ROME — The man who taught the world to laugh at violence has finally broken six decades of silence about the partner who made him a legend, and the truth he revealed is more extraordinary than any script they ever shared.

Terence Hill, now 87 years old, sat down for an emotional retrospective on the life of Bud Spencer, the towering Neapolitan giant who died in 2016. For nearly half a century, the world believed the two men were merely professional colleagues who tolerated each other for the cameras. Hill’s account shatters that myth, painting a portrait of a shy, polymathic titan whose real life outshone every fictional brawl he ever staged.

“We were two simple people,” Hill said, his voice carrying the weight of decades. “Every time we met to start a new picture, it felt like going back to school together.”

The story begins not on a film set, but in the bombed-out streets of wartime Naples. Carlo Pedersoli, the man who would become Bud Spencer, was born October 31, 1929, into a family of factory owners. The Second World War landed directly on top of them.

A direct hit wiped out the Pedersoli factory overnight, forcing the family to flee to Rome, where they sold their heirloom linens one piece at a time just to survive.

Carlo was 10 when the war began and 15 when it ended. Those years forged something remarkable. By 15, he was beating grown men in swimming competitions.

His school rugby team won a national title. He took up amateur heavyweight boxing and, by his own account, never lost a single fight.

His swimming career was no hobby. On September 19, 1950, at a pool in Saluzzo, the 20-year-old touched the wall in 59. 5 seconds in the 100-meter freestyle.

He had just become the first Italian in history to swim that distance in under a minute. He competed at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, reaching the semifinals, and did it again in Melbourne four years later.

Then came water polo. He won the Italian championship with Lazio in 1954 and took gold with the national team at the 1955 Mediterranean Games in Barcelona. Decades later, his son Giuseppe revealed a truth that surprised many fans: his father treasured those sporting years far more than any film.

“The Olympics,” Giuseppe said, “may have been the happiest time of his entire life.”

Hill has his own memory of that era. A teenage Mario Girotti — Hill’s real name — first laid eyes on Carlo Pedersoli at a swimming pool. A national champion standing at the edge of the water, calmly smoking one cigarette after another.

Neither boy could have guessed what was coming.

Most retired athletes drift toward coaching or television. Pedersoli went another way entirely. At just 17, he had enrolled at Sapienza University in Rome to study chemistry.

When his family immigrated to Brazil in 1947, he went along. He worked at the Italian consulate and fell in love with Brazilian music, a passion that stayed with him for life.

Back in Italy around 1948, he switched from chemistry to law for a very practical reason: law school left him more time to train in the pool. He eventually earned his law degree. Along the way, he picked up at least six languages, including Italian with a thick Neapolitan accent, Portuguese, Spanish, German, English, and French.

Then, after his competitive career ended in 1957, he made a choice that baffled everyone who knew him. He moved to Venezuela for three years to work as a foreman building a stretch of the Pan-American Highway. An Olympian and national hero laying road in the South American heat.

When people asked him why, his answer was disarmingly simple: he wanted to find out whether he was a brave man or a coward.

In 1960, Carlo married Maria Amato. Her father was Giuseppe Amato, one of the most powerful film producers in Italy, whose credits included Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.” Through that family connection, Carlo stepped into the music business.

Between 1960 and 1964, he worked with RCA Records, writing and producing Neapolitan songs and pop tunes.

Here is a detail that sounds made up but has been repeated in multiple accounts. One day, a young man from the small town of Poggio a Caiano came in to audition with songs Carlo thought were simply terrible. He sent him away.

That young man was Domenico Modugno, who would go on to win the Sanremo Festival and conquer the world with “Volare,” one of the most famous Italian songs ever recorded.

After his father-in-law died in 1964, Carlo moved on again, this time producing documentaries for RAI, Italy’s national broadcaster. He was 35 — swimmer, lawyer, road builder, songwriter, television producer. Acting still wasn’t anywhere on his list.

It would take one more accident to put it there.

In 1967, director Giuseppe Colizzi was casting a spaghetti western and needed someone who looked truly imposing. Somebody pointed him toward the giant swimmer. Carlo was 38, had no training, and agreed mostly for fun.

But there was a catch: Italian names were considered poison at the international box office. So he chose two of his favorite things — his favorite beer, Budweiser, and his favorite actor, Spencer Tracy. Bud Spencer was born.

Hill’s own name has a story just as casual. At the end of that first western, the producers handed him a list of about 20 names and gave him 24 hours to pick one. He liked the sound of Terence Hill and took it.

He was so sure it was temporary that he had a clause written into his contract saying he would go back to his real name on the next film. Then the picture became a worldwide success, and the producers begged him to forget that clause. He did.

That first film, “God Forgives… I Don’t,” almost never brought the two men together. The actor originally cast opposite Spencer broke his foot. Hill had spent the previous three years working in Germany, so Italian producers barely knew his face.

He flew to Madrid and was driven through the night to reach the set in the desert.

Funny enough, both men had already appeared as uncredited extras in the 1959 epic “Hannibal” without ever meeting. Now thrown together by a broken bone, they discovered a chemistry neither could explain. Hill was quick, blue-eyed, and boyish.

Spencer was huge, slow, and grumpy — like a bear woken too early. Scenes that usually took several takes worked the first time.

In 1970, a cinematographer named Enzo Barboni had written a comedy western and was walking it around every production office in Rome. Hill remembers how it went. Producers would open the script and say, “What is all this dialogue?

No action. Nobody gets killed.” And they would pass.

When it finally came to Hill and Spencer, they were nervous too. But they liked the characters.

The film was “They Call Me Trinity.” Hill played Trinity, a lazy, grinning drifter who happens to be the fastest gun in the West. Spencer played his brother Bambino, a horse thief who speaks mostly in grunts and slaps.

It became the most successful Italian film of its day, beating even “La Dolce Vita” at the Italian box office. The 1971 sequel, “Trinity Is Still My Name,” sold about 14. 5 million tickets in Italy alone.

What made the Trinity films so different was their heart. Spaghetti westerns had been all squinting gunmen and grim violence. Hill and Spencer threw that out the window.

Their fights were slapstick ballets. Nobody died. Nobody bled.

And audiences laughed until they cried. Hill believes the real inspiration was not other westerns at all, but the old American comedies — Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy.

Spencer had his own theory. He told French television that he could never play the villain because the audience would be finished with him. The trick, he explained, was to play his character a little slow, so the audience always figured things out a step before he did.

After Trinity, mothers would stop Hill on the street and beg him to keep making movies they could take their children to. He listened. Over the years, the pair made 17 or 18 films together, ending with “Troublemakers” in 1994.

Anyone else would have been satisfied with Olympic medals and movie fame. Bud Spencer could not sit still. After filming “All the Way Boys” in 1972, he fell so hard for flying that he earned his commercial pilot’s license and his helicopter license.

He logged more than 2,000 hours in airplanes and around 500 in helicopters. He called flying the greatest passion of his life — bigger than swimming, bigger than movies.

On October 29, 1981, he founded his own airline, Mistral Air. It started out carrying mail and later flew passengers, including Catholic pilgrims bound for Lourdes, Fatima, and other holy sites. He eventually sold the company, and after several changes of ownership, it became part of Poste Italiane, the national postal service.

In other words, the airline Bud Spencer started now helps deliver Italy’s mail.

He also held patents on a string of inventions. Among them: a walking stick that unfolds into a little table and chair, and an early idea for an electric car that turned out too heavy to be practical. Years later, watching electric cars take over the roads, he noted with some satisfaction that he had been right all along.

During one shoot in America, he bought a dirt airstrip on impulse, planning to build airplanes there. Two FBI agents showed up almost immediately, wondering what a giant Italian really wanted with a private runway.

Here is perhaps the strangest chapter of all. In Germany, Bud Spencer wasn’t just famous — he was a phenomenon. Part of the reason was the dubbing.

The German voice team led by Rainer Brandt didn’t just translate the dialogue; they rewrote it, adding jokes and wordplay that made the German versions even funnier than the originals. Spencer’s name even turned into German slang for giving a gang of bad guys a good comical thrashing.

When the town of Schwäbisch Gmünd asked residents to name a new tunnel, “Bud Spencer Tunnel” won the vote. The town council compromised and named the public swimming pool after him in 2011, and he came in person to the very place where he had won a swimming race some 60 years before. A museum in his honor later opened in Berlin, and a bronze statue was unveiled in Budapest in 2017.

Away from the cameras, the distance between Bud Spencer and Carlo Pedersoli was enormous. His son Giuseppe described him as the least strict father in the world. In his whole life, he struck his son exactly once — a single slap on the leg.

He kept a childlike sense of wonder until the very end. He once handed Giuseppe a pen that could write upside down and explained with complete seriousness that astronauts used it.

Spencer was badly nearsighted. He took off his thick glasses before every take, which means he could barely see during his own legendary brawls, and he still refused a stunt double. His appetite was legendary too.

“Give him 2 kilos of pasta,” Giuseppe said, “and he would finish it.”

Hill has a favorite story about that. Spencer liked to tell people that Hill was always delighted to be invited for pasta in Rome because Hill’s wife wouldn’t let him eat noodles at home so he wouldn’t get fat. In the early days, they even shared a trailer and ate every meal together.

One day, Hill recalls, his big friend turned to him and said, “I won’t tell anyone, but you eat more than I do.”

Even so, the two shy men rarely socialized. Giuseppe guessed they went out to dinner maybe three times in their lives. Hill lived in America, and every so often he would drop by for Maria’s spaghetti.

On camera, though, something came alive between them — a harmony that appeared from nowhere and vanished the moment the director called cut.

They even dreamed of one more great project: a version of “Don Quixote.” Hill explained on French television that there were two big problems. First, finding a good script for such a classic.

Second, finding a horse strong enough to carry his friend.

Spencer married Maria Amato in 1960, and they stayed together for 56 years. They had three children: Giuseppe, Cristiana, and Diamante. He wrote several books of his own, including an autobiography that became a bestseller in Germany.

In 2005, he even ran for regional office. His announcement was pure Bud Spencer: in his life, he said, he had done everything. There were only three things he had never been — a ballet dancer, a jockey, and a politician.

Since the first two were out of the question, he would throw himself into politics. He lost.

On June 27, 2016, Carlo Pedersoli died in Rome at the age of 86. His last word was “Grazie” — thank you.

Terence Hill’s memory of that day is one he has shared with great emotion. He was in the desert of Almería in Spain, scouting a location for a new film of his own. The spot they found was good, but he wanted to see more, so they drove deeper into the desert.

Then his phone rang. It was Giuseppe telling him his father was gone.

Hill was standing in the very place where the two of them had first met 49 years earlier. In that moment, he was truly sad. But not long after, he said, a great calm came over him because he realized that nothing happens by chance.

A few days later, at the funeral in Rome’s Church of the Artists, as the coffin was carried out, the crowd outside spontaneously began singing a theme song from one of his films. The man who always insisted he was not an actor, only a character, had made a whole continent sing.

A boy who lost everything in the war. A record-breaking swimmer. A lawyer.

A road builder. A songwriter. A pilot.

An inventor. And a gentle giant who through it all made three generations laugh. Hill’s final word on his partner of nearly five decades carries the weight of a lifetime: “Nothing happens by chance.”