Searching for her Sicilian slice of life
Lorraine Bracco is unlikely star of her own HGTV show
When people ask Lorraine Bracco how she’s doing these days, the actress said she usually gives the same answer.
“I say I’m crazy,” she said. “A little nutty, but good.”
To be clear, she doesn’t mean the kind of insanity that would get someone committed by Dr. Melfi, the psychiatrist she played on “The Sopranos,” or that would compel someone to sit atop her mobster husband in their marital bed while aiming a gun at him, as she did in “Goodfellas.”
“More fun crazy,” Bracco said. “I think one of the things they would say about me is that I’m fun.”
It is that spirit — call it intrepidness or recklessness — that drove Bracco, inspired by little more than a news article she read on her phone, to purchase a ramshackle house in Sicily for 1 euro and restore it to its former glory.
And it is that same boldness that spurred her to contact HGTV and persuade the cable channel to have a camera crew document her efforts.
And that is how Bracco became the star of her own home renovation series, “My Big Italian Adventure,” which debuted Oct. 30.
Even as she recounted its origin story, Bracco could not help enumerating all the red flags that warned against this undertaking. For starters, she didn’t speak Italian and had never been to Sicily before.
“There would have been a lot of reasons not to do it,” she said. “But I was so intrigued.”
Bracco, 66, was speaking from her year-round home in Bridgehampton, New York. She sat in a living room she had decorated with black-and-white photos of favorite artists and performers such as James Brown, Elizabeth Taylor, Federico Fellini and John Huston.
“I’m inspired by them all,” Bracco said.
She was similarly energized by that news story she had read online about two years ago, reporting that Sambuca, a small hilltop town in Sicily, was selling abandoned and ruined homes there for 1 euro. (The local program, which required new owners to restore the dwellings within three years of purchase, was established to encourage tourism and boost the region’s economy.)
As Bracco recalled: “I said to myself, what do I have to lose? What is the downside?”
A fan of home-renovation shows and HGTV programming, Bracco was convinced her Sicilian renovation project would make a good series for the channel. So she contacted directly Loren Ruch, an executive there, and pitched the idea.
Ruch, who is HGTV’s group senior vice president for development and production, said that Bracco’s approach “was completely not our typical way of finding a show, but it felt right.”
“If it was a celebrity that just asked us to buy them a vacation home, we would probably politely decline,” Ruch said.
(HGTV said it covered its own production costs for “My Big Italian Adventure” and compensated Bracco for appearing in the series, but that she paid the costs for the home renovation herself.)
But Ruch said that Bracco’s proposal “felt rooted in passion and love to us — that’s what we’re always looking for.”
“I run by emotion,” he said. “I could just imagine this show working.”
Further challenges awaited Bracco when she first traveled to Sicily in early 2019 to see the 200-year-old, 1,075-square-foot property she now owned.
“Basically, what I bought was a town house,” she said.
After a brief pause, she added: “I’m lying. What I bought was three freakin’ rock walls. I mean, it was a disaster.”
She spent the next several months working with a contractor, artisans and laborers to rebuild the structure, provide it with electricity and running water and outfit it to her particular tastes. As with any artistic endeavor, there were creative differences to overcome.
“I wanted two dishwashers, and they were like, ‘Aah, two dishwashers?’ ” Bracco recalled. “I said that’s what I’m used to — I have a family, and I expect a lot of people to come.
“I put French doors in the bathroom, to open up onto a little terrace. And they would be like, ‘Mamma mia.’ They thought I was slightly off, but it’s gorgeous.”
In total, Bracco estimated the home restoration cost her $250,000 to $300,000, considerably more than the $150,000 she had budgeted for the project.
Still, the enterprise was not without fringe benefits, like the fans Bracco encountered on shopping trips to Palermo, who recognized her not from the internationally acclaimed Italian American sagas “The Sopranos” and “Goodfellas” but from her role as Angie Harmon’s mother on the TNT police drama “Rizzoli & Isles.”
Harmon, who visited Bracco in Sicily during the making of “My Big Italian Adventure,” said the two of them have remained so close since “Rizzoli & Isles” ended in 2016 that she still refers to Bracco as “Ma.”
She too was surprised by the initial condition of Bracco’s property.
“I was told there’s a couple walls missing, but you don’t think it’s, like, rubble,” Harmon said. “But Ma has exquisite taste, so I knew she was going to make something really beautiful out of it.”
Harmon was also impressed to see how swiftly Bracco had settled into Sicilian culture.
“She takes me to a cheese stand, and it’s all I hear about for two days,” Harmon recalled. “‘We got to go to the cheese stand. It’s all about the cheese.’
“I’m like, OK, I get it. How good could it be? And she was right — it was really, really good cheese.”
Bracco said her HGTV series was not intended as a substitute for the acting work that continues to keep her busy. She had finished films planned for release, and new projects she was scheduled to work on were postponed.
It has been several months since Bracco finished work on the house, and while she will not be able to fully appreciate it until after the pandemic has subsided, she said it felt sufficiently empowering just to get it done.
“Oh, I’m empowered,” she said with a laugh. “I often butt against things that people say, ‘Oh, oh, oh, no, no.’ But I make things happen. I do.”