She was born in Turin in 1967. Her mother was a concert pianist and her father a composer and heir to the CEAT tyre fortune.
Her older sister is the Italian actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi.
In the early 1970s, when Red-Brigade militants threatened to kidnap Italy's rich and famous, the family relocated to France.
While still in her teens, Carla Bruni began modelling for top fashion houses.
By 1990, she was among the world's highest-paid models.
She went on to date a string of rock stars, actors and sundry glitterati.
Her list of former lovers is said to include Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Kevin Costner, Vincent Perez, Donald Trump and former French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius.
She told Le Figaro Madame magazine last year that she became easily "bored with monogamy", adding: "Love lasts a long time, but burning desire - two to three weeks."
Femme fatale?
In 2001, while living with the French writer Jean-Paul Enthoven, Bruni began an affair with his son Raphael - a budding philosopher who was 10 years her junior.
The affair broke the younger Enthoven's marriage with another scion of the French intelligentsia Justine Levy, daughter of the even more famous philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy.
Ms Levy's revenge took a literary form. In 2004 she published a successful novel, entitled Nothing Serious, about a young woman whose husband is stolen by a brazen femme fatale with "a Terminator smile".
RotterI didn't know that glitterati is a film made in 2004; this is according to Yahoo. Does this mean she particpated in many films?
No, Carla Bruni is a model who becomes a singer. Thank heaven she isn't an actress 'cause we have had enough of her smug face on the front page in every newspaper and tabloids. She isn't much appreciated owing to her