Ilary Blasi, the quiz-show Letterina who turned the end of her marriage to Totti into a Netflix hit

Ilary Blasi

Photo: Davide Ripamonte / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 28, 1981 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Television presenter and showgirl
Known for	My Name Is Francesco Totti, Big, Ilary Blasi: The One and Only

In November 2023 Netflix released an 80-minute film in which a woman sits in front of a camera and explains, in her own Roman accent, how her twenty-year relationship with the most famous footballer in the city came apart. Within a day Unica was the most watched film on Netflix in Italy. Within three days it had logged 1.9 million views and ranked sixth among the platform’s non-English films worldwide. The woman was Ilary Blasi, and the title was a private joke that the whole country understood: in March 2002 Francesco Totti had scored in the Rome derby and lifted his shirt to show a T-shirt that read “6 unica”, you are the only one.

Blasi, born in Rome on 28 April 1981, had spent most of her life on Italian screens by then. She started in commercials before she could read, became famous as a showgirl on a Canale 5 quiz, co-hosted the Sanremo Festival at 24, anchored Le Iene for more than a decade and launched Grande Fratello VIP. What changed after 2022 was the balance of power over her own story. For years the tabloids had written it for her. With Unica, a book and a second Netflix series, she began writing it herself.

A child of Roman advertising

Her screen life began in 1984, when she was three, in a family advert for Olio Cuore alongside the actress Mariangela Melato. A friend of the family who ran an advertising agency then told her mother that a client needed a blonde little girl with blue eyes for a panettone spot. She got the job, and a string of others followed: Cicciobello dolls, Renault, FIAT, Barilla, Findus and more.

At five she made her big-screen debut with a small part in Da grande, the 1987 comedy directed by Franco Amurri, where the end credits spelled her name in English as “Hilary Blasi”. She also appeared in television films by three veterans of Italian cinema: Il vizio di vivere by Dino Risi, La dolce casa degli orrori by Lucio Fulci and David e David by Giorgio Capitani, as well as the feature Fiori di zucca by Stefano Pomilia. None of it made her famous, but it taught her early how a set works and how long a working day in front of a camera can be.

From Miss Italia to the Letterine

The late 1990s were years of auditions. Blasi posed for the photo-romance magazines of the publisher Lancio, acted in a comedy at Rome’s Teatro Testaccio and, at 17, competed in Miss Italia 1998 wearing the Miss Cinema Lazio sash. In 1999 she had a small part in the cast of Scherzi a parte. Then came two years of castings that went nowhere.

The break came through the preserale quiz Passaparola, hosted by Gerry Scotti on Canale 5. On 10 September 2001 she debuted as one of the “Letterine”, the group of young women who opened the show and handed out the letters of the alphabet game, alongside Silvia Toffanin, Daniela Bello and others. She stayed for two seasons. It was a decorative role on paper, but the programme drew a large early-evening audience, and the Roman girl with the quick tongue stood out.

In June 2003 she moved to public television. She co-hosted the summer edition of Top of the Pops on Rai 2 with the presenter Alvin, then joined Fabio Fazio on Che tempo che fa on Rai 3, introducing reporters and guests and reading the weather at the end of each episode. From 2004 she also fronted the music show CD: Live, again with Alvin. On 9 April 2005, as a guest on Fazio’s programme, she announced live that she was pregnant; Totti confirmed it by phone during the broadcast.

The Totti years

Blasi and Totti married on 19 June 2005 in Rome. The ceremony was broadcast live by Sky, and the proceeds from the TV rights went to charity. Their son Cristian was born on 6 November 2005, their daughter Chanel on 13 May 2007 and their daughter Isabel on 10 March 2016. For almost two decades they were the most photographed couple in Italy, a football captain and a television host who appeared together in Vodafone commercials, in campaigns for the Vicenza jeweller Comete and even in the Italian dub of an episode of The Simpsons in 2006.

Her own career grew in parallel. In 2006 she co-hosted the Sanremo Festival with Giorgio Panariello and Victoria Cabello and presented Festivalbar with Mago Forest and Cristina Chiabotto. From 15 January 2007 she was the face of Le Iene on Italia 1, a mix of investigative stunts and satire, where she worked opposite a long list of partners: the comic duo Luca and Paolo, Fabio De Luigi, Luca Argentero, Enrico Brignano, Alessandro Gassmann and Teo Mammucari. She stayed, with breaks for maternity, until May 2018.

In 2016 she opened a second front with the first edition of Grande Fratello VIP, the celebrity version of Big Brother on Canale 5. She hosted the first three editions, then in 2018 presented the World Cup variety show Balalaika with Nicola Savino and Belén Rodríguez and the Summer Festival, and in 2019 the games show Eurogames. In 2021 Mediaset gave her L’isola dei famosi, replacing Alessia Marcuzzi, and she led it for three seasons. Not everything worked: the talent show Star in the Star closed after five of its seven planned episodes.

The separation and “Unica”

On 11 July 2022, after seventeen years of marriage, Blasi and Totti announced their separation. What followed played out in court and in the press: disputes over Totti’s Rolex watches and Blasi’s designer handbags, and over the causes of the break. Each side gave its version in interviews.

Blasi’s answer was Unica, released on Netflix on 24 November 2023. Framed as a long interview, it went through the end of the marriage stage by stage and included the stories of the missing watches and bags that Italian gossip pages had been chasing for months. She said she had been among the last to learn of her husband’s new relationship, which she described as common knowledge in Rome. Critics split between those who saw a sharp act of self-defence and those who saw television-grade revenge, but the audience figures settled the commercial question.

In January 2024 Mondadori published her memoir Che stupida. La mia verità, a 228-page account of the same years. A year later, on 9 January 2025, Netflix released Ilary, a five-episode docuseries produced by Banijay Italia and directed by Tommaso Deboni, which followed her daily life, her work and her relationship with the German entrepreneur Bastian Müller, with appearances by Michelle Hunziker, Nicola Savino and Federica Sciarelli.

The story kept producing new chapters. In October 2025, in an interview with Prime Video Sport, Totti said that the “6 unica” T-shirt of 2002 had been meant for Roma’s Curva Sud, not for her. Blasi replied with pointed messages on social media. The Rome civil court made the divorce final from 6 July 2026, reducing Totti’s monthly child support from 12,500 to 10,900 euros. A separate hearing on which of the two was responsible for the breakdown of the marriage was set for October 2026.

A flop, then a comeback

Her television career did not simply ride the publicity. In 2024 Mediaset did not reconfirm her for L’isola dei famosi, and she moved to the summer music show Battiti Live with her old partner Alvin. In April 2025 she launched The Couple, the Italian version of the Spanish format Gran Hermano DUO, on Canale 5. It opened with 2.2 million viewers, then fell every week, dropping below one million and a 7.7 percent share. The network closed it on 11 May after five of the eight planned episodes. Several reviews spared the host and blamed the format.

The recovery came through the programme she had launched a decade earlier. In March 2026 Canale 5 brought her back to Grande Fratello VIP, almost eight years after her last edition, taking over from Alfonso Signorini. After an uneven start, the audience grew. The finale drew 2.44 million viewers and a 23.13 percent share, the best figure of the season, and the network extended the run. Canale 5 director Giancarlo Scheri credited her “unique and ironic style”. On 17 September 2026 a new edition started, with Cesara Buonamici and Selvaggia Lucarelli as commentators beside her.

Style and public image

Blasi’s appeal on television has always rested on the same things: a Roman directness that does not bother to sound polished, a readiness to laugh at herself and speed in live broadcasts. Those qualities made her an ideal foil for comedians on Le Iene and a natural referee in the chaos of reality shows. Off screen, she has been a constant presence on magazine covers, from GQ and Vanity Fair to the weekly gossip titles, and a long-running face in advertising for brands such as Vodafone, Stroili and Vogue Eyewear. In 2003 she even designed a collection for the British label Miss Criminal.

What the last few years added was authorship. The child who was hired for her blonde hair and the Letterina who handed out letters on a quiz became, in her forties, the author of her own narrative, and a Netflix success in a genre that usually belongs to athletes and rock stars.

Personal life

Blasi has three children with Totti: Cristian, Chanel and Isabel. Her relationship with Bastian Müller, a German entrepreneur, became public after the separation and was followed on camera in the Netflix series. The couple married on the night of 13 September 2026 at Villa Cimbrone in Ravello, on the Amalfi Coast, with about fifty guests; to avoid photographers, the civil signing took place at Ravello’s town hall after midnight. Her sister Melory was one of her witnesses. Four days later she was back on Canale 5, opening the new season of Grande Fratello VIP.

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