"Suddenly the war seemed far away, we shrugged off the dust, hunger, fatigue of the post-war period, for the first time we looked up and looked ahead. The worst was over. At that time Rome was a magnet, everyone dreamed of living in the city of cinema, of stars, the capital of elegance and modernity of which we read in magazines: and the mirage was at hand, right there, a few kilometers away".
The heroine of the Roman "dolce vita", the undisputed queen of the Spanish Quarters, was loved and courted. Tarantina's life was certainly all this, but not only. Like many other "femminielli" of her generation or the following ones, hers was also a tiring existence, made up of painful rejections (especially on the part of the family and the community of origin), of precariousness and despair, of prison and broken dreams.
From her story without any veils and full of often unexpected encounters, comes the portrait in the round and in strong colors of a person who lived with courage and obstinacy, in search of happiness, without ever denying herself. Courage and obstinacy that even today, on the threshold of eighty years, do not seem to have abandoned her at all - as evidenced by her telling herself in public.
Carmelo Cosma was born in 1936 in Avetrana, province of Taranto, and this shy boy would become The Tarantina, one of the most iconic figures of the Italian transgender movement.
At the age of 9, he is repudiated by his family and moves to Naples and then Rome. In the capital, Carmelo begins to dress as a woman, the gender she has in her heart. She does not regard herself as homosexual or transgender, and she does not dream of surgery but she takes feminizing hormones. Life in Rome seduced her and spurred her to throw herself headlong into increasingly scandalous situations. Those were years of great euphoria, and wildness, there was the taste to exaggerate, to break the taboos of the past.
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