PICASSO THE MAGUS. Diana Widmaier-Picasso was born in 1974 and is an art historian, curator, and specialist in modern art. The maternal granddaughter of Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter, she is the daughter of Maya Widmaier-Picasso. Diana holds master’s degrees...
Flesh is my medium. Miles Greenberg is a New York-based performance artist and sculptor. His work consists of large-scale, sensorially immersive and often site-specific environments revolving around the physical body in space. These installations are activated with...
AN INCREDIBLE SUCCESS. Roberto Cicutto was appointed President of La Biennale di Venezia on February 2020, overseeing the city’s prestigious art and architecture biennials as well as the film, dance, theatre and music festivals. Cicutto is a native Venetian and a film...
SAFETY FIRST. Jean Todt is a French motor racing executive and former rally co-driver. He was Peugeot Talbot Sport’s director and then Scuderia Ferrari Formula 1 team principal, before being appointed CEO of Ferrari from 2004 to 2008. From 2009 to 2021 he served as...
GUARDIAN OF AN IMMENSE HERITAGE. Salvatore Nastasi is Secretary General of the Italian Ministry of Culture. He has been at what used to be called the Ministry for Cultural Property and Activities since 2000, with a brief interruption when he was Deputy Secretary...
THE IMPORTANCE OF A CLASSICAL LEGACY. The writer Marina Valensise was recently appointed CEO of the Italian National Institute of Ancient Drama (Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico, INDA) which manages the ancient Greek Theatre of Syracuse. Valensise was formerly...
PASSION PROJECTS. Andy Harries produces television series including The Crown and Outlander. He is chief executive and co-founder of LEFT BANK Pictures, a multi-award winning independent production company launched in 2007 to make high-end film and television for the...
IN THE MERCIFUL SHADOWS. Anthony McCarten is a novelist, playwright, journalist, television writer and filmmaker, best known for writing The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour, Bohemian Rhapsody and The Two Popes. His play The Collaboration, with Paul Bettany and...
IN CONTACT. Riccardo Scamarcio is an award winning Italian film actor and producer who has been working since the early 2000s. I met up with him in London, a few days after he and his co-star Alba Rohrwacher hosted the showing of the movie Three Floors (Tre Piani) at...
A DESTINATION POINT IN NEW YORK. I am at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York in the office of the Director, Professor Fabio Finotti, a distinguished Italianist. He is professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the author of...
ON THE ROAD WITH DIOR. British menswear designer Kim Jones is a graduate of Central St Martins. He has worked with high profile fashion brands including Dunhill, Louis Vuitton, Mulberry, Alexander McQueen, Hugo Boss, Iceberg, Topman and Uniqlo. In 2018 he joined Dior...
THE POWER OF ONE. Maurice Lévy is Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Publicis Groupe, the French multinational advertising and public relations company that has overtaken all other ad holding companies to become the world’s No.1 agency group in terms of market...
A GREAT COMMUNICATOR. David Puttnam is a British film producer, educator, and environmentalist who recently retired as a member of the House of Lords, where he served on the Labour Party benches for 24 years. His many celebrated film productions include Midnight...
RE-IMAGINING A LANDMARK. Laurent Le Bon is the recently appointed president of the Centre Pompidou, the very important Paris institution focused on modern and contemporary art. He was previously the president of Musée Picasso-Paris.This interview is available to...
A VERY ECLECTIC PERSON IN THE WORLD OF ART. Martin Bethenod was the Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection until October 1st, 2021. Director of Palazzo Grassi - Punta della Dogana from 2010 to 2020, he previously held positions...
GUARDIAN OF THE PATRIMONY OF A SUPERMAN. Giordano Bruno Guerri is an Italian writer, journalist, and historian. He is an important scholar of twentieth-century Italy, in particular of the Fascist period and the relationship between Italians and the Catholic Church. He...
THE ARTISTIC VOICE OF FASHION. Pierpaolo Piccioli is Creative Director of the luxury fashion house Valentino S.p.A. based in Rome. His July 15 2021 couture show at the Venice Biennale of Architecture was acclaimed as being at a new level of meaningful collaboration...
WHO CARES WINS. Lily Cole is a British fashion model and acted in films including The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus of Terry Gilliam. Her recent book Who Cares Wins features interviews with Sir Paul McCartney, Elon Musk and Extinction Rebellion co-founder Professor...
HER OWN WOMAN. Giovanna Buzzi is a costume designer and fabricator. She is the owner of SlowCostume workshop for the creation of costumes for the theatre, cinema and television with her partners, Odino Artioli, Silvia Aymonino and Massimo Pieroni. They have done...
MAKING THE DIG. Gabrielle Tana is a British film producer, most recently of “The Dig”, a Netflix January 2021 release in which Ralph Fiennes plays the amateur archaeologist Basil Brown and Carey Mulligan plays Edith Pretty, whose land he digs on. Tana and her fellow...
TO BE A WRITER. René de Ceccatty is a writer of numerous novels and biographies. He translates Japanese works, and Italian works such as those of Giacomo Leopardi, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia. He has also written biographies of Pasolini, Moravia and Elsa...
HOW THE WORLD WE LIVE IN WAS CREATED. The historian, novelist and TV presenter Simon Sebag Montefiore has been reading extensively during lockdown. He recommends some delightful books and offers his perspective on Trump's failed putsch. LISTEN TO THIS INTERVIEW HERE....
NECESSARILY AN ACTRESS. Alba Rohrwacher studied medicine before she identified her calling as an actress. Cinema is in the Rohrwacher blood. It has been said that Alba "radiates intelligence and sensuousness in all her performances". She also provides the narration...
BUILDING NEW BRIDGES. Katia Pizzi is Director of the Italian Institute of Culture in London and 2021 is a year of Dante celebrations and many more.Katia Pizzi, before becoming Director of the Institute you were Senior Lecturer in Italian at the Institute of Modern...
A MAN WITH A MISSION. The conductor Alvise Casellati was born in Padova in 1973. He is creator and Music Director of “Opera Italiana is in the Air”, a free open air event whose debut was in Central Park, New York.This interview is also available to listen to as a...
THE STORY OF VAUX-LE-VICOMTE. Alexandre de Vogüé and his two brothers, Jean-Charles and Ascanio, own and run the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, one of the greatest Historical Monuments in France.A podcast of this interview is available to listen to here. Alexandre de...
FACT OR FICTION? Robert Lacey is a writer and the historical consultant to the popular series THE CROWN, for which he has published two offical companion volumes. The fourth season of The Crown is released on Netflix on November 15. Lacey recently published Battle of...
AUTHENTIC VOICES. James Fox is a British journalist and biographer with an American father and a British-American mother. His books include White Mischief, The Langhorne Sisters, Life - Keith Richards, and most recently Look Again – David Bailey. His work is received...
LAILA IN HAIFA. Amos Gitai is an Israeli filmmaker who was trained as an architect. Born in 1950, and best known to the public for his film Kippur, shown at Cannes in 2000, Amos Gitai bases his work to a large extent on personal experience, including the Yom Kippur...
CREATING A NEW PROGRAMME AFTER FOUR MONTHS OF COVID. French theatre director Stéphane Lissner is the current Superintendent and Artistic Director of the San Carlo Theatre in Naples, which was established in 1737. Stéphane Lissner, you were Superintendent and Artistic...
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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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