“Life, for women, begins at 60”: Isabella Ducrot on a lifetime of threads
She survived the war, hid an illness for a decade and was a self-confessed spinster at 30. At 95, she’s happier than she has ever been.
Isabella Ducrot was born in Naples in 1931, on a hill crowded with churches, and raised on a religion that taught her mostly guilt. At 17 she fell ill with tuberculosis, which her mother insisted she keep secret, and by 30 she considered herself a spinster. So she left for Rome, where nobody knew her, and took a job answering the phones at IBM. There she met Vittorio Ducrot, who told her not to bother with drawing or writing, but who made her feel, for the…
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