Known to many as the food-loving TV personality who has co-produced, co-created and co-written her television shows Made in Italy with Silvia Colloca, Silvia’s Italian Table and Cook like an Italian, Milan-born, Silvia Colloca’s diverse range of interests and professional expertise extend to acting, singing and as author of several best-selling books, the latest of which, The Italian Home Cook was published in August this year by Pan Macmillan.
A professional opera singer, Silvia Colloca trained at Milan’s Scuola Musicale and has performed in some of Europe’s most beautiful theatres, including The London Palladium, Berlin’s Tempodrom and Milan’s Teatro Nazionale. She performed the mezzo-soprano role of Orfeo (in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice) in 2015 in Sydney, and in Lindy Hume’s re-imagining of the opera Snow White (Kamalova, Miller) for Opera Queensland in 2016. Her acting credits include roles in the Malthouse Theatre production of Lorca’s Blood Wedding and Griffin Theatre’s The Bull, the Moon and the Coronet of Stars – during both productions cooking for cast mates after the shows was mandatory!
Her most recent film appearance is as Maria in Little Tornadoes (2022). Silvia also appeared as a series regular in Foxtel’s crime drama The Twelve, which finished airing in August 2022.
Signed to Decca (Australia) in 2022, she now creates her first-ever recording. Appropriately titled Sing like an Italian, Silvia sings four songs on the album. These include an opera aria by Gluck, a Neapolitan song (Non ti scordar di me), a Christmas lullaby which Silvia has translated into Italian (Tranquillo, bambino – with harpist Marshall McGuire) and the evergreen Con te partirò (‘Time to say Goodbye’). Her pianist is Van-Anh Nguyen, also a Decca Australia artist. The album goes on to embrace Silvia’s personal selection of some of her favourite opera aria and song performances by such artists as Andrea Bocelli, Luciano Pavarotti, Cecilia Bartoli, Patrizio Buanne, Vittorio Grigolo, Freddie De Tomasso, and others.
Singing has always been in Silvia’s veins. Her parents nicknamed her Cri-Cri (cricket) because she was “endlessly serenading them with my chirping”. Her love for the classical voice came later in life, around the age of 21. Abandoning both a Science of Education degree as well as lead-singing in rock bands, she turned to classical music and has honed that skill over more than two decades.
