![]() ![]() “So,” she’d ask with her ironic smile, “can you imagine your life without this person?” After all, her own marriage to Gianni, though long and based on a mutualĭevotion, did have its share of heartache. and later, after meeting my future husband, the artist Sandro Chia - “zia Marella” was the person I turned to for advice. When I was young and going through my first romantic troubles Love is a concept to which Marella is finely attuned, and “amore” (with an exclamation mark) her preferred term of endearment for younger relatives. The Met show in 1978/Courtesy of Agnelli Archives, photo: "Marella Agnelli, New York, December 16, 1953," photograph by Richard Avedon © the Richard Avedon Foundation Oberto Gili/Courtesy of Rizzoli ![]() Credit Clockwise from left: Courtesy of Agnelli Archives Richard Avedon's personalized invitation to Marella Agnelli for “In retrospect,” she told me, “my central preoccupation was Gianni, and creating an environmentįor our art collection that he could relate to.”Ĭlockwise from top left: Marella and a friend poolside in Rome in 1946 an Avedon photo of Marella in 1978 with a note from the photographer the Chinese Gallery at Villar Perosa the gardens of Villa Frescot, the Agnelli home in Turin. Of the White House) and the English gardener Russell Page, who guided her in the estate’s transformation. When she did, it was in part thanks to the Paris decorator Stéphane Boudin (whom Jackie Kennedy had consulted on the décor Marella would not find her vocation as a talented homemaker and gardener for another year. ![]() The Countess’s motto, Marella told me, laughing, was: “To catch a man all one needs is a bed, but it takes a well-run home to keep him.” On notepads and matchboxes, how to seat guests at a formal dinner. She gave the young bride a crash course in how to manage the kind of home Gianni expected: how to find the best chefs, where to get initials embroidered on bed linens or printed Volpi was the owner of Palazzo Volpi in VeniceĪnd known for her savoir faire as a hostess. Gianni, noticing his young wife’s hesitation to adopt the role of lady of the house, phoned up Countess Lily Volpi - a “dragoness,” according to Marella. “I spent the first months of my marriage on the sofa reading French novels and wondering what I could possibly do with all that time on my hands,” she told me She had recently returned from New York, where she had worked as anĪssistant to the photographer Erwin Blumenfeld. She has worked with some of the great architects, decorators and landscape designers of her time.Īnd yet, when she first moved into the grand Agnelli house in Villar Perosa in the mountains southwest of Turin, the 26-year-old beauty felt at a loss. She has planted four gardens so large and articulate they are best described as parks, and designed her own line of fabrics. In the 60 years since her marriage to Gianni Agnelli, scion and chairman of the Fiat empire, my aunt Marella has created 15 homes located at varying altitudes on both sides of the Atlantic and north and south of the Mediterranean. Credit Clockwise from left: Courtesy of Agnelli Archives François Halard/Trunk Archive Franco Calosso/Courtesy of Agnelli Clockwise from left: the writer’s aunt Marella Agnelli and her husband Gianni Agnelli at home in Corsica in the ’70s the facade of Villar Perosa, the Agnellis’ villa outside Turin Marella, who worked as a model and an assistant to Erwin Blumenfeld, holding her favorite Nikon camera in 1972. ![]()
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