My name is Alice, but I do not come from Wonderland.
I am a very precocious pianist from Sicily, and the protagonist of “Tempo Rubato – Stolen Time”: a screenplay about wonderful places, unconditional love and, of course, music.
My father, Norman, a young English biologist, moved to Sicily to marry my mother, Marion, who is a piano teacher. I was conceived soon after an accident occurred to my father in his lab.
The author of my story insists in saying that I am an incredibly beautiful girl and a remarkably good pianist.

The first time I sat in front of a piano, I felt the keys talking to me and telling me how to play them. My mother taught me to read music but wouldn’t let me go to a normal school. I learned to read and write, at home from my Aunt, Jean: an English literature teacher and a Shakespeare lover. That type of love is contagious so I too fell in love with Shakespeare, and learned most of it by heart.

My nanny, Nunzia, is a fifty-year-old Sicilian countrywoman who speaks no Italian. I think of her as my second mother!
During the celebration of my second birthday, I realized that I was not like any other child: I was two, but looked ten years old!

I age very quickly. I do not have friends and I cannot travel by plane: my I.D., at the security checks, would make me a public freak in no time at all.
For most of my young life, I spent my days mostly at home playing my piano, hours on end, reading Shakespeare, watching love films, and eating the delicious dishes Nunzia prepared for me. I needed a lot of calories then: every year of my life I aged five years!
My life is a seesaw as I vacillate between the age of my body and the age of my birth certificate. I play the piano as very few other pianists do but, sometimes, I want to sleep with my parents in their big bed. I can recite most of Shakespeare by heart but, occasionally, I want to be fed with a bottle, or be read a fairy tale to go to sleep.
My father does not cease searching for a cure for my abnormality in his laboratory, but my mother stops him from experimenting the results of his findings on me. One day, during a visit to his lab, I secretly took a big gulp of a substance that dripped out of a distiller, thinking that substance could slow down my aging process. I was four years old, and looked twenty years old. This experiment almost killed me!

While I was in hospital, it suddenly dawned on me that music was the only cure that could help me suspend time. And music did indeed suspend time for me. In the next six years I did not age at all, played in the most important Italian theaters and continued to look like I was twenty years old.
One day, after a successful concert at Greek Theatre in Taormina, I met an Englishman named William, my heart tumbled and I understood what love was all about!
My encounter with William marked the remaining part of my life, but you’ll have to wait for the film to know the rest of my story.
Yours, Alice