14
THE TRIUMPH OF ITALIAN STYLE
It was the dress seen ’round the world: a princess bridal gown fashioned from fifty yards of satin, seventy yards of lace, and more than one thousand pearls. On January 27, 1949, in Rome’s Church of Santa Francesca Romana, Linda Christian, a stunning young actress dubbed the “Anatomic Bomb” for her shapely figure, married the international heartthrob Tyrone Power. Eight thousand Italians craned for a glimpse of the star-kissed pair. When the newlyweds posed in the Forum, photographers snapped pictures and videos that graced front pages and newsreels on every continent.
The marriage officially ended seven years later, but the three sisters who created the fantasy dress reigned as queens of Italian fashion for almost half a century. Le Sorelle Fontana (the Fontana Sisters), three dressmaker’s daughters from a small town near Parma, defined alta moda (high fashion) before anyone else, including the Italians, realized that a homegrown form of haute couture even existed.
Hollywood royalty, along with actual queens, princesses, and duchesses, came like pilgrims to stand before the trio called “the three-sided mirror.” Bacall brought Bogie; Ava Gardner, her then-husband Frank Sinatra. Senator John F. Kennedy bounded up the stairs and picked out three outfits for Jackie. Kirk Douglas bought an entire wardrobe for his wife.
“Our clients used to say that they needed three days for Rome—one for the Forum, one for the Vatican, and one for the Sorelle Fontana,” recalls Luisella Fontana, a daughter-in-law who worked with the designers for forty years. “They joked about throwing a few coins in the Trevi Fountain but leaving their wallets with the Fontana sisters.”
Only a single suite of rooms remains of the three-story atelier that was once a Roman landmark. Here the Fondazione Micol Fontana, created by the longest-surviving sister in 1994, displays mannequins costumed in some of the house’s most memorable designs.
As enthralled as a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s closet, I marvel at a hand-embroidered bodice laced with a bounty of beads and a satin bridal train that seems to stretch for a city block. A skintight lipstick-red sheath with no visible buttons, snaps, or zippers intrigues me.
“How do you put it on?” I ask.
With help, Luisella explains, showing me how the strapless dress, custom-molded around a woman’s body during multiple fittings, would be wrapped in graceful folds and attached with hidden fasteners.
“And to get out of it?”
Luisella dramatically begins unwinding the soft fabric, as if unfurling the wrapping from a priceless statue.
Could there be a more seductive way of dressing—or undressing?
AMERICANS, PARTICULARLY ON VACATION in shorts and tee-shirts, often look ready for a day at Disney World. Italians, even as they go about daily chores, primp for an avventura, a word that can translate into either “adventure” or “romance” and ideally combines a bit of both. This isn’t surprising: a passion for fashion is woven into the fabric of Italian history.
In ancient Rome, aristocratic wives and daughters robed themselves in such extravagant finery that the Senate passed a law restricting gold jewelry and varicolored dresses. Women took to the streets to demand—and eventually win—its repeal. The sybaritic rulers of third-century Rome installed a silk factory in an imperial palace to manufacture the delicate fabric—forbidden to commoners—for their togas, trimmed with dyes more expensive than the costliest gems.
In the Renaissance, artisan tailors, furriers, haberdashers, embroiderers, tanners, cobblers, braiders, weavers, and button makers crafted the most dazzling fashion statements the West had ever seen. Women—who, according to an early fashion chronicler, changed styles “even more than the shape of the moon”—vied to parade the longest trains, the fullest skirts, and the most extravagant brocades. Their peacock men strutted in fur-trimmed cloaks and jewel-encrusted caps.
When the teenage Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589), great-granddaughter of Lorenzo il Magnifico, demanded additional stature for her wedding to the future king of France, Italian cobblers invented the high heel. And women owe another fashion first to this wife and mother of kings: underpants.
When riding a horse all’amazzone (sidesaddle)—to show off her legs, her detractors hissed—Catherine donned a prototype pair of knickers. The fashion police of the day endorsed this practical garment for two reasons: it shielded “those parts that are not for male eyes” in case of a fall, and it protected women from “dissolute young men, who put their hands under women’s skirts.”
Over the following centuries, Parisian designers reigned as style setters for the world. Italians served mainly as suppliers of fine fabrics, butter-soft leathers, and intricate lace and embroidery. Then a peasant’s son from a poor town outside Naples elevated the humblest sartorial art—shoemaking—beyond mere craft to couture.
I CAME ACROSS THE TALE at an exhibit called “The Amazing Shoemaker: Fairy Tales and Legends About Shoes and Shoemakers” at the Salvatore Ferragamo Museum in the company’s flagship store on via Tornabuoni in Florence. This is how it begins:
“Once upon a time there was a boy named Salvatore. The eleventh of fourteen children, he was born in Bonito, a small village near Naples, with a handful of houses, one main road, and a lot of countryside. His parents were farmers, and their life consisted of waiting and praying for a good harvest.”
The story’s young hero would cross the ocean to the United States, open a small custom shop, and design shoes for the movie stars who reigned as “the princesses and sorceresses of the twentieth century”—all before turning twenty.
Salvatore Ferragamo (1898–1960), who had left school after the third grade to help support his family, made his first pair of shoes when he was just nine. Unable to borrow white shoes for his younger sister’s first Communion and too poor to buy them, the family faced the public disgrace of the girl’s appearing in worn wooden clogs.
Working all night with nails, glue, lasts, cardboard, and some thick white canvas from the local shoemaker, Ferragamo cobbled shoes so stunning that the entire village marveled. His father, who had opposed his son’s apprenticing in what he considered the lowliest of trades, relented. Soon young Ferragamo mastered every technique of the cobbler’s craft.
After his father died of appendicitis, the eleven-year-old boy borrowed money from an uncle who was a priest and set up a shoe shop just inside the front door of his family home. Women from surrounding villages snapped up his stylish and well-priced footwear. The precocious shoemaker soon hired six assistants.
By sixteen, Ferragamo had saved enough for a third-class ticket on a ship to Boston, where he had lined up a job at a shoe company. After one glance at the clumsy shoes with “points shaped like potatoes and heels like lead,” he quit. Heading west to California, he joined four of his brothers, who were doing odd jobs for the American Film Company.
Ferragamo wrangled a contract to make boots for Westerns, sandals for biblical epics, and one-of-a-kind footwear for stars like Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Rudolph Valentino (who regularly stopped by for pasta). “The West would have been conquered sooner if they had boots like these,” the Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille exclaimed. The charming immigrant quickly became known as “shoemaker to the stars.”
WHEN HE WAS TWENTY-TWO, a car accident left Ferragamo with a permanent limp and a commitment to ensuring “that others should know the pleasure of walking freely.” Enrolling in an evening anatomy class, he learned the biomechanics of arch support, balance, and the musculature of the foot—and applied these lessons in custom designs. But when the Depression devastated the American economy, a disheartened Ferragamo lost his clientele and returned to Italy to open a shop in Florence.
In 1933, Ferragamo declared bankruptcy. Working frantically, he managed to repay his debts within a few years, buy the Palazzo Spini Feroni on via Tornabuoni, and open boutiques throughout Italy. When leather became scarce, he made “uppers” with almost anything he could get his hands on: rope, raffia, braided cellophane from candy wrappers. For soles and arches, he used cork—and invented the wedge heel in the process. He also found the love of his life: Wanda, the daughter of the village doctor in Bonito.
World War II damaged Ferragamo’s palazzo in Florence and destroyed his shop in Venice. But with top-quality leather salvaged by a local tanner, he rebuilt his business—pair by pair. Designing “Over the Rainbow” platform sandals for Judy Garland and gold stilettos for Marilyn Monroe, he regained his star status and opened boutiques around the world.
“I love feet. They talk to me,” the shoemaker wrote. “I am consumed with anger and compassion: anger that I cannot shoe all the feet in the world, compassion for all those who walk in torment.” Wanting every woman to feel the magic of Cinderella’s glass slippers, Ferragamo produced more than twenty thousand shoe styles, many displayed in art and design museums around the world today.
Since Ferragamo’s death in 1960, his wife, children, and grandchildren have shepherded his vision of a “Ferragamo woman”—sporting his house’s eyeglasses, watches, and handbags as well as shoes—into a global empire, still under family control.
And so, as Ferragamo wrote in his autobiography, the fairy tale “continues—like life itself.”
WHILE FERRAGAMO WAS FASHIONING footwear for Hollywood stars, the Fontana sisters were mastering the exacting techniques of needlework, design, cutting, and beading in the village of Traversetolo near Parma. As young teens under their mother’s unyielding discipline, they sewed and embroidered from morning until late at night, with only brief breaks for lunch and dinner and occasional outings on feast days.
The oldest sister, Zoe (1911–1979), with a passion bigger than her tiny hometown could contain, was determined to break into the fashion business in either Milan or Rome. Unable to decide which, she and her husband hopped on the first train that pulled into the local station. It carried them to Rome, where her two younger sisters, Micol (1913–2015) and Giovanna (1915–2004), soon joined them to work as seamstresses.
Zoe’s “golden scissors” impressed Gioia Marconi, the fashionable and well-connected daughter of Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the radio. She commissioned an entire wardrobe and recommended the sisters to her style-setting friends. Fueled by a potent mix of passion and determination, the Fontana sisters launched the first fashion house in Rome in 1943.
With raw materials scarce during wartime, they bartered fresh produce from their parents’ garden for fabric and kept stitching even as artillery boomed in the distance. Based on fashions popular during the Renaissance, their ultrafeminine dresses featured narrow bodices, cinched-in waists, and full skirts—along with lighthearted touches of pure whimsy, such as a huge ribbon bow, a cascade of pleats, or a rainbow of ruffles.
Linda Christian’s bombshell wedding gown, heralded as a “beacon of style,” catapulted the sisters to instant celebrity status. Brides everywhere—from Egypt’s future queen to President Harry Truman’s daughter—clamored for Fontana gowns. Audrey Hepburn rushed in for fittings between takes of Roman Holiday—then fell in love with Mel Ferrer, canceled her planned wedding to a British aristocrat, and gave the gorgeous dress to one of the Fontanas’ young seamstresses for her own walk down the aisle.
AMERICAN MOVIEMAKERS SHOOTING IN ROME hired the sisters to design wardrobes for stars like Myrna Loy, Grace Kelly, Deborah Kerr, Loretta Young, and Barbara Stanwyck. “Every Sunday, mamma would cook, and celebrities would come for dinner,” Roberta, the daughter of the youngest sister, Giovanna, tells me. “The movie stars became part of the family.”
With a Fontana workshop and salon in Manhattan, Micol spent so much time in the United States that she became known as “the American sister.” On one of her many Hollywood sojourns, Cary Grant took the starstruck Italian for a moonlight spin in his convertible.
In Italy, the sisters emerged as celebrities in their own right, playing themselves in an Italian movie about a young girl working for the atelier. Their brand branched into ready-to-wear, shoes, perfume, luggage, and linens, with factories outside Rome, hundreds of employees, and boutiques throughout Italy.
Pope Pius XII honored the family and their employees in 1957 with a private audience and a blessing—the first time, the official Vatican newspaper noted, that a pontiff had ever discussed fashion. For La dolce vita, Fellini outfitted Anita Ekberg in Fontana creations, including the striking “priest dress,” a severe but sexy frock inspired by a cardinal’s scarlet robes. The sisters again played themselves in an American film, Gidget Goes to Rome, and, decades later, inspired an Italian fiction (television movie).
But the Fontana sisters did more than create a legendary name. They helped propel the entire Italian fashion industry into the forefront of haute couture with just three English words: “made in Italy.”
FEBRUARY 12, 1951, marks the birthday of modern Italian fashion. On that date, Marchese Giovanni Battista Giorgini (1898–1971), an aristocratic entrepreneur who had exported Italian products to the United States before the war, organized the first-ever showing of Italian designs in the elegant Villa Torrigiani, his family home in Florence. The designers included the Fontanas, tailors from Rome and Milan, jewelers, and accessory makers. The audience consisted of buyers from the toniest American department stores. The sole journalist in attendance filed a front-page story for Women’s Wear Daily under the headline ITALIAN STYLES GAIN APPROVAL OF U.S. BUYERS.
The next year almost two hundred American buyers and reporters flocked to Giorgini’s fashion show, which had to be moved to the city’s Grand Hotel. In an article headlined ITALY GETS DRESSED UP, Life magazine commented that “just like Chianti, Italian fashions are becoming as well-known as its table wine.”
Aiming for a more upscale vintage, the presentations relocated to the glittering Sala Bianca, or White Room, of the Palazzo Pitti. The fifth annual show astonished attendees with a torchlit, trumpet-sounding reenactment of a sixteenth-century wedding, with actual nobles from Florence’s families modeling Renaissance costumes made by Italian designers.
The coalition fractured several years later, with some houses showing in Rome and others in Florence. Eventually Milan, an industrial center and transportation hub, would emerge as the capital of la moda italiana. By 1961, Life declared that Italian design had “changed the way the world looks—the cars, buildings, furniture, and, most universally, the women.”
With the same élan long associated with the “fine Italian hand,” the pioneers of alta moda combined traditional craftsmanship, fresh new styles, and modern technology. In their comfortable, effortlessly elegant designs, men would break out of the stiff suits that served as twentieth-century armor. Women would shed wired bras and elastic girdles to slip into outfits that flowed over their curves. And the world would sit up and take notice.
AMONG THE EARLY STYLE SETTERS, another family of strong women established the Fendi name at the forefront of luxury furs and accessories. I heard their backstory several years ago from Anna Fendi, one of five sisters who propelled the brand to international fame. We met at the Villa Laetitia, a palazzo on the Tiber that she bought as a near ruin and lovingly restored as a hotel, each room as artfully tailored as her family’s trademark bags.
Retired from the daily operations of the Fendi business, this “fashion artisan,” as she describes herself, recalled how her parents started a leather and fur shop in Rome in 1925 and struggled to survive during the dark days of Fascism and German occupation. After the war, they took over a dilapidated movie theater that was about to be torn down on via Borgognona, now one of the chicest streets in Rome.
As the Fendi daughters came of age, they joined the family business and resolved to preserve their parents’ passion for high-quality design. In 1965, the sisters hired Karl Lagerfeld, long before his association with the house of Chanel made him a fashion icon. He revolutionized fur and leather clothing by perforating, weaving, and pleating the materials—and designed the double F (one inverted) Fendi logo, a symbol of style the world over.
The sole Fendi still involved in design is Anna’s daughter, Silvia Venturini Fendi. The New Yorker compared one of her handbags, the Baguette, to a Petrarchan sonnet because, while its form always remains the same, “within it the variations are unending.” Fendi has produced more than one thousand different Baguettes since its creation in 1997—about three times the number of Petrarch’s compositions.
FAMILIES LIKE THE FONTANAS AND FENDIS designed their way into fashion’s nobility, but Emilio Pucci, the Marchese di Barsento (1914–1992), was born royal—the first person in his blueblood Florentine family, he often joked, to work for a living in a thousand years. With typical aristocratic sprezzatura (which roughly translates as nonchalance disguising often-strenuous effort), he claimed that his career sprouted from his passions for sports and pretty women rather than fashion itself.
While studying in the United States in the 1930s, Pucci stumbled into a job coaching the ski team at Reed College in Oregon. In order to free skiers from thick winter coats, he designed snug jackets and stretchy tights with stirrups to keep them in place. With what seemed a snap of his fingers, modern skiwear was born.
While he was vacationing in Capri after World War II (he served as a bomber pilot in the Italian Air Force), a lady friend arrived with nothing he deemed suitable to wear. With an innate flair for design, he whipped up playful shorts and swimsuits. A journalist snapped some eye-catching beauties in his colorful clothes and sold the photos to Harper’s Bazaar. Soon sunseekers along the Italian and French Riviera were clamoring for his eye-popping outfits.
In his signature styles, Pucci—the first designer to sign his name (Emilio) to the exterior of garments—swirled a kaleidoscope of vibrant colors into scarves as striking as abstract paintings and paired ankle-kissing capri pants with bold-patterned silk shirts. “The prince of prints,” as the fashion press crowned him, created wearable but chic sportswear that blended the allure of couture with the ease of ready-to-wear. As his tony clients morphed into the international jet set, Pucci lightened their suitcases with feather-weight, wrinkle-proof synthetics—the precursors of an active modern woman’s wardrobe.
ANOTHER ITALIAN DESIGNER WOULD LIFT alta moda to a level of refinement that once was exclusive French turf. Born in 1932 in a small city in Lombardy, Valentino Garavani was obsessed with glamour from the time he was a teenager.
“I was always a big dreamer,” he told an interviewer. “Vivien Leigh, Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner, and Katharine Hepburn—I am a designer today because I would dream of those ladies in fox coats and lamé, coming down those grand staircases they had in the movies. That was what I thought about. That was what I wanted.”
This dream led Valentino to apprenticeships with top couturiers in Paris. His distinctive style would combine the elegance and worldliness of French fashion with the sensuality and high craft of Italy.
In 1960, at age twenty-eight, Valentino opened a maison de couture near the Piazza di Spagna in Rome but struggled to make a name for himself. Then, in a café along the via Veneto, he met Giancarlo Giammetti, six years younger, who recalled that “Valentino was incredibly seductive, with his deep tan, blue eyes, and soft but intense way of speaking.” The two became lovers and then lifelong companions and business partners.
Valentino rose to the heights of haute couture, blazing as a star among stars. Elizabeth Taylor, friend and fan, regularly appeared in his designs. Jackie Kennedy wore Valentino for her wedding to Aristotle Onassis. Julia Roberts and Jodie Foster accessorized their Valentinos with Oscars at the Academy Awards.
“Valentino was the last true couturier,” says Matt Tyrnauer, director of the documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor. “He was one of the first designers to make himself the inspirational figure at the center of the story he was telling.”
Valentino acquired a villa in Rome, a mansion in London, a penthouse in Manhattan, a castle in France, a chalet in Gstaad, a private jet, a vast collection of museum-quality art, platoons of servants, and half a dozen pugs that traveled everywhere with him. “People say I am insane, this is not the world anymore, nobody lives this way,” Valentino conceded. “But I want these things in my life. My eyes want to see perfection.”
In Rome in 2007, I joined the crowds at the Ara Pacis Museum oohing and aahing through an exhibition meeting Valentino’s high standards while honoring his career. The stark Futuristic setting provided a dramatic backdrop for pyramids of intense Valentino red, mountains of white, and long, stately rows of black dresses and gowns. A bridal train cascaded from a ceiling-high pedestal like a waterfall. A jewel-toned harlequin design, surrounded by mirrors, shimmered like a kaleidoscope. Yet as much as I admired the stunning silhouettes and intricate detail, I couldn’t imagine wearing Valentino—or any other high-fashion designer’s clothes—in my far-from-jet-set life.
THE MAN WHO CHANGED my mind—the first to “get” what working women really want—was a former medical student, window designer, and buyer in Milan. Born in 1934, Giorgio Armani grew up in Piacenza, which was heavily bombed during World War II.
“Because of the war,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I sometimes think I never had a childhood or adolescence. I had no connection at all to fashion—I never even breathed in the air of an atelier.” But he had the movies, which he described as his “real education”: “They shaped my imagination, my culture, and my tastes.”
Recognizing Armani’s cinematic style sense as so rare that “even the blind” could recognize it, the designer Nino Cerruti hired him to “create a new image for men.” Armani would launch a “whispered revolution”—not by blowing anything up but by tearing apart the most fundamental piece in a man’s wardrobe.
Deconstructing the traditional jacket, Armani removed the stiff lining and traditional padding. With softer fabrics and a new approach to buttoning and hanging, he coaxed the lapels to fall a bit forward in a relaxed way. “I made the jacket come alive on the body,” says Armani, who opened his own design house in the 1970s.
Then the movies—his boyhood passion—gave him his big break. The Hollywood superstar John Travolta, an early client, suggested that Armani provide the wardrobe for a sensuous thriller called American Gigolo. A relative unknown named Richard Gere ended up with the starring role—and the wardrobe. From the opening scene, when Gere assembles shirts, ties, and jackets from his well-stocked closet into subtly sexy ensembles, Armani almost stole the movie.
“Who’s acting here?” Gere quipped while shooting. “The jacket or me?” The film, released in 1980, catapulted both the actor and the man who dressed him to stardom.
As his supple men’s suits shouldered aside London tweeds, Armani sensed another change in the air. His sister, an actress and model at the time, was always borrowing his jackets. Like her, he realized, other liberated women wanted a more professional look.
“Women couldn’t be credible dressed like dolls,” he told a journalist. They needed clothes that would allow them “not simply to be noticed but to be remembered.” Armani tried something radical: adapting men’s jackets for women’s bodies, using classic male tailoring that offered a sense of stature and security.
His new jackets featured wide shoulders, elongated lapels, an air of casualness, and a gentle drape. “Giorgio’s Gorgeous Style,” as Time acclaimed it in a cover story, would adorn singers like Lady Gaga and Madonna, movie stars like Cate Blanchett and Diane Keaton, professional athletes and Olympic teams.
As he has evolved over the decades, Armani, many believe, has risen to the level of an artist—a designation he rejects. “I stubbornly remain convinced that fashion is not an art form,” he insists. “Art—real art with a capital A—is made to last. It transcends time and sums up a society’s highest aesthetic and cultural values. Fashion is created, used up, and renewed in a quick and endless cycle.”
Accused of being a “maniacal perfectionist,” Armani admits to “an obsessive relationship with my work….I don’t have much time for literature, for music, for art. I live with my work. I make love to my work.” Perhaps this explains the seductiveness of his clothes.
“What’s sexy is not a body laid bare before everyone’s eyes,” he contends. “Sexy is suggestion, veiling and unveiling….Seduction should be a game that brings people closer rather than shouting, ‘Look how beautiful I am!’ ”
MY SEDUCTION STARTED DECADES AGO during weekly walks past an Emporio Armani store (far less pricey than his couture salon) to Italian classes in San Francisco. After months of admiring the garments in the windows, I was lured inside by a semiannual sale. The first time I tried on a natty pin-striped blazer—stylish but not showy—I felt both elegant and at ease. Since then, I’ve worn Armani’s statement jackets, crisp but comfortable pants, and the best little black dress ever for book tours, lectures, television interviews, presentations in Italian palazzi, and the formal ceremony of being knighted at the Italian Consulate in San Francisco.
Armani’s impact has extended far beyond occasional buyers like me. “If you so much as glance in a mirror as you dress each morning, Giorgio Armani has influenced your wardrobe,” observed Martha Nelson, the founding editor of InStyle, in a tribute to an Armani exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. His enduring legacy: “his passion for simplicity in all forms of dressing.”
I never appreciated the scope of Armani’s fashion vision until my last visit to Milan, where I toured the Armani/Silos. Built in 1950 as giant food storage bins, four levels showcase the clothes that changed the way the world dresses. I wandered through room after room of understated daywear, ultraglamorous evening gowns, variations on “greige” (a blend of gray and beige that Armani invented), Persian-inspired tunics, Asian sarongs, tuxedos for women, slouchy coats for men, layers and layers of sheer fabric creating skirts, in a critic’s words, “as delicate as the flap of a butterfly’s wing.”
Over the decades Armani’s design empire, the most successful Italy ever produced, has extended beyond fashion. The city-block-size Palazzo Armani in Milan houses boutiques for furniture, flowers, pets, children’s clothes, sportswear, shoes, books, chocolates, and accessories, plus a café that offers the best people-watching in town. In addition to shops around the world, Armani hotels in several major cities cocoon guests in understated luxury. In 2017, at age eighty-two, Armani opened a private, invitation-only club that quickly became the must-be-seen-in destination for Milan’s trendsetters.
“We don’t have military power in the world,” a businessman told me at a reception in Milan. “We don’t have political or financial influence. But we have the pope and Armani. One represents the Church, and the other represents style.”
Other stars also have lit up Italy’s ever-expanding fashion galaxy. Gianni Versace and, after his murder, his sister Donatella amped the erotic energy in sexually expressive clothes with a Fellini-like sensuality. Miuccia Prada, a political science major and professionally trained mime before surrendering to her passion for design (and self-confessed “obsession” with nylon), emerged as fashion’s “punk and radical thinker,” as a Vogue writer described her.
In their theatrical designs, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have mined every vein of Italian passion, drawing inspiration from “molto sexy” Sicilian widows, bad-boy bandits, soccer players, and classic Italian icons. The theme for a recent collection was “Italia Is Love,” but as a reporter noted, “the message might better have been summed up as ‘Italia is loved.’ ”
TAKING STYLE TO A NEW DIMENSION, Italian designers have been showing their love for their country by helping to preserve its endangered treasures. In 2010, Diego Della Valle, head of Tod’s, a luxury shoe and leather goods firm, donated 25 million euros to restore the time-battered Colosseum, Rome’s emblematic landmark. Bulgari, the upscale jewelry brand, funded the cleaning and repair of the Spanish Steps, just down the street from its flagship store. The Salvatore Ferragamo Group has underwritten the upgrading of air and security systems in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. Gucci has paid for refurbishing Renaissance tapestries in that city’s Palazzo Vecchio. Prada is investing in restorations in Bologna, Padua, Bari, Florence, and Milan.
Generous tax breaks have provided an undeniable financial incentive, but corporate donors also voice a genuine passion for their country and culture. “My father chose Florence for its beauty—it inspired his creations,” says Ferruccio Ferragamo. “We feel it is our duty to maintain and contribute to the beauty of our city. Florence gives to us every day. Now it is time we give back.”
The house of Fendi gave back to Rome with a 2-million-euro cleaning and refurbishment of the Trevi Fountain. For its ninetieth anniversary, the atelier displayed its 2016 collection literally on the famous fountain—with models strutting on a temporary Plexiglas catwalk that created the illusion that they were walking on water. Fendi also is partnering with the Galleria Borghese as a sponsor of the digital Caravaggio Research Institute, the most complete searchable database chronicling the artist’s life and works.
LATE ON AN AUTUMN EVENING IN ROME, I take a solitary walking tour of some of the fashion-sponsored restorations. The Colosseum, once a somber gray hulk, glows with newfound majesty. The Spanish Steps, chipped and grimy for as long as I can remember, sparkle in the lamplight. I approach the Trevi Fountain through a maze of narrow streets and listen for the splashing sound of cascading water that always precedes a first glimpse.
As I turn a corner and enter the Piazza di Trevi, I stop in my tracks. The water god Oceanus and his luminous winged horses seem to glow from within. (The effect, I later learn, comes from LED lights.) Turquoise waters spill over and around the gleaming stones. A mist rises in the night air to envelop onlookers with its magic spell.
I immediately realize that I am looking at more than a monument. Once again, I am seeing la passione italiana, timeless in its beauty—and its style.