Luisa Gibellini was married to the Italian football manager Carlo Ancelotti for 25 years. She died in 2021. Three years later, her two children opened a guesthouse on the family’s old land outside Parma. They have said it was built around something their mother had always wanted.
Ancelotti now manages Brazil’s national team, and his name has been in the headlines through the 2026 World Cup. Her own life gets far less attention, and she rarely gets mentioned without his name attached to hers. She was a goalkeeper, a softball catcher, and in her forties, a licensed helicopter pilot.
| Born | 1958, Medesano, Parma province |
| Died | 24 May 2021, Reggio Emilia, aged 63 |
| Married | Carlo Ancelotti, 1983, divorced 2010 |
| Children | Davide Ancelotti, Katia Ancelotti |
Table of Contents
Growing up in Medesano
Gibellini grew up in Medesano, a small town in the province of Parma, and knew Ancelotti from a young age. According to the Gazzetta di Parma, her local paper, she played as a goalkeeper for a string of amateur football clubs, at a time when organised women’s football barely existed in the region, and also played softball as a catcher. She took up tennis too, a sport Ancelotti later played himself.
Marrying into football
She married Ancelotti in 1983, while he was playing for Roma. Once his career moved into coaching, the family settled in Felegara, a hamlet inside Medesano, and stayed there no matter which city his job took him to next.
The real strain came from the commute. Getting from Emilia Romagna to wherever he was working, and back again, left little time for the family in the evenings. At 41, in 1999, Gibellini earned a helicopter pilot’s licence in Reggio Emilia, around the time Ancelotti took charge at Juventus, and began flying him to training in Turin herself, so he could be home most nights instead of on the road.
One flight is particularly well documented. On 14 May 2000, Juventus travelled to Perugia needing a win to stay in the Serie A title race. A storm delayed kickoff long enough that Lazio finished their own match first and had already started celebrating before Juventus even got underway. Juventus could only draw, and the title went to Lazio on the final day of the season. Gibellini flew Ancelotti home from Perugia that night. Once he moved to AC Milan the following year, she began making the same kind of flight to Milanello, the club’s training ground, instead of Turin. The Spanish paper Marca later summed her up simply:
“The love of his life, a woman so amazing that she could even fly helicopters.”
How long the marriage really lasted
Most quick references online list the marriage as ending in 2008. Italian papers including Il Fatto Quotidiano and Fanpage date the couple’s actual separation to that year. The Gazzetta di Parma, however, records the divorce itself as final two years later, in 2010, through the Tribunale di Parma, the Parma courthouse.
Ancelotti has said very little about the marriage in public. In an old interview with the Italian magazine Novella 2000, he called her the one real love story of his youth, and said he married young.
Gibellini’s death in 2021
Gibellini spent her final years dealing with what the Gazzetta di Parma’s obituary called a serious degenerative illness. Neither her family nor the wider Italian press ever named the specific condition.
Ancelotti was managing Everton when her health declined sharply. On 23 May 2021, his team were beaten five goals to nil by Manchester City on the final day of the Premier League season. Soon after the final whistle, he learned her condition had turned, and flew back to Italy that night. Gibellini died the next day, 24 May 2021, in hospital in Reggio Emilia. She was 63.
Parma’s football supporters sent public condolences to the family. So did Everton’s own fan channel.
What her children are doing now
Katia Ancelotti runs a clothing label called Debate Clothing from Madrid, and owns Tenuta Il Poggio. She was born in Rome in 1984, while her father was still playing for Roma, and briefly tried singing on the Italian talent show Amici in 2004. EssentiallySports reports that she later worked for Chelsea TV, during her father’s time in England. According to Il Gazzettino, she has been married since 2014 to the nutritionist Beniamino Fulco, who has worked alongside Carlo on his coaching staff, and the couple have three children.
Her brother, Davide, followed a different path. Born in Parma in 1989, he had a short playing career at AC Milan before moving into coaching, and spent more than a decade on his father’s staff at clubs including Real Madrid, Napoli and Everton. He took his first head coaching job at Botafogo in Brazil in 2025, and is now in charge of Lille in France.
Ancelotti led Brazil into the 2026 World Cup, where Norway eliminated them in the round of 16, Brazil’s earliest exit from the tournament in decades. The federation kept him on regardless, with a contract reportedly running through 2030. Katia posted about it in July, thanking Brazilian fans for their support through a difficult tournament, on the same account where she also runs Debate Clothing and Tenuta Il Poggio.
Most of what’s public about the family still centres on Carlo, and increasingly on Davide’s own coaching career. Tenuta Il Poggio is different. Katia and Davide built it themselves, years after their mother died, and have said plainly that they did it to keep her memory alive.
