"I’ve seduced the world with casual elegance." Calvin Klein gets out of a Mercedes and goes into an Italian restaurant downtown. He is dressed in dark grey and is wearing a crew-necked pullover without a shirt underneath. He is very thin and lanky. When he speaks, he...
A life spent in photography. What does that mean? It’s a great life because photography is a way to express oneself with a wonderful language, a universal language that doesn’t need to be translated or interpreted. That everyone can understand. It’s a language that is...
Looking after special places, for ever, for everyone. Dame Helen, you are Director General of the National Trust. What is the National Trust? The National Trust is an organisation that has changed a lot in the last one hundred and twenty years. Its purpose is to...
Helmut Newton is sitting in a light green chair in his studio on the thirty-third floor of a high rise in Monte Carlo with a view of the sea, the Tennis Club and the peninsula where designer Karl Lagerfeld has his house up on high. The great photographer is dressed...
Art can be a prism which transcends and transforms. LANDSCAPE, a new exhibition of David LaChapelle’s work, is showing at the Robilant+Voena Gallery in Milan. Marco Voena is with Jacqueline and I in the Armani Hotel. We just met Sophia Loren, here having lunch with a...
Charles Saumarez Smith is Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts in London's Piccadilly. Charles, after having been at the National Portrait Gallery and then the National Gallery, how is it to run the Royal Academy? To be honest, it is more...
Carla Bruni shows up right on time at the Bar des Théâtres, which is located on the Avenue Montaigne a stone’s throw from Christian Dior’s maison. She is wearing a velvet hat that she bought at a flea market, a small Azzedine Alaïa pullover in fluffy black velvet: a...
Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of London’s Tate Gallery, says that: “Today art must know how to entertain.” Nicholas Serota, as director of the Tate Modern Gallery, you wanted to hold a retrospective of German artist Gerhard Richter’s work. This is an artist you have...
Fashion designer Vivienne Westwood: “People have never been so poorly dressed.” Vivienne Westwood, what state is the fashion industry in? “I make avant-garde things, but I hear from people that there is a crisis, and that it is quite serious. I don’t know how long it...
Elizabeth Peyton smiled when I asked if I could interview her, but was reticent. She told me that she had previous bad experiences. But then she said yes, and the interview took place in the back seats of a big black German car at seven o' clock in the morning, on...
Best wishes to Thaddaeus Ropac on the April 28th 2017 opening of his London gallery at Ely House on Dover Street. I had the pleasure of interviewing him in Salzburg in August 2014: It is Sunday afternoon and, after a delicious lunch that ended with apricot strudel and...
Carlo Orsi is President of The Association of Italian Antique Dealers (AAI). Carlo, you come from a famous family of Milan antique dealers. What has changed in your profession over the years? The world has changed and the way we perceive our profession of antique...
Paolo Bulgari is very tall with white hair: he is a man of few words but has a considerable sense of humour. He works in his office on the first floor in via Condotti above the legendary jeweller’s shop. The offices were renovated a year ago and the walls are covered...
Gaetano Pesce has just arrived in his office in downtown Manhattan at 543 Broadway. “I have lived in New York since 1980, for 34 years. I love the city, but this summer we have heavy rain all the time and it is quite inconvenient after the very cold winter we just...
In Rome, where the weather is terribly hot, I go to visit Mimmo Paladino in his studio on the top floor of a Palazzo in Piazza Navona, facing the church of Sant’ Agnese by Borromini. The terrace is amazingly big and I ask Mimmo: Do you play tennis on this terrace?...
Giorgio Armani is in good spirits, wearing long dark blue Bermuda shorts and a dark brown T-shirt. He is tanned and resting at his home on the island of Pantelleria, an oasis of true luxury, very quiet and with a light breeze. It's seven o'clock in the evening and, in...
I go to visit Dr Cristina Acidini, Superintendent of the Historical, Artistic and Ethno-anthropological Heritage and the Museums of the City of Florence. I open a little door in a little street of Florence that divides the Palazzo Vecchio and the Vasarian building of...
Skinheads, Nazis and prejudices. Anti-Semitism is the child of Fear. Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) does not give way to pessimism: the past is a spent force, history does not repeat itself. December 1st, 1992. The 1987 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, one of...
I am very sad about Oscar's death. The fashion world won't be the same without his smile, his positive and warm energy, his loyalty to his friends. What a splendid example for all of us of someone who loved and worked at his craft from his very early days to the very...
Eric C. Shiner is Director of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. I meet Eric Shiner on a sunny Sunday morning in early March, a tall man, fit, very focussed and polite. He sits next to Bob Colacello, (previously interviewed in La Stampa), the first editor of...
Carolyn Hanbury is chatting with her friend, the Italian botanist Ursula Piacenza, in a beautiful villa facing the sea, with a beautiful Mediterranean garden that goes down to the seashore. The most famous Italian gardener and landscape architect, Paolo Pejrone, who...
A visit to the Laurent-Perrier garden created by Luciano Giubbilei. RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2014 Winner: Best in Show. If you want to know who the English people are, you need to go to the Chelsea Flower Show. I was surprised by such a long queue to get in, the size...
Peter Brant, entrepreneur and collector: “Andy Warhol taught me to have fun.” The interview took place at the Cipriani Hotel in Venice during the Biennale 2011. Peter Brant is one of the most famous collectors of contemporary art. Peter, when did you become interested...
Curator of Italian and Spanish Paintings, National Gallery of Art. Anna Gavina, Jacqueline Schnabel and I have lunch with David Alan Brown in the French restaurant of the National Gallery in Washington, DC. The coq au vin and the various salads are great. We talk...
This interview with Roberto Andò came about as a peculiar way of teaching students in the Italian Department of Penn University in Philadelphia, where I share a class on Comparative Jewish Literature with Professor Fabio Finotti, the Director of the Department. What...
So many years have passed since I went to interview Gianni Versace in June 1993, but I still remember him very well. He was a clever man, a talented man. He was not pretentious and really friendly. I saw him again a couple of years later on a boat in Turkey. He was...
The Frick Collection is one of the most prestigious small museums in the world. To visit it is like going back to what New York was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when billionaires used to build fabulous mansions and create remarkable art collections. ...
In New York the weather is still inclement, cold. The sky is blue but the wind is very strong in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where I go to visit the artist Kiki Smith in her townhouse studio. The front door is painted bright red. I ring the bell and a young...
The idea to re-publish some very special interviews with some very special people many years later, as we have done previously with Luciano Pavarotti, Eric Hobsbawm, Sophia Loren and Diane von Fürstenberg, is because in an interview you get to know the personality...
On the eve of The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF), and following on from my recent interviews with Scott Schaefer, Fabrizio Moretti and Letizia Treves, I meet Marco Voena in the lounge of the Suvretta House hotel in St. Moritz on a Saturday at lunch time. At the...
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Money Must Stay in the Family
The plot of Money Must Stay in the Family, unfolds around the family matriarch’s last will and traces the story of an upper class Jewish family from Turin, the fictional Ottolenghis. The multigenerational saga begins with the flight from Mussolini’s Racial Laws of 1938 and continues with the arrival in the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the dispersion from New York to Rome, Paris, Tuscany, South America, and Jerusalem.
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