Long before Rome became her home, Audrey Hepburn had already captured the Eternal City on film. Her performance in Roman Holiday, which won her the 1953 Best Actress Oscar, made her a Hollywood star and a symbol of the city itself. Yet when she lived in Rome for two decades, she shed her glamorous red-carpet persona; rather, she was known simply as “Mrs. Dotti”, the neighbor in Parioli who cooked (her favorite) pasta al pomodoro for family and friends, wandered through Villa Borghese, and shopped for groceries in Rome’s pizzicagnoli. Here, she lived the life of a true Roman.

No one knew the woman behind the pearls better than her son, Luca Dotti. On a crisp spring afternoon, I met Luca to talk about his book Audrey at Home (2015, Harper Collins). What comes through in his writing are small, everyday joys: stories of long Roman lunches at Audrey’s mother-in-law’s house, a collection of Audrey’s handwritten recipes, and photos of trips to Tuscany and Venice donning thin striped swimsuits and straw hats. It was ordinary Italian days when Audrey felt most at home.

Audrey first moved to Rome in the 1960s. Before then, home was Belgium (where she was born), the UK, and the Netherlands—the latter where she spent the frightful years of WWII, surviving off of turnips and boiled tulip bulbs. These years most built her determined, hopeful personality, and taught her to give importance to what really mattered. 

In the 1950s, home was on screen. It was Hollywood of the Golden Age, when Audrey filmed classics like Sabrina (1954), her alarm ringing at 4 AM every day so she could review her lines before reporting to set. It was the years of her first rented house, a small apartment on Wilshire Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Alone in Los Angeles, she found solace in cooking—the classic of that time, penne alla vodka, on repeat. Even after moving away, “Audrey considered our home in Beverly Hills her home away from home,” shared her longtime friend Connie Wald. 

During the same period, Cinecittà was putting Rome on the cinematic map and brought stars from Audrey to Anthony Perkins, Shelley Winters, and Ava Gardner to the capital. Audrey filmed three movies here during this time: Roman Holiday (1953), War and Peace (1955), and The Nun’s Story (1959). “When she stepped off the airplane at Ciampino Airport, she was welcomed as a foreign star (at the time mistaken for an American), but by then she was Roman by adoption,” shared Luca Dotti in a 2013 interview for Vanity Fair. 

By the end of that decade, Aurdey had begun spending more and more time in Rome, building a close circle of friends and eventually establishing her home there, first in the center and later on via San Valentino in Parioli. She began to step away from the scripts not because Hollywood stopped calling, but because she chose Rome, family, and eventually her humanitarian work with UNICEF. It’s here that she married Andrea Dotti in 1969, where their son Luca (b. 1970) grew up, and where they shared dinners of gnocchi alla romana. Even though Giovanna, the family cook, was around, Audrey loved preparing meals herself. Luca recalls eating penne al’Americanata (penne with ketchup) with his mom in front of the TV, usually Canzonissima or the ballets of Raffaella Carrà, of whom she was a great fan. 

When they weren’t at home, there were Sunday lunches at Romolo alla Fornarina in Trastevere, walks in Villa Borghese, afternoons at Villa Balestra with the latest issue of Captain America under her arm. Audrey queued for vegetables at Campo de’ Fiori, ate at Da Nino on Via Borgognona, and walked, relatively unnoticed, atop Rome’s sanpietrini. 

“I’ve preserved the snapshots of those private years of the 1970s in my own albums, which are not unlike those kept by many other Italian families,” Luca told Vanity Fair. Hard to believe for the son of the woman on more than 600 magazine covers. 

For public events, Audrey often donned outfits by Italian designers, namely Ferragamo or the Fontana Sisters—she played a key role in bringing Made in Italy design to Hollywood—but the day to day was casual. When waiting for Luca after school, she’d put on simple jeans and a flannel shirt, smiling at him from behind a camera as she snapped photos of his smiling face. Audrey’s beauty was elegant without being showy—an embodiment of that elusive Italian “sprezzatura”. 

At Luca’s birthday parties, with cone-shaped hats and projections of My Fair Lady, almost no one realized that Eliza Doolittle was the very woman bringing the cake with candles to the table. “Perhaps in part because of its indolence, Rome always protected my mother, giving her time and space,” Luca told Vanity Fair. 

In the 1980s, Aubrey left her beloved Rome for the countryside of Switzerland. But aspects of her Italian life lingered: slow breakfasts of fresh pastries with cherry jam, gelato shared with friends, dinners of linguine with parsley pesto (improvised, since basil was hard to come by there). Here, she put frozen cherry tomatoes out to defrost on the windowsill for the next day’s sauce and tended to her flower garden near-daily. 

It’s this woman that Luca urges us to get to know, not the boat-necked black dress, big sunglasses, and elbow-length gloves image usually associated with his mother. In his book, he writes, “I’ve never met Audrey Hepburn. To a group of journalists who asked me insistently about her, as a child I replied a bit annoyed, ‘You are wrong, I am Mrs. Dotti’s son.’” 

Photos from Audrey at Home (2015, Harper Collins) – All rights reserved