Alessandro Tersigni (Born 11 October 1979)
Biography of Alessandro Tersigni
Alessandro Tersigni was born in Rome on 11 October 1979. As a boy of just ten, he was accepted into the Schola Puerorum of the Sistine Chapel Choir, the Vatican's own boys' choir, and trained as a chorister for four years under the celebrated maestro Domenico Bartolucci — an education in performance about as far removed from Italian soap opera as it's possible to get.
Before acting, Tersigni worked for a time as a firefighter in Rome. Fame arrived by an unlikely route: in 2007 he entered the seventh season of Grande Fratello, Italy's Big Brother, and finished as runner-up. Inside the house he met a fellow contestant, Melita Toniolo, with whom he was in a relationship from 2007 to 2009.
Riding that sudden visibility into an actual career, Tersigni enrolled in a two-year acting course under director Francesca Viscardi. He made his stage debut in 2008, playing Jesus in the musical Maria di Nazareth at Rome's Teatro Tenda di Cinecittà.
Television followed quickly: a role in the sitcom 7 Vite that same year, then a part opposite Terence Hill in Don Matteo 7 (2009). His film debut came in 2010, with a brief cameo in Federico Moccia's Scusa ma ti voglio sposare. A far more substantial break followed the same year: the lead role in 5 (Cinque), directed by Francesco Maria Dominedò. That year he also joined the second season of Romanzo Criminale – La serie, directed by Stefano Sollima.
In 2010 he also met Maria Stefania Di Renzo, a dancer who had appeared a few years earlier on the talent show Amici di Maria De Filippi. He proposed to her on a beach in Termoli; days later she was called away for a five-year job in Marseille.
When she returned, they married on 9 July 2016. "Il matrimonio è stato il giorno più bello della mia vita" ("The wedding was the happiest day of my life"), he said. Their son, Filippo, was born the following year, and their daughter, Zoe, in February 2022.
By the time Il Paradiso delle Signore premiered on Rai 1 on 8 December 2015, Tersigni had already logged supporting roles in I Cesaroni, Un medico in famiglia, and Le tre rose di Eva.
None of it quite prepared audiences for Vittorio Conti — the ambitious, sharply dressed advertising man who becomes director of a grand Milanese department store, in a drama set amid the couture houses and rival fashion ateliers of 1950s and '60s Italy.
The role turned Tersigni into daytime television's best-known face of Italian style, with Conti spending nearly a decade maneuvering between glamorous rivals, ill-fated romances, and the business of selling haute couture to postwar Milan. Of his long run in the part, Tersigni has said simply: "Siamo cresciuti insieme" ("We grew up together").
After eight seasons, Tersigni left the soap in May 2024, sending Vittorio off to Amsterdam with his onscreen love, Matilde di Sant'Erasmo. He returned briefly for two episodes that October before stepping away again, explaining that it was time for a pause and a chance to build new characters rather than wear out an old one.
He has since appeared in the historical drama Cuori, and has left the door open to a return to Il Paradiso delle Signore on his own timeline. For nearly a decade, though, in Italian living rooms every weekday afternoon, Alessandro Tersigni was the closest thing daytime television had to a fashion-house patriarch — impeccably tailored, perpetually in crisis, and impossible to look away from.
