gIANNI VERSACE, FETED AT THE END OF HIS LIFE BY ROCK AND royalty, could hardly have come from more humble origins. He was a son of Italy’s deep south, a forlorn region perennially trapped in a cycle of poverty, corruption, and relentless emigration. Calabria, the region of his birth, covers the tip of the toe of the Italian boot; it is a territory overrun for centuries by foreign invaders and buffeted by torrential rains, deadly droughts, and earthquakes. Malaria was a constant scourge; shopkeepers regularly stocked antimalaria tablets until the 1940s. In the isolated villages high in the Aspromonte mountains, the final surge of the Apennine chain that runs down the spine of the Italian peninsula, a system of sharecropping survived until the 1960s. Poor, illiterate families worked vast tracts of clay-tinged land owned by a few wealthy clans, and starting at age six children were sent into the hills to herd animals. They didn’t speak proper Italian but a dialect gleaned from the Greek, Spanish, and Arab tongues of Calabria’s invaders, a linguistic distinction that would further isolate them from the rest of Italy throughout the twentieth century.
In such hopeless conditions, emigration spread like a plague. In the late 1800s, a third of Calabrians emigrated, many to America, a flow that continued well into the 1980s. The region’s hardscrabble frontier air forged a Calabrian character that is dogged, rough, and tinged with melancholy, while family ties are fierce even by southern Italian standards. Those characteristics would also define the Versace clan, contributing to both their success and their tribulation.
Reggio di Calabria, the area’s largest city, is a port town jammed into a narrow crystalline coastline that runs like a ribbon around the foot of the Aspromonte mountains. The northeast tip of Sicily almost touches Calabria, and the strait in front of Reggio is often as still as a lake, affording a clear view of Mount Etna, its peak blanketed in snow in the winter. Despite its natural beauty, Reggio’s isolated position—the highway to the nearest large city wasn’t built until 1963—made it an exceedingly provincial town, lacking the noble history of its southern sister cities, Palermo and Naples. Gianni Versace would chafe at his isolation almost as soon as he was old enough to walk.
Reggio bore the forbidding weight of natural tragedy: An earthquake in 1908 killed two-thirds of the population and collapsed the city. By the 1930s, city planners had rebuilt Reggio from scratch in a bland Liberty style punctuated with a few intimidating, Fascist-era buildings and had laid the streets in a tidy crosshatch style. Lining the boardwalk were magnolia bushes, palms, and jasmine flowers, which gave off an intoxicating perfume that is characteristic of the Mediterranean spring.
The Versaces were not originally from Reggio; their provenance was even more remote than that of the region’s city. Antonio Versace, known to everyone as Nino, was born in 1915, the youngest of five children, in a family that hailed from Santo Stefano, a tiny farming town high in the Aspromonte. Nino’s family were the poor relatives of a wealthy clan—a distant relative was later kidnapped for ransom in the 1950s—and his father was forced to sell firewood to scrape out a living. Lean and fair skinned, with blondish hair and angular features, Nino was a serious, solitary young man. He was, however, a gifted and passionate athlete. He played semiprofessional soccer, where he earned the nickname U Carro Armato, or “The Tank,” and was also an avid bicyclist, competing often in races in Calabria and Sicily, where he bested professional racers who competed in the Tour de France.
In 1938, after his obligatory two years of military service with Mussolini’s Fascist army, he fell in love with a local girl—much to the consternation of his family: The young woman’s family had a poor reputation in Reggio. “Don’t you know a nice girl for Nino?” his brother asked his wife, hoping to derail the romance. She thought of a serious, hardworking young woman who had just begun working as a seamstress and arranged for Nino to have a garment made by her. Her name was Francesca Olandese.1
Francesca, known as Franca, was born in 1920 in Reggio to a family of higher social standing than the Versaces. Her father, Giovanni, a shoemaker, had an iconoclastic streak. As a young man, he had joined the Anarchist Party, a hard-left group that was a precursor of the Italian Socialist Party, and he mixed with anti-Fascist activists. According to Versace family legend, the local police would throw Giovanni in jail whenever a leader of the Fascist Party from Rome came to Reggio for a visit.
Franca, the youngest of five children, had the most forceful character among her siblings, and, despite her youth, became a natural leader in the family. Possessed of her father’s determination and stubbornness, she dreamed of becoming a doctor, possibly a gynecologist. However, Calabrian mores were so oppressive that women could hardly dream of getting a university education, much less having a profession. They weren’t allowed to walk through town unaccompanied. The morning after a wedding, the bride’s family would flourish bloody sheets from their window to prove to neighbors that their daughter had been a virgin. Police even turned a blind eye to il delitto d’onore, or honor killing, whereby a husband could kill an adulterous wife. When Franca told her father she hoped to be a doctor, he would hear none of it.
“Franca, you’re a girl, a signorina,” her father told her one day. “You can’t go to school with boys. You can’t work in a place where there are men. Go learn a trade.”2 She was allowed to attend school only until her early teens.
One of the few respectable trades for a woman in prewar Italy was sewing, and at the age of thirteen girls went to the local seamstress to learn how to sew as part of their preparation to manage a household. Before the war, one of the leading seamstresses of Reggio was a woman known as La Parigina, or the Parisian, because legend had it she had trained in a couture house in Paris. Franca convinced her to take her on as a trainee. The teenager’s meager income from her work with La Parigina helped support her family. But Franca soon exhibited the entrepreneurial spirit she would pass on to her children. By 1940, when Franca was twenty, she had opened her own shop.
Soon after she met Nino, war broke out in Italy, and he was drafted for a second time by the Fascist regime to fight. But because he was one of the few young men in the city who could read, he spent the war in a desk job in Reggio and never saw combat, which allowed him to court the ambitious young woman. Franca and Nino fell in love despite their contrasting personalities—she was extroverted and curious, while he was quiet and withdrawn to the point of coolness. However, they shared a prodigious work ethic. In late 1942, Nino and Franca married in a spare wartime ceremony. In November 1943, the young couple’s first child arrived and, following tradition, they named her Fortunata, after Nino’s mother. Because Nino’s brother had also named his first daughter Fortunata, Franca and Nino nicknamed their daughter Tinuccia.3
Wartime deprivation, coming on the heels of the Great Depression, fell particularly hard on Calabria, already one of Italy’s poorest regions. The area had scarcely recovered from the 1908 earthquake, and new buildings were often shabby and dilapidated. Some residents were so poor that, when they wore out their clothes, they turned them inside out to get as much use as possible from them. Work was extremely scarce, the economy having ground to a standstill under Mussolini’s autarky—his attempt to render Italy completely self-sufficient by cutting off nearly all trade with the outside world. Families subsisted on fishing, agriculture, and small crafts.
On December 16, 1944, Santo was born, named after his paternal grandfather. His birth came about four months before Allied troops reached Milan, marking the liberation of Italy. After the war, the Versaces could finally settle into family life during a time of peace. On December 2, 1946, Franca and Nino welcomed a second son, Giovanni Maria—Giovanni for his maternal grandfather the anarchist, and Maria for Nino’s sister. Gianni, as they called him, would inherit his grandfather’s iconoclastic streak.
When the war ended, Italy was on its knees, emerging from the conflict as one of Europe’s most backward countries. The long land war and frequent Allied bombing had destroyed Italy’s meager industrial base. In Reggio, life was exceedingly simple. Refrigerators hadn’t arrived yet, so the ice man made the rounds in a miniature three-wheeled truck, with large blocks of ice in the back covered in thick wool to keep them from melting. He broke off blocks for five lire, or about two cents, each.
Few families had cars, and those that did reluctantly traversed the treacherous, single-lane provincial highways that connected Reggio to the rest of Calabria. But by the early 1950s, Italy saw the first signs of the postwar boom that brought living standards a bit closer to those of the United States or the United Kingdom. By the end of the decade, northern companies such as Fiat and Pirelli were churning out cars, tires, and machine tools at full tilt. This sparked a massive new wave of emigration—ever the scourge and the salvation of Italy’s south—as millions of poor southerners flocked to Milan and Turin in search of work in the hulking new factories there. As always, prosperity would not come to Reggio; the Reggini would have to go to it.
Stories quickly spread through Reggio, not only about the opportunities in the north but also about how northerners mocked these newcomers, who often couldn’t read and who arrived from the countryside with their belongings packed in battered cardboard boxes bound with rough twine. Settling in the north, Calabrians squeezed alongside their brethren from Naples, Sicily, and Puglia into ugly tenement blocks that had been thrown up in the cold, foggy periphery around Milan and Turin. Others moved to Germany, Belgium, or Switzerland to work in coal mines or on construction sites. Very few returned.
But, even as many abandoned Calabria in the early 1950s, the Versaces managed through hard work to capture a slice of the new economic boom. After the war, Nino had taken over his brother’s coal business, using a scooter to haul the ore up the hill to clients’ homes. When Italians switched from coal heating to gas, Nino started delivering canisters of gas. Then he began to sell the city’s first refrigerators and simple washing machines. The first Cinquecentos, the tiny cars that Fiat sold at just 500,000 lire, or about $250, began to replace scooters and bicycles in Reggio, and Nino and Franca could afford the family’s first car. In 1958, Nino brought home a television, one of the very first in the city. That year, forty friends and relatives crowded into the family’s living room to watch the Sanremo music festival, when Domenico Modugno, a little-known Pugliese performer, sang “Volare” for the first time, a sweet ballad that instilled a sunny new image of Italy the world over. Nino and Franca left the windows open so that the neighbors could listen to the music.4
During the 1950s, the young family could afford some modest middle-class comforts. They moved into a spacious apartment near the city’s resplendent, cream-colored cathedral, or duomo, with its glittering rose-shaped window. Tinuccia, Santo, and Gianni grew up steeped in the indolent rhythm of Italy’s deep south. After Mass on Sundays, children accompanied their fathers to the Bar Malavenda, an elegant fin de siècle—style café with dark wood and brass fittings, to buy trays of pastries, while old men whiled away the afternoon at the bar, reading La Gazzetta dello Sport or playing cards. During the week, women stopped to chat and gossip under the colorful umbrellas in the open market near the Versace home, where wooden crates overflowed with eggplants, tomatoes, and lemons cut in half to show off their bright yellow pulp. The citrus smell, together with the aroma of fresh fish piled on mountains of chipped ice, mingled with the smell of freshly baked bread, rich espressos, and salty sea air to make for a heady Proustian aroma that Gianni would recall with affection years later. A weekday lunch was a three-hour affair, and Nino came home to eat with the entire family before returning to work.
“Life in Calabria was poetry then,” Santo Versace would recall five decades later. “Everything was a victory. People had survived the war, hunger, desperation, so they were happy.”5
Franca’s shop prospered. Large-scale production of clothes was common in the United States by the mid-nineteenth century, but in Italy, what little ready-made clothes were available in the shops were ugly. For most, a woman’s postwar-era wardrobe evoked misery: cork wedge heels, skirts split in the back to make for easier pedaling on a bike, and harsh, square-cut jackets. Franca could offer them something better, even beautiful. While an elite few went to Paris to buy their wardrobes at the French couture houses, most of Italy’s upper crust had their wardrobes made by local dressmakers. A few top dressmakers bought the patterns made in plain cotton from the Paris couture houses to make exact copies of their latest designs. But the fees that houses such as Christian Dior and Balenciaga charged for their patterns were too expensive for most seamstresses, particularly in the provinces. Instead, tailors such as Franca bought patterns from the emerging couture houses in Rome. From the start, even in this modest way, the Versaces would forgo French fashion and embrace the possibility of Italy.
Gianni Versace had an exceptional mentor in his mother. Franca soon became known as Reggio’s best dressmaker, and the city’s most elegant ladies came to her when they needed a wedding dress for a daughter or a new outfit for an evening at the city’s theater. Although she bought patterns from the couture houses in Rome, she often added her own touches, such as a collar of intricately beaded pearls. She was so skilled that she could cut cloth for a new dress without following a pattern, using just pins to mark the edges—a rare ability. She loved her work and devoted long hours to it—sometimes working through the night to finish a dress.
Franca particularly loved to make wedding gowns, and indeed a Versace bridal gown was a dream for many Reggio brides, a rare burst of glamour for families of modest means. In turn, weddings were a boon for Franca. In the 1950s, a bride would require not just a wedding dress, but an entire corredo, or the day clothes, evening clothes, overcoats, and even the underwear that a new signora required. Franca sat patiently with excited brides and their mothers, paging through heavy books with photos and sketches to help them choose, telling them what shoes and gloves to buy. On the morning of a wedding she went to the bride’s house to attend to the final details.
Franca’s children were among the best dressed of the city. For her First Communion, Tinuccia wore a full-length white dress with tiny buttons down the front and a skirt that was a cascade of ruffles. For Santo’s and Gianni’s, Franca made perfectly cut white three-piece morning suits, complete with bow ties and white gloves. A photo from the era shows a prim young Gianni in his pristine white suit, with a shy but determined smile on his face. For carnevale celebrations, the Italian Mardi Gras festival, Franca made the children elaborate costumes—and Gianni was her best model. One year, she dressed him as an eighteenth-century nobleman with knee-length breeches, a rich silk embroidered cape, and cream-colored shoes festooned with large bows. Even as a very young boy, Gianni absorbed his mother’s sense of style; when he was in middle school, he would sometimes point out when his friends’ socks clashed with the rest of their clothes.6
In Reggio, with its ten months of sunshine a year, mild winters slipped into balmy springs; the heat of the summers was relieved by a frequent breeze from the strait. On warm evenings, the Versaces often walked down Corso Garibaldi, where whole families went for postdinner strolls, stopping for dishes of gelato or fruit cocktail. Occasionally, Nino would take Franca dancing on one of the dance floors that were laid down during the summer on the gravelly beach on the lido, where bands played mambos or the sweet hits of a newly carefree Italy. Gianni would sit licking an ice cream, entranced as he watched his parents dance to songs such as “Parlami d’amore Mariù” (“Speak to Me of Love, Mariù”).7 Sunday was dedicated to the extended family, when Versace cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents ate together, joking and chatting in Calabrian dialect. After lunch, Nino gathered the children to solemnly hand out their allowances. Later, he would do the week’s accounts, papers spread out in front of him, as he listened to the city’s soccer team, La Reggina, play its weekly soccer match.
Nora Macheda, a young relative of Franca’s who was orphaned as a girl, came to live with the family when the children were young. Zia Nora, as she was known to everyone, helped Franca run the house and care for the children. Gianni, Santo, and Tinuccia adored Nora, who was about fifteen years younger than Franca and something of a peer and confidante for the children. A small, wiry woman with black hair cropped short, Nora, who never married, bustled around the kitchen preparing meals for the brood. During the summers, Nora took the children to a rented three-bedroom house high in the hills above Reggio. They joined cousins on Nino’s side of the family, riding their bikes along the dirt paths. Sometimes they went to an American military base nearby, where Gianni and his siblings would watch films in English, understanding not a word but soaking up the glamour of Hollywood.
But the hard-earned postwar idyll of the Versace family would be cruelly shattered in a way that would affect Gianni profoundly. In May 1953, Tinuccia, then nine, fell ill with peritonitis. Franca sent Gianni and Santo to stay at an uncle’s house while she sat distraught by the girl’s bedside. Gianni, frenetic with worry, soon ran away from his uncle’s house and came home—entering the house to see his sister in a white casket, dressed in her First Communion dress and surrounded by white flowers, in the room where his mother usually sewed. He felt like he couldn’t breathe.8
Franca, kneeling in front of the casket, convulsed in sobs, motioned for Gianni to come over.
“Gianni, your sister has gone to heaven,” she said. “You and Santo are all I have now.”
For the funeral Mass, white horses drew a carriage bearing the casket, a kindle of schoolgirls dressed in First Communion dresses trailing behind it.9
For months, Franca was inconsolable and unable to work. She spent most of her time closed up in her bedroom crying or at the cemetery, visiting her daughter’s grave. Within a year’s time, however, she grew calmer. One day, she took her younger son aside.
“Gianni, you’re going to have a little brother or sister,” she told him.
Donatella was born on May 2, 1955.
From the time Gianni was a small boy, Franca’s workshop was heaven for him. After school, he stopped at home for a snack prepared by Nora, and headed straight for Franca’s shop, where he would finger the fabrics and gaze fascinated at the patterns that Franca brought back from her trips to the couture houses in Rome. He hid behind the deep red curtain that closed off the bright room where Franca received clients. In the next room were Franca’s seamstresses, surrounded by bolts of cloth and baskets full of pins, buttons, and beads. He watched enthralled during fittings as his mother and an assistant pinned dresses, and garments slowly took shape. He sat on the workshop floor as Franca’s seamstresses laid the fabric out on sheets of paper where the patterns had been traced in white chalk. Pins held the cloth down as the women deftly cut into the fabric. Others in the shop would sew hundreds of tiny multicolored pearls to create the beaded bodice of a wedding gown.
“Why don’t you go out and play with your friends?” Franca asked Gianni, worried about all the time he spent in the shop.
“I don’t want to,” Gianni responded. “I want you to show me how you make the clothes.”10
Before long, he started to use what he was learning. When he was about nine, Gianni started gathering the scraps of silk and wool that fell to the floor and stitching them into puppets, holding his own private shows afterward. At age eleven, he made dresses for a friend’s dolls, staging a play baptism for them. The workshop not only inspired him; its women nurtured him. The dozen seamstresses Franca employed, many of whom traveled each day from the poor, small towns in the hills above Reggio, often had to sleep in the shop during the long days and nights of preparation for a wedding.11 The women fussed endlessly over Gianni. “Vieni qua, Giannino!” they would call to him. “Come here, Giannino!” Gianni loved the attention, looking for any excuse to run errands, buying pins or zippers for the matronly ladies. On hot days in the summer, he went to buy them shaved ice granite.
“My life was like a Fellini film,” he later told an interviewer. “I grew up surrounded by all women. I was spoiled. I had twenty girlfriends and twenty mothers.”12
But the main woman in Gianni’s life remained his mother. He was devoted to Franca, in a way surpassing even the maternal adoration typical in Italian boys. He resembled her physically, with his round face, deep-set eyes, and small frame. Franca was an affectionate mother who clearly adored her children, although she could be stern and demanding of them. Willful and determined, Franca had a strong creative streak that might have blossomed more richly in a different time and place. Despite her constrained upbringing in provincial Italy and her limited education, she was remarkably open-minded for her time, having inherited her father’s iconoclastic bent. She had absorbed her family’s socialist ideas—a relative rarity in a region known for strong Fascist sympathies.
“She wasn’t at all one of those old-fashioned mothers,” recalled a childhood friend of Donatella’s. “You could talk to her about everything.”13
Franca’s bond with all three of her children was fierce. It is hard to overstate the role of the mother in Italian families; she is a venerated figure even in modern times, particularly in the more traditional south. Italian mothers lavish care and attention on their kids in measures that seem excessive by the standards of northern Europe or America; they constantly cook their children’s favorite meals, ensure their clothes are perfectly laundered and ironed, and fuss over even minor ailments. Sons are an object of particular attention, even when they are grown. Children usually live at home right up until they marry, and even when they move out, they typically see or speak with their mothers every day. And, of course, sometimes such relentless loving attention can turn into undue maternal control of sons and daughters, even as adults.
By contrast, Gianni struggled in his relationship with his father. While Nino was diligent in providing for his children, he was a solitary, taciturn man, largely leaving it to Franca to bring up the kids. For the young Gianni, whose imagination was already bubbling over with ideas and ambition, Nino lacked verve and flair. His clothing—plain, gray pants, with a shirt that had big pockets for him to hold his pens and notes—appalled his son.
“His shirt was like his office,” Gianni said later.14
Nino spent his little free time absorbed in books, particularly classics such as Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. He loved to gather his children in the living room to listen to him recite passages from memory. Though his father was clearly a man possessed of his own classical imagination, Gianni found such sessions unbearably boring. The man himself was intimidating to his younger son.
“He used to scare me, even when he took me by the hand in the afternoon to go for a walk,” Gianni would recall.15
Moreover, Nino clearly favored Santo, who closely resembled his father. The eldest son occupies a place of honor in Italian families; he bears the weight of his parents’ highest expectations. In those straitened and more traditional postwar days, the oldest son shared in the responsibility for caring for the whole family. In this, Santo never disappointed. He became Franca and Nino’s pride and joy. With a long face, dirty-blond hair, and a leaner, more athletic body than Gianni, he was the best-looking of the Versace siblings as well as the most accomplished. He brought home top grades, shared Nino’s love of sport, and enthusiastically assisted his father in business. When Santo turned just six years old, Nino started taking him to his shop to help shovel coal and fill orders for customers. A kilo of coal cost thirty-six lire (about twenty cents) then, and Nino drilled Santo until the boy could multiply any number by thirty-six in his head to tally the price for a customer. Santo loved it; he basked in his father’s approval. On Sunday mornings, when his workers were off, Nino took Santo along to clients’ homes to help him unscrew empty canisters of gas and install full ones. If Santo, a gifted basketball player, had a game and couldn’t go to the shop, Nino drafted Gianni to help instead. But Gianni hated it, grumbling and complaining the whole time. Sometimes he simply defied his father.
“Nino sometimes told Gianni he had to come help, but there was no way,” Zia Nora remembered. “He would just say no.”
The constant comparisons to Santo embittered Gianni. His teachers often pointed out the differences between the two brothers. Nino and Franca badly wanted to see their children earn university degrees, which few families in Reggio could yet afford. They were pleased to see Santo grow into a serious young man. Gianni, however, was directionless, a dreamer and a slacker. His parents made their displeasure known.
“My parents adored Santo because he was the perfect child, the one who studied and always did what he was told, while I was the black sheep,” Gianni said much later. “I was the one who answered back, the one who didn’t study. It weighed on me.”16
Santo’s athletic prowess, a source of great pride for Nino, also embarrassed Gianni, a skinny kid with little interest in sports. One winter, the family went skiing in the Aspromonte, when Gianni took a violent fall and badly broke his tibia. Emergency surgery left an ugly nine-inch scar that marred his leg so badly that as an adult he would try unsuccessfully to have a plastic surgeon erase it. Worse still, Gianni brought home abysmal grades, frequently failing subjects such as Latin, geography, and math, and scarcely passing the rest of his courses, even art. He constantly cut classes to go to the beach. Franca sometimes drafted her seamstresses to corral her unruly son and get him to school.
“I can still picture him with two of the seamstresses, dragging Gianni under his arms, his hands covered in chocolate,” said Anna Candela, a close family friend. “They were literally lifting him off the ground.”17
When he made it to school, he sat in the back of the drab classroom, paying little attention, instead filling notebook after notebook with sketches. Once, his teacher summoned Franca to the school. She showed her Gianni’s notebooks, filled with drawings of women with huge busts and tiny wasplike waists. “Signora, your son is some sort of sex maniac,” the teacher said. The truth was far different, of course. Gianni had a boyish fascination not with women as sex objects but as the divas of the day—namely, the sultry actresses Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren, who starred in the films he avidly watched at the local cinema.
“Those sketches were a sign of what I would become,” he would say decades later. “But how could I explain that to a teacher in Reggio Calabria in 1956?”
While Santo was protective of Gianni, he scolded him for wasting his allowance, usually on clothes, magazines, and later, tickets to concerts and the theater. In turn, Gianni tried to squeeze more money out of his older brother.
One of the few occasions that brought father and son together was the opera. Nino loved opera and often took Gianni with him. Once when his mother dressed him in a gray velvet jacket and black pants to go to the Teatro Cilea in Reggio to see Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, Gianni, sitting next to his father, who was dressed in black, felt like a prince. He found the costumes and the sets dazzling, touching a creative chord that would resonate later.18
But Gianni did not dream then of being a clothing designer. Instead, he wanted to become a musician—he idolized the American composer George Gershwin—and he pestered his parents to send him to a local high school for the arts. Nino wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted Gianni to earn a surveying degree at a technical high school. As rural areas poured their population into the cities in the south, a building boom was sweeping Reggio, and Nino reckoned that a degree in surveying was a ticket to a secure job. He insisted Gianni enroll at the city’s technical high school, housed in an ugly gray Fascist-era building that was as forbidding as a prison.
Although the teenage Gianni languished at school, he blossomed in Franca’s atelier. He spent more and more time in his mother’s shop, passing the afternoons sketching or cutting photos out of fashion magazines. During the family’s summer retreats to the mountains, he would disappear for hours, a sketchbook tucked under his arm. When he was about fifteen, his mother started sending him to Messina to deliver garments to be embroidered by a particularly skilled craftswoman there, and to buy fabrics for the shop. He loved rummaging through dozens of thick spools of fabrics, looking for something unique. These short trips across the strait gave him the first taste of life beyond Reggio. The standards of Reggio society and achievement soon felt suffocating. When the time came for Gianni to take the state exam necessary to receive a high school diploma, he simply skipped it and never received the degree, bitterly disappointing his father.
Moreover, as Gianni advanced through his teenage years, Nino must have also worried about Gianni’s lack of interest in girls, especially as Santo was gaining a reputation as a young lothario. The skinny, shy Gianni seemed a mammone, a mama’s boy, forever tied to Franca’s apron strings. Classmates began to notice that Gianni was different, and some began to avoid him. That only made him more reluctant to attend school.
According to Angelo Bernabo, a former classmate, “He was certainly a very sensitive person. He had this falsetto voice, a very high-pitched voice, so he was classified as ‘different’ immediately. Some people were afraid that, if they hung out with him, others would jump to the wrong conclusions.”19
Once, Gianni dressed up as a woman for carnevale. “He was the spitting image of a woman,” a close friend recalled. “We had to go pick him up and I saw him walking down the street in this outfit. I thought, O mio Dio, what if someone sees us!”
As a teenager, his growing awareness of being gay was a heavy burden for Gianni. In the early 1960s, homosexuality was still deeply taboo in Calabria, where sexual mores remained suffocatingly strict. It was shameful for a family, particularly a Calabrian father, to have a gay son. Italian mothers of the era sometimes protected their gay offspring, but in Calabria they often took the side of the father in ostracizing a homosexual child. Gay men were the target of taunts—they were called ricchiuni, Calabrian dialect for “queer”—and, occasionally, violence. Gianni hid his sexuality, never speaking about it to his parents, or even Santo, who, according to some friends, found his brother’s emerging sexual orientation embarrassing. Nora was the only one to whom he confided his secret, and she, in turn, was extremely protective of the teenager, defending him when Franca or Nino lost their patience with Gianni.
But any anguish over his sexuality, and his concealment of it, did not stop Gianni from exploring his desires. He started to hang out on an isolated beach just north of Reggio, where a tiny alternative scene bustled. Teenagers smoked pot, women bathed topless, and gay men met up. After high school, Gianni went to Taormina and Catania, two cities on Sicily’s eastern coast that had some gay nightclubs and saunas. When he was alone with one of the few gay friends he’d found in Reggio, he could allow himself some freedom, joking about his sexuality.
“A gay man in Reggio had problems,” said Bruno De Robertis, who was one of Gianni’s few close gay friends in Calabria. “In Reggio, gay life didn’t exist—there were no bars or clubs. But I could talk with Gianni about everything—about traveling, about sex, about leaving Reggio. It was a subject that brought us together.”20
By the time he was eighteen, Gianni began to dream of escaping his native city.
“Reggio was very, very provincial then,” said another close friend. “And there was Gianni, with his ‘problem.’”
Gianni found refuge in the form of his baby sister. From the start, Donatella was the cocca, or coddled baby, of the family. Nine years younger than Gianni and eleven years younger than Santo, she was the much-cherished replacement for her dead sister, Tinuccia, a living gift to compensate for the great loss of the family’s first daughter. Following Donatella’s birth, Franca and Nino broke with the Calabrian tradition of bestowing family names on their children, instead giving her a name that was derived from dono, or “gift” in Italian. Donatella would benefit not only from her parents’ love for Tina but from the Versaces’ increasing prosperity. By the time Donatella was born, the family had a relatively affluent lifestyle that included three cars and a small beach-side vacation cottage. As a result, everyone spoiled little Donatella. Her cousin Tita Versace has said that “anything Donatella wanted, they made sure she got it.”21
Franca was extremely attached to Donatella. The loss of her first daughter had shaken Franca deeply, despite her solid, optimistic character. When she gave birth to Donatella, she poured her grief for her eldest child into her love and affection for her youngest one. While she loved her sons, she had yearned for a little girl, and she spoiled Donatella without reserve, taking her shopping and having her seamstresses make her elaborate dresses. In her shop, Franca sometimes emptied the big baskets she used to hold bolts of cloth and plopped Donatella in one, rocking her gently as she worked. As she grew older, Donatella would remain much closer to her mother than to Nino, who would always be a remote figure for the little girl.
Surrounded as she was by adults, Donatella grew up fast, and Gianni soon made her his accomplice in his teenage rebellion. He would send her to steal the keys to their parents’ car from Nino’s nightstand so that he could go dancing or to a concert, or have her pilfer money from their parents’ wallets when he had spent his entire allowance. She eagerly went along, relishing the attention given her by her big brother.
“Everything he asked me to do for him was fun for me,” Donatella would recall. “I’ve never found anyone who was as exciting and fun.”22
Gianni sometimes loaded Donatella into his baby blue Cinquecento to take her with him to the beach, where they spent hours with Gianni’s friends at the Bagno Milea, popular for its three hundred wooden changing rooms, lounge chairs, and purple and white umbrellas. Other times, they headed to the beaches on the Ionic coast, which afforded more hours of sunlight and where young people soaked up the sun from as early as April.
As she grew up, Donatella played by the rules of Reggio, displaying more focus and ambition than her errant brother. Unlike Gianni, Donatella was a diligent student, particularly in English. But otherwise, the siblings shared similar characteristics. While Santo was more exuberant and garrulous, neither Gianni nor Donatella was very expansive or open to outsiders. Both shy and taciturn by nature, they had a small clutch of close friends and would often shoot strangers a wary, steely look. As one childhood friend described it, “Donatella hated it when there were new people around, or someone she didn’t know, because she couldn’t be herself.”
Meanwhile, Santo, ever the diligent elder brother, fulfilled his parents’ dreams for their children. He played for Reggio’s semiprofessional basketball team and excelled in high school, where he studied accounting. Around the same time, he began to help with the family’s finances, negotiating the terms of loans and investments with the bank managers.
“When we were kids, Gianni and I were the clubbers and he was the one who finished his homework and then went to help our mother close the shop,” Donatella once said of her oldest brother. “Gianni and I used to say, Santo is so boring! But we knew we could count on him.”23
In 1963, after high school, Santo enrolled in the University of Messina—Reggio wouldn’t have its own university until years later—shuttling back and forth across the strait from Sicily to attend classes. At school, he became one of the top leaders of a large left-leaning political group, displaying natural organizational skill at a time when student politics in Italy was stirring with fresh radical ferment. While many students in Italy take seven or eight years to finish their degrees, Santo, ever the methodical student, rushed through in four. In 1968, he became the first in the family to finish college, earning an economics degree with top honors, having produced a 410-page thesis entitled “The Economic Effects of Public Spending on Gross National Product.”
“There was always Santo, the calm one, Gianni, the enfant terrible and me, Gianni’s accomplice,” Donatella later recalled.24 “Santo was a sort of father figure. Instead, Gianni was my friend.”25 The youthful dynamic among the three siblings would mark their adult relationships with one another, fostering their success in the years ahead—and, thanks to the inevitable dysfunction among them, ultimately leading them close to ruin.