REFLECTIONS ON CORONA AND QUARANTINE. Sandro Veronesi is an Italian writer. After earning a degree in architecture at the University of Florence, he started a career that includes novels, essays, interviews, screenplays and television programs. Sandro Veronesi, how...
CIAO! Photographer Mario Testino has created his personal love token for Italy’s people, art, food, and fashion in the form of a new book published by TASCHEN. This interview is also available to listen to as a podcast here. Mario Testino, why Italy? When I was a...
REBUILDING THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN RUSSIA. Berel Lazar is a Jewish Orthodox, Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic rabbi. Born in Italy, he studied in America and began his service in Russia in 1990. He became Chief Rabbi of Russia in 2000.This interview is available here as a...
RETURN TO GENOA. Carlo Clavarino is Executive Chairman of the AON insurance company’s Europe Middle East and Africa region. 22,000 people work for AON in this area and Clavarino is a member of the executive committee of AON Corporation. He is also president of the...
THE IMPORTANCE OF FLORENCE. Paola D’Agostino is Director of the Musei del Bargello, in Florence, Italy, a new museum group comprising the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, the Medici Chapel, the Church and Museum of Orsanmichele, Palazzo Davanzati and Casa Martelli. This...
TRANSFIXED BY GUERNICA. We celebrate Ernst Beyeler (16 July 1921 – 25 February 2010), the great Swiss art dealer and collector. This interview first appeared in La Stampa on June 1st 2005.In 1955, Ernst Beyeler was transfixed by Picasso’s Guernica at the Palazzo Reale...
INDEPENDENT, INCLUSIVE AND INSPIRATIONAL. Marlene Taschen is the CEO of the international publishing house TASCHEN that was founded by her father Benedikt, who is also a collector of contemporary art. TASCHEN specialize in illustrated publications on a range of themes...
CONNECTING THE WORLD. The sculptor Antony Gormley is perhaps best known for his large installations in public space. A major exhibition of his work was recently held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. His next exhibition is at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris...
BUILDING VESSELS OF LIGHT. Renzo Piano is an Italian architect whose notable buildings include the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Shard in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens...
DISRUPTIVE RESEARCH. Fabiola Gianotti is the first woman Director-General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. Elected for a five year term in 2016, she was recently renominated to hold the position until 2025 and thus becomes the first...
NEW FRONTIERS IN COMMUNICATIONS. Andrew Viterbi is an Italian born American electrical engineer and businessman who co-founded Qualcomm Inc. a company that transforms theoretical concepts into practical means of communications. He is celebrated for the invention of...
A LAWYER IN KABUL. Kimberley Motley quit her job as a public defender in Milwaukee in 2008 to join a U.S. government sponsored 'capacity building' program that helped train lawyers in war-torn Afghanistan. 32-years-old at the time, she was a former Mrs. Wisconsin and...
HANDMADE ITALY. Davide Rampello is an Italian television presenter, the Artistic Director of Davide Rampello & Partners creative studio, a university professor and a former president of the Milan Triennial.Davide Rampello, in your book “Handmade Italy. Living...
THE ART OF OUR TIME. Laura Mattioli is the Founder and President of the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York. An art historian, curator, and collector, Laura specializes in twentieth-century Italian art. Since 1983 Laura Mattioli has been the curator...
PRODUCTIONS FOR PRISONERS. Wasfi Kani OBE is the founder and CEO of Grange Park Opera and Pimlico Opera, through which she enriches the lives of British prisoners and primary school children by exposure to music. Pimlico Opera has presented co-productions with prisons...
PRESCIENT INFLUENCER Franco Maria Ricci is a, if not the, giant of art publishing and graphic design. Born outside of Parma, as a young graphic designer Ricci came across the typefaces of Giambattista Bodoni in the Palatina Library and felt an instant affinity with...
THE PRADO AT 200. Miguel Falomir is the director of Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, which celebrates its Bicentenary in 2019 with a special program featuring numerous exhibitions and museum-related activities.Professor Miguel Falomir, you have been the director of...
THE GENIUS OF LIGHT. Trained as a philosopher and gardener, the Spanish garden designer Fernando Caruncho began his career 40 years ago and has made private and public projects all over the world. His two sons, Fernando and Pedro, trained as architects and now work...
A COLLECTION OF BIOGRAPHY AND HISTORY. Dr. Nicholas Cullinan was appointed the Director of the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2015. He was previously Curator of International Modern Art at Tate Modern in London, and then Curator in the Department of Modern and...
'TO BE BORN MALE IS AN INCURABLE DISEASE.' The writer Edoardo Albinati was born in Rome in 1956 where he still lives and teaches literature at the city’s Rebibbia prison. Albinati won Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Premio Strega. His work The Catholic...
CREATING WORLD HERITAGE. Count Luigi Donà dalle Rose is a Venetian who has spent fifty years making the marine village of Porto Rotondo in Sardinia beautiful and fascinating. Over time he has transformed Porto Rotondo into a glamorous and celebrated residential...
WRITING IS A WAY OF LIFE. The following interview was made with Alain Elkann by Letture.org following the publication of Anita by Bompiani in 2019.Alain Elkann, your latest novel, published by Bompiani, is called Anita. Death is the “stone guest” throughout the entire...
A LAYERED APPROACH TO LANDSCAPE. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) award winning landscape designer Todd Longstaffe-Gowan brings to his garden design a sense of the complexities of our relation to the past that is informed by his training and experience...
MAKING MEDICINES IN ORBIT. Yossi Yamin is the Chairman of SpacePharma, which provides researchers access to the unique environment of microgravity, using cutting edge remote controlled orbital labs. SpacePharma is headquartered in Courgenay, Switzerland, with research...
FROM ACROPOLIS TO AGORA. Tania Coen-Uzzielli is Director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (TAMA). She was previously Head of Curatorial Services at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem where she curated exhibitions on Jewish art and the “Synagogue Route” exhibition, one of the...
A RESPONSE TO THE CRISIS IN WELFARE SYSTEMS. Letizia Moratti is the former Rai (Radiotelevisione italiana) president, was the Italian Minister of Education, Universities and Research, served as the mayor of Milan, and today is Chairwoman of the Board for UBI Banca, a...
In ARTISTS I STEAL FROM the 36 year old artist Alvaro Barrington and Julia Peyton-Jones, the very well appreciated contemporary art curator, bring together works by 49 artists who influence Alvaro’s work. The exhibition is at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in London from 5th...
THE JOY OF CONSERVATION. Monsignor Alberto Rocca is a fellow at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana library in Milan, as well as being the director of the Pinacoteca (painting gallery), and director of the Class of Borromean Studies.As director of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana,...
CONNECTING HUMANS AND NATURE. I interviewed the eminent Japanese architect Tadao Ando at Château La Coste, the beautiful hotel and vineyard located near Aix-en-Provence, where Ando was opening a show of his drawings in the art centre that he built in 2011. Afterwards...
THE DIVIDING QUESTION OF KEYNES. Giorgio La Malfa was a university professor and a leading light of the Italian Republican Party from 1972 to 2011. In his political career he was a Member of the Chamber of Deputies, Minister of Budget and Economic Planning, and...
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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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