Susan Sarandon discovers Italian roots

(ANSA) - Los Angeles, April 26 - Oscar-winning US actress Susan Sarandon has discovered her Italian roots. Her great-grandfather came from a small town near Lucca in Tuscany called Coreglia, she found out. The Dead Man Walking and Thelma and Louise star went on hit TV ancestry show Who Do You Think You Are? to trace a grandmother called Anita Rigali who dropped off the family tree in the 1930s. Rigali, she found out, was a showgirl and dancer in New York before WWII. Rigali's father, Sarandon's great-grandfather, was a statue-maker called Mansueto who, the show's genealogists said, came to America because life was tough for sculptors in Tuscany. In Coreglia, Sarandon visited a church where ten generations of the Rigali family were baptised, dating back to the mid-17th century. "I'm always happy to be in Italy," she said. "The first time I came I felt inexplicably at home". "Now I know why.
My gene pool was crying out". Sarandon, has a 25-year-old actress daughter, Eva Amurri, with Italian filmmaker Franco Amurri, whom she dated in the 1980s.