrived was something to eat. He divided a sandwich, then I said to Sandra: ‘But are we sure that this has the money?'”.

“Attentive to the two of us”, “Sandra and Raimondo Show”, “Zig Zag”, “The game of the nine”. Tandem conductions, to which independent paths were added. If the doors of “Pressing” and even of the Sanremo Festival in 1998 opened in Vianello, Mondaini gave herself lonely in “Happy Sunday” in the role of Sbirulino and in the fiction “Dear Maestro”.

However, the real genius was represented by “Casa Vianello”. Sixteen seasons, for a total of 338 episodes all concluded by Mondaini always in the same way: “What a beard, what a boredom, what a boredom that beard”. They followed kicks under the covers that Raimondo suffered in absolute silence.

“We bring our real life, logically exasperated – she revealed her – if I really had such a husband I would have slammed him out of the house”.

No son, but an enlarged family

A lot of love, no child. A lack compensated by the affection for the couple of Filipinian domestic domestic adopted in 1995: “My nanny after so many years was leaving and one night I proposed to Raimondo: ‘If we took a couple with a small child?’

That idea of ​​the extended family gave the two a serene epilogue: “I am living a wonderful old age, I even made time to make peace with my dad. I have always compared the life of the game of poker: it is not important how you sit or you are in the middle, but how you get up from the table. Finishing an existence in beauty like I am finishing it is the most beautiful thing that can be there”. The manifesto of happiness.

Cancer, funeral

Cancer affected both, in different phases. An outdated obstacle that convinced them to lend their image for the Airc campaign against tumors. The struggle with vasculitis, which in recent years forced Mondaini in a wheelchair in recent years. However, the disease that did not prevent him from acting in “Vianello cruise”, the last melancholy act of an extraordinary career.

Sandra & Raimondo: two names pronounced in one breath and delivered to eternity. And in the end, the beloved Silvio was right, who one day gone them with a forecast as cynical as well as spot on: “I made the biggest deal of my life with you, because I will be able to broadcast you indefinitely, even after you will be dead”.

It went exactly like that.