Alessandro Preziosi (Born 19 April 1973, Napoli Italy)
Alessandro Preziosi (born 19 April 1973) is an Italian actor, director, and former lawyer, one of Italian television and theater's most recognizable leading men. He is best known for playing Count Fabrizio Ristori in the hit costume drama Elisa di Rivombrosa (2003–2005) and the painter and historian Giorgio Vasari in I Medici (2018), alongside a long parallel career on the Italian stage.Biography
Alessandro Preziosi was born in Naples on 19 April 1973, the son of two lawyers.
He followed the family path at first. After a classical high-school education, Preziosi earned a law degree with the highest honors from the University of Naples Federico II in 1998, and went on to work as a teaching assistant in tax law at the University of Salerno.
Acting pulled him away before the law career ever really began.
He had already made his stage debut in 1994, in an Italian staging of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap.
In 1996, at twenty-three, Preziosi appeared on Rai 1 under the stage name "Axel Preziosi," winning a spot on Paolo Bonolis's variety show Beato tra le donne.
He trained properly afterward, at Milan's Accademia dei Filodrammatici, where the director Antonio Calenda noticed him and cast him as Laertes in a staging of Hamlet.
In 2001, Preziosi returned to the stage in a trilogy of Aeschylus plays under Calenda's direction: Agamennone, Coefore, and Eumenidi.
In the mid-1990s, Preziosi had a relationship with the actress Rossella Zito; their son, Andrea Eduardo, was born in 1995.
Television work followed on the soap opera Vivere and the miniseries Una donna per amico 2, but it was 2002 that changed everything: Preziosi was cast as Count Fabrizio Ristori in Elisa di Rivombrosa, a thirteen-episode costume drama about a doomed love between a nobleman and his household's lady-in-waiting, played by Vittoria Puccini.
Dressed in the tightly buttoned frock coats and cravats of Napoleonic-era Piedmont, Preziosi became, almost overnight, the face of Italian period romance.
Elisa di Rivombrosa aired across 2003 and 2005 and turned into a genuine cult hit; Preziosi won a Telegatto for it as the year's male television personality.
Preziosi and Puccini fell in love on set. Their daughter, Elena, was born in 2006. The relationship, one of the most closely watched in Italian celebrity gossip at the time, ended in 2010 amid reports of infidelity — a breakup Preziosi has since called the most painful of his life.
He also had a brief detour into music in these years, writing the ballads for Pupi Avati's film La seconda notte di nozze (2005) and performing live at Sanremo's Teatro Ariston, singing "Che mistero è" alongside the jazz musicians Nicky Nicolai and Stefano Di Battista.
Film roles followed steadily: I Viceré (2007), La masseria delle allodole (2007), and Il sangue dei vinti (2008).
The film I Viceré (2007) is based on the novel I Viceré written byItalian Writer Federico de Roberto (Napoli, 16 gennaio 1861 – Catania, 26 luglio 1927). It was the story about Uzeda, a Sicilian princely family in 19th century Sicily faithful to the Bourbon kings, begins to lose its power, with the Unification of Italy in 1861 and the rise to power of Giuseppe Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele II).In 2007 Italian director Roberto Faenza adapted it into a historical film with the same title, and Alessandro Preziosi played the principle character Consalvo.
On television, Il commissario De Luca (2008) won him the Efebo d'Argento, and Sant'Agostino (2010) brought both the Ciak d'Oro for "Stile d'Attore" and a Best Actor award at the Roma Fiction Fest.
In 2010, Preziosi also won the Nastro d'Argento for his role in Ferzan Özpetek's Mine vaganti, playing one of several adult children whose secrets upend a traditional Southern Italian family over a single dinner.
In 2018, Preziosi joined the historical drama I Medici, playing the painter, architect, and biographer Giorgio Vasari — trading Napoleonic frock coats for Renaissance doublets in yet another handsomely costumed leading role.
His personal life stayed mostly out of the spotlight through the 2010s: a relationship with Greta Carandini in 2017, and, by 2021, occasional sightings with a woman named Costanza, about whom little was ever reported.
In 2023, Preziosi began a relationship with Delfina Delettrez Fendi, a jewelry designer and fourth-generation heir to the Fendi fashion house, who has run her own eponymous jewelry line — handmade in Rome by traditional goldsmiths, occasionally alongside 3D-printed forms — since 2007.
It closed a strangely small circle: Delfina's own former partner, the actor Claudio Santamaria, had once been involved with Vittoria Puccini herself.
Preziosi and Delettrez Fendi kept the relationship almost entirely private. Asked directly, in a May 2025 television interview, whether he was in love with her, Preziosi answered only, "In questo momento, non so che rispondere" ("Right now, I don't know how to answer that") — describing himself elsewhere in the same interview, with typical self-deprecation, as "bello e strafottente" ("handsome and cocky").
The following month, paparazzi photographed him kissing another woman on the island of Salina, shortly after he'd received the Premio Troisi at the Mare Festival. By the end of 2025, Delettrez Fendi had moved on to a new relationship of her own.
Preziosi has continued working steadily across television, appearing in Masantonio – Sezione Scomparsi (2021), La vita che volevi (2024), and Black Out (2025) — still, more than two decades after Fabrizio Ristori, one of Italian television's most reliably cast leading men.
