From Olympic mats to centre stage: Giulia Staccioli tells all in 'Aliena'
An autobiography three decades in the making arrived in Italian bookshops on 25 September 2026. Giulia Staccioli, the former rhythmic gymnast who represented Italy at two Olympic finals before founding Kataklò Athletic Dance Theatre, has published Aliena through Maretti Editore. The title borrows from the show with which her company marked its thirtieth anniversary, but it also names what Staccioli says she has felt all her life: a sense of being out of place, even in a crowd.
A competitive career, silenced abuses
Staccioli trained and competed from 1976 until her retirement in 1990. She won the Italian national championship three times and reached two Olympic finals — seventh place in the all-around at Los Angeles in 1984, and a second appearance at Seoul in 1988, where she met her future husband, Italy national volleyball player Andrea Zorzi.
The book also confronts darker chapters. Staccioli writes of molestie — abuses — she suffered in sport, which she kept silent for years out of fear she would not be believed. She also describes the food restrictions she endured during training. The environment, she writes, was not always capable of protecting young athletes.
From New York to a new language of movement
After retiring from competition, Staccioli moved to New York. She studied at the Alvin Ailey studios and worked for three years with the company Momix, led by Moses Pendleton, touring internationally. That experience, she has explained, showed her what artistic potential a gymnast could have. The foundation remained body awareness, but deployed in service of movement rather than pure acrobatics.
In 1995, she founded Kataklò Athletic Dance Theatre. The name comes from ancient Greek and means "I dance by bending and contorting myself." The company fuses gymnastics and dance, sport and art.
A public presentation in Milan
The official presentation of Aliena takes place on 30 September 2026 at 18:30 in the Foyer del Teatro Carcano in Milan, where Staccioli will be in conversation with Francesca Interlenghi, who also edited the volume. The memoir covers not only Staccioli's professional path but also a complex family life, a secret discovered at age forty-five, maternity marked by guilt and emancipation, and the illness and loss of her parents.
The book is described by the publisher as an unfiltered account of falls and recoveries — one that transforms a lifelong feeling of never being in the right place into a source of creative strength.
