Tony Blair was more on the right than Thatcher. “When I think about Italian politics and corruption, I break out in hives.” Gaia Servadio lives in a typically British house in the Belgravia district of London, with a studio perched on a terrace where she writes and...
"After 31 years as Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York I decided it was time to teach my long experience and the life of the work of art." Philippe de Montebello is in great shape, sitting comfortably in one of the salons of the New York University...
Book publishing is far from finished! Alberto Vitale, you were the Chairman and CEO of Random House, Inc. for ten years, from 1989 to 1998. Do you think that since then many things have changed in book publishing? Sure, many things, and the biggest change has been a...
Centro Primo Levi recently launched CPL Editions, a new publishing enterprise at the historical New York Italian bookstore and publisher S.F. Vanni. The interview with Alessandro Cassin, Director of Publishing, took place at the recently reopened S.F. Vanni Bookstore...
In partnership with every age. Eight years ago you started a new magazine called Lapham's Quarterly. What is it about? It is about history. I believe with Faulkner that, "The past is never dead. It is not even past." I believe that history is an extraordinarily...
Kew Royal Botanic Gardens' Director. Richard, can you describe the nature of your job? My job is to lead this extraordinary scientific and horticultural institution, and is very varied. It involves science, fundraising, the visitor attraction, and a lot of work...
The Secrets of The Leopard - an interview with Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi. Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi welcomes me into his flat in the Palazzo Tomasi di Lampedusa in Via Butera 28 in Palermo. He has recently published a biography of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, his...
"Africa - my goldmine." Wilbur Smith is in Rome, staying in a very elegant suite on the top floor of a hotel in Trinità dei Monti. Spring has just begun, but he is already dressed in a beige cotton suit. He walks into the hotel wearing a Panama hat. He is smiling,...
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...
THE INTERVIEW AS A LITERARY GENRE A self-interview along with Elisabetta Sgarbi, taken from a conversation between Alain Elkann and Elisabetta Sgarbi, who writes: “This piece was born from a game between me, the publisher, and Alain Elkann, an author of mine. I asked...
Tony Little is Headmaster of Eton College. The Eton Headmaster’s guide to building character in male teenagers:- 1) Encourage them to aim high. 2) Celebrate their diverse individual achievements. 3) Give them genuine responsibility to take the lead. 4) Allow them to...
Jacqueline Risset died on 4th September 2014. She was a poet and a poetical person. With her death we lose a voice, the voice of a woman of great culture and intelligence. With her angelic smile she was very attentive to the support of her friends, and to sharing with...
Raffaele La Capria has started his summer holidays in the family home of his wife Ilaria Occhini, near Arezzo in Tuscany. But summer holidays mean very little to a writer. There are no particular rules or hours. Raffaele La Capria, what is a writer's role in Italy...
"I am a foreigner in America. From the time I was a child, I dreamt of being somewhere else." Susan Sontag, in your latest book, you write that the United States is a country where one can always start over in life. Is that true? "It’s definitely a myth, but because...
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...
The young are strangers to their own past. This interview with Giulio Einaudi, doctor, author and founder of the Italian publishing house he built into a European wellspring of fine literature, intellectual thought and political theory, was made in February 1998....
Intolerance is more dangerous than Nazism or Fascism or Communism. We are having lunch in the bow-windowed living room in Lord Weidenfeld's beautiful apartment on Chelsea Embankment, overlooking the Thames. There are books everywhere, a piano, and Old Master paintings...
Interview with an angry writer. Gore Vidal: “The Attorney General is nothing but a puppet. Let me tell you about this massive conspiracy.” Gore Vidal, you followed President Clinton's speech on TV at your house in Ravello. What do you think about it? In a few words,...
In the middle of the Ukraine Crimea Russia EU crisis after the declarations of President Obama, the world misses intelligent intellectuals like Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012), capable of understanding the many differences and nuances between the Western and the Eastern...
Erica, what is your view of what is happening in the feminine world? I think that more and more people are becoming aware that women’s rights are human rights. The smartest men understand well that when women are educated the economy goes up. Why? Because when women...
The interview with Roberto Peregalli took place in Milan, the city where Peregalli works and has his office, just before he gave a public speech and a reading of his book at the Franco Parenti Theatre. Roberto, how would you define yourself? I like to be an architect...
Asher Cohen works in a very modern office in one of the buildings of the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, close to the Mount of Olives and overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem. The University was founded by very prominent intellectuals like Freud, Einstein 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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