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...
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...
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 ROAD TO UNFREEDOM: RUSSIA, EUROPE, AMERICA. Timothy Snyder is a leading American historian and public intellectual, and enjoys great prominence in Europe, the subject of most of his work. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a...
ITALY IN THE WORLD TODAY. Massimo Cacciari is a celebrated Italian philosopher, academic, and politician. He was mayor of Venice from 1993 to 2000, and again from 2005 to 2010. An expert in forms of contemporary political power and the configurations of the crises of...
LONDON'S HIDDEN GEM. Dr Xavier Bray is the Director of the Wallace Collection, an internationally outstanding museum in central London which contains unsurpassed masterpieces of paintings, sculpture, furniture, arms and armour and porcelain.Dr Bray, you are a renowned...
THE ARTISTS' HOTEL IN ROME. I meet with Caterina Valente at the Hotel Locarno, a five-star hotel in the historic centre of Rome. She is the owner and the soul of this hotel, which has a very strong bond with the world of art and culture; over the years it has offered...
VIOLENCE REMEMBERED. The avant-garde filmmaker Yervant Gianikian was born in Merano, an Alpine town in Italy’s South Tyrol region, in 1942. His father was Armenian, a survivor of the genocide, and his mother was half Austrian and half Italian. As a child Yervant went...
ART IS LIMITLESS AT THE POLDI PEZZOLI. Annalisa Zanni has dedicated a large part of her life to Milan’s Poldi Pezzoli Museum, the former home of one of the city’s most prolific art collectors. She began working on educational programmes here during her university...
NEW MEDIAS. Turi Munthe is a journalist turned media entrepreneur and investor. He is the Founder of Parlia, a 'wikipedia' for opinion, and a partner at North Base Media, where he invests in media and media technologies. Turi has founded several media companies...
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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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