Gabriele Bonci: from cocaine addiction to rebirth

Gabriele Bonci: from cocaine addiction to rebirth
Gabriele Bonci: from cocaine addiction to rebirth

The chef and pizza maker Gabriele Bonci confides for the microphones of Luca Casadei, recounting his difficult past and his path of rebirth.

Luca Casadei’s interview with Gabriele Bonci

In Luca Casadei’s podcast, One More Time, the famous Roman chef and pizza maker Gabriele Bonci also passed; the man, who initially became famous for his participation in the Rai cooking show La prova del Cuoco, then won the hearts of the public by hosting the program Pizza Hero – The challenge of the ovens and through his culinary creations produced and sold within the his chain of pizza by the slice. In the interview, however, we don’t talk (only) about food, but much more: childhood spent in Rome until depression and attempted suicide, one’s weaknesses and addictions and, finally, one’s rebirth.

Gabriele Bonci and cocaine addiction

His inner demons, however, have also expressed themselves with other tools, which are difficult to fight. Demons that he had already mentioned during one of the episodes dedicated to Italian chefs of the last season of the Netflix program Chef’s Table, when Gabriele Bonci spoke of the unexpected growth in popularity that has invested him and how he was unfortunately sucked into drugs, especially from cocaine. An addiction from which, however, he came out: “Let me be very clear, I haven’t used anything for a year and three months. I will fight that substance to the death. For me and for others. It’s devastating, sadly he stays close to you when you have an addiction. You have it close as a thought. It’s your demon, your mistake, and it needs to be kept out.”

The relationship with death

Among the most intimate revelations he grants to the interviewer is the one about his relationship with death. “Unfortunately I’m not afraid of death, unfortunately I also played a lot with death,” said Gabriele Bonci. “In 2017 I had a heart attack, I have two heart stents and when I was sick, with depression… I tried, in short, to end it somehow. I ate sleeping pills and went to sleep on a window ledge on the ninth floor. Thanking God in the morning I was still on that ledge, but if I turned around a little, I would have made nine floors. And there it scared me a bit. Now I’m really good, I’m centered ”, he assures, in the last minutes of the episode.

The rebirth: living “like a butterfly”

Finally, with respect to his path of rebirth, he explains to Luca Casadei: “I’m fine. I have always asked God for ‘melee and torment’, I have never asked for success. Today I am very well because I am in the fray and in torment”. “The butterfly is the most beautiful thing in the world, they all come from great pain. And I want to become a butterfly and therefore I have to suffer. I am happy with my pain. I want to become a butterfly to live one day only well”.