In the history of motorsport there are few women who dreamed of driving a race car and managed to hold it in their hand.
Her five formula 1 of Maria Teresa de Filippis, Lela Lombardi, Divina Calica and Desire Wilson closes in 1992 the Italian Giovanna Amati, daughter of a former butcher and millionaire movie owner Giovanni Amati and actress Anna Maria Pancani.
Amati's story is tragic and came to light in 1978 with brilliant articles in the press.
On February 12, 1978, at the age of 18, Giovanna Amati fell victim abduction through her car, near the villa where she lived. Men, members of a gangster gang in Marseille led by Jean Daniel Nieto, grab her and take her to a house very close to her paternal home.
The young woman lives the absolute horror. She was locked in a wooden cage for 74 days, while her captors tried to get the family to give them $ 1,8 million if they wanted to see their child alive again. Police freeze the family's bank accounts in an effort not to succumb to kidnappers' threats. But they do not bend and threaten to kill her.
Giovanni Amati eventually gets a portion of the proceeds from the Star Wars movie, which starred in the cinemas that belonged to him, his wife sells her expensive jewelry and raises $ 925.000 wanting to have their beloved daughter with them again.
The 18-year-old lives the absolute horror. "In the beginning, Giovanna hit them in the face. "She was beaten with wet towels and kicked every time the negotiations for the liters fell into a vacuum," said Vittoria's sister.
One day they threatened to cut off her ear, the next her finger. Giovanna was repeatedly raped by the ringleader, Nieto, who exhibited a very strange behavior: on the one hand he abused her and on the other he tried to be polite and tender.
The days passed and the kidnapper became more and more affectionate towards his victim. "Many times he told me about him and the life he had lived," the victim seems to have said to his sisters after release of. "Many times when I cried he would come to me, caress my head and comfort me," he had said.
Their story does not seem to have ended when Giovanna was released and 7 of the kidnappers were arrested. Nieto was not among them, who managed to break it. A month after the police operation, he started sending flowers to his ex-victim and love affair, in which he signed as SDG, the humiliation that Giovanna had stuck to him, and it was about the sports shoes he was wearing.
When he started calling her, according to an article in People magazine, the police persuaded the girl to work with them to trap him and arrest him. Their appointment has been set. Giovanna arrived at the meeting point with her red motorbike, while the carabinieri waited with their weapons lined up. The armed Nieto appeared, the Police fired warning shots at his legs and arrested him.
Full of remorse, Giovanna did not think that she would part with her love. In the middle of the street she was shouting at the police and begging them to let her hug him one last time! Two days later, convinced that Nieto was using it to reduce his sentence, she named him.
The love story with her rapist caused a stir in Italy. The newspapers wrote articles about the tender moments and the arrest during a date. "I only wish he had been arrested in another way and not with my help," he said in a May 1978 report by the Montreal Gazette.
The 18-year-old's relationship with her parents broke down. "She left the house virgin and came back raped," her mother said in one of her many interviews, while her sisters revealed why the rupture came. "When Giovanna returned home she was very happy, as if she had been reborn. They should have left her alone, with 1-2 people near her, to open up, to talk about what she experienced. Instead, our parents subjected her to the scourge of publicity, photographers and journalists, and she could not stand it. "She needed to feel love and affection and not be chased by a bunch of strangers," said Vittoria's sister.
In 2015, in an interview with the BBC, she seemed reluctant to look back on that dark period of her life. He never admitted his love for Nieto, attributing it all to the imagination of journalists.
"What you have read in the newspapers was wrong, completely wrong. When I was released all I wanted was to go back to my family and get my kidnappers arrested […] Sometimes you lose your faith and your hope because you think everyone outside will have forgotten you. But you realize that this is not true. You do not just communicate with the rest of the world. "When you are released, you recover," he said.
Nieto was sentenced to 18 years in prison prison, escaped in 1989 and was arrested again in 2010.