Ludovica Martino, the actress escaping the girl she taught Italy to love

Ludovica Martino

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	February 26, 1997 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Champion, Under the Riccione Sun, My Brother, My Sister
Awards	Mariangela Melato · Premio Nuovo Imaie, Nastri d'Argento 2024 · Premio Guglielmo Biraghi, Nastri d'Argento 2021 · Ciak d'Oro Protagonist of the Year 2021

Eva Brighi is not gone. She lives in seven seasons of SKAM Italia, in the muscle memory of Italian audiences who grew up watching her navigate first loves, group dynamics, and the specifically brutal social arithmetic of adolescence. But the actress who played her, Ludovica Martino, has been making other choices — and the distance between Eva Brighi and Marta, the postwar Calabrian woman she inhabited for Il mio posto è qui, is not a normal career arc. It is a deliberate argument.

Martino was born in Rome in 1997, the eldest of two children. Her academic trajectory had nothing obvious to do with acting: she enrolled at Sapienza University, graduating with honors in translating and interpreting, a discipline that requires inhabiting language the way an actor inhabits a character. By the time she joined the cast of the family drama Tutto può succedere in 2015 — she was eighteen — she had already trained at the Jenny Tamburi school and C.I.A.P.A., and spoke four languages: Italian, English, Spanish, and Russian.

The early television years were quiet accumulation. Fifty-five episodes of Tutto può succedere, a role in Che Dio ci aiuti, small credits in Don Matteo. Italian television’s way of testing someone before it trusts them. In 2018, she was cast as Eva Brighi in SKAM Italia, the Italian adaptation of the Norwegian teen drama that had already made a generation of Scandinavian teenagers feel understood. The Italian version did the same, and Martino — precise, physically undemonstrative in a medium that rewards expressiveness — became the emotional center of it.

SKAM Italia ran through multiple seasons from 2018 to 2024. Eva Brighi appears across several of them, which means Martino was embedded in the role long enough for it to become public shorthand for who she was. Netflix acquired the series internationally, which meant the Eva Brighi association followed her across markets. By 2020, she was also in Netflix’s Sotto il sole di Riccione and its 2022 sequel Sotto il sole di Amalfi — light romantic comedies set on the Italian coast, audience-tested and commercially reliable. The throughline was youth, energy, and recognizable relatability.

What the Eva Brighi years don’t explain is Il mio posto è qui (2024), directed by Daniela Porto and Cristiano Bortone. The film is set in postwar Calabria and follows Marta, a young woman in a rural village who is promised in marriage to a man she does not love, within a social system that will not accommodate her refusal. Martino arrived at the role having never stopped working since SKAM Italia — but nothing in the Eva Brighi years was preparation for this kind of submission-as-resistance. The performance required two weeks without washing her hair. It required disappearing into a silenced body. It won her the Mariangela Melato Award for Best Actress at the Bari International Film Festival and the Premio Nuovo Imaie at the Nastri d’Argento. Italian critics called it one of the best performances in Italian period drama in years. The reading of the pivot was simpler: she had cleared the frame.

Between the poles of SKAM Italia and Il mio posto è qui, her work ranged purposefully. My Brother, My Sister (2021) put her in a family-in-crisis drama. Lovely Boy (2021) placed her inside a story about addiction in Milan’s music scene. Luna Park (2021) returned her to television with a period setting. The four-episode arc in Carlo Verdone’s autobiographical comedy series Vita da Carlo (2023) confirmed what Italian directors were beginning to note: she was not a type. She was a tool with an expanding range of uses.

Martino rarely discusses personal life in interviews, which is a choice that serves her well. What she tends to discuss instead is method — how she reads scripts, what languages she listens to while preparing a role, how the translating-and-interpreting training permanently changed how she processes meaning. She speaks about character construction with the vocabulary of a linguist rather than a performer. The character as a foreign language that must be inhabited rather than translated: you do not explain it, you speak it until it becomes natural.

In late 2025, she played Laura Ceccarelli in Carosello in Love on Rai 1 — a young RAI secretary in the 1950s who falls in love with a disillusioned documentary-maker. The prime-time premiere drew 2.47 million viewers. Come fratelli followed in the same year. And a 2027 project, C14, has already been announced with Martino as Giorgia Giani — confirmation that the postwar pivot was not a detour but a direction.

The Eva Brighi years will not disappear. They are part of Italian television history now, archived in Netflix’s catalog and in the collective memory of a generation of Italian teenagers who watched SKAM Italia as if it were a mirror someone had finally pointed at them. What Martino seems to be building alongside that legacy is a film career that does not require the same audience. Il mio posto è qui established that she can carry a period drama about structural oppression without sentimentalizing it. C14 will tell us whether directors have drawn the same conclusion.