Alain Elkann Interviews

AN INDEFINABLE PERSONALITY.  Patrick Kinmonth is an Anglo-Irish opera director and designer, film maker, writer, painter, interior designer, art editor, creative director and exhibition curator. He is widely known for his many stage, costume, interior and architectural designs and recognised internationally for the breadth and depth of his creative interests. His many collaborations have yielded l...

AN ODE TO CRAFTSMANSHIP AND AUTHENTICITY.  Gabriella Cortese  made her mark on the fashion universe when she founded Antik Batik in 1992. The  Antik Batik fashion house stands out for its collections of chic, bohemian clothing and accessories that emphasise craftsmanship and artistic techniques. It was the alluring scent of adventure that set Gabriella Cortese on her travels and inspired her to cr...

ACTIVELY AGING.  Erri  De Luca  was born in Naples in 1950. A widely celebrated Italian novelist, essayist, poet, and translator, he has been hailed as "the writer of the decade" by Italian critics and his work has been translated into over thirty languages. He has written around 80 books – some say 100 – and is also a translator of important works. He has studied ancient Hebrew, Swahili, Russian...

CHINA FIRST.  Dr. Yu Jie  is Senior Research Fellow for China, Chatham House. She focuses on the interplay between China's domestic political economy and foreign policy and is a seasoned commentator in major international media outlets, including BBC News, the  Financial Times  and  Foreign Policy.  She regularly briefs senior policymakers from G20 governments and leading intergovernmental organis...

SEAMLESSLY BLENDING ART DECO AND CONTEMPORARY DESIGN.  Benoist F. Drut  is managing partner of  Maison Gerard , a leading source for French Art Deco furniture, lighting and objects, and — more recently — postwar and contemporary design. Founded in 1974 by Gerardus Widdershoven, Maison Gerard maintains two premises on East 10th Street in Manhattan and is an  elegant presence at both The Winter Show...

A CREATIVE ENTREPRENEUR.  Marcantonio Brandolini d'Adda , born in 1991, is a Venetian entrepreneur and artist with diverse creative pursuits. The family business, Laguna~B, specialises in contemporary Murano glassware, and from this base Brandolini d'Adda is now expanding his activities into a universe of complementary ventures, including a design studio, a restaurant, and a magazine called EVERYT...

CHOSEN TO SAVE SUN BEARS.  Dr. Wong Siew Te  is a Malaysian wildlife biologist, wildlife conservationist, tropical forest ecologist and nature lover. He studied veterinary science in Taiwan and later wildlife biology at the University of Montana where he began his focus on the rare and little-known Malayan sun bear, the endangered smallest species of bear in the world. In 2008 Wong founded the  Bo...

MILANESE MASTER OF CONTEMPORARY DESIGN.    Piero  Lissoni  is a multi-award-winning-architect, designer and art director. One of the masters of contemporary design, he has an almost forty-year history in the development of projects the world over in the fields of architecture, landscape, interior, product and graphic design. He is art director for Alpi, Boffi, Living Divani, Lualdi, Porro and Sanl...

A PASSION FOR GREECE.  Paolo Colombo is an Italian artist and poet. Born in 1949 in Turin, Italy, he lives and works in Athens, Greece. He was a curator between 1986 and 2017 in Philadelphia, in Geneva, in Istanbul, in Torino and in Athens. His works of visual poetry are exhibited widely. "Greece is my world" "Language is very connected with painting, regardless whether I make a painting of a poem...

COMBINING ARCHITECTURE AND INTERIOR DESIGN.  Nathalie Droulers  and her twin sister  Virginie were born in Milan in 1973. Nathalie graduated in Architecture from the Polytechnic University in Milan in 1997. She worked in New York as a Creative Director in product design development and in 2000 returned to Italy, where she collaborated with the Milan-based Dstudio as a Project Manager. In 2005 she...

COVID REFLECTIONS.  Jay McInerney is a well-known American writer, one of the most gifted of his generation. Novelist, screenwriter and wine connoisseur, McInerney recently published See You on the Other Side, the eagerly anticipated final volume of his stunningly accomplished and profoundly affecting fictional tetralogy: Brightness Falls, The Good Life, and Bright Precious Days. "The stories that...

LUMINARY IN ART CRITIQUE.  Andrew Graham-Dixon is a leading art critic and presenter of arts television in the English-speaking world. With a long history of public service in the field of the visual arts he has won numerous awards for writing and broadcasting. His book "Caravaggio A Life Sacred and Profane" is a Sunday Times Bestseller, and his recent title "Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found" paints...

TAKING FASHION SERIOUSLY.  Valerie Steele is an American fashion historian and the Director and Chief Curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York City. A pioneer in the field of fashion studies, she has been instrumental in establishing fashion as a legitimate intellectual and cultural subject. "Both the allure and the problematic aspects of fashion attracted and...

CHAMPION OF ITALIAN OPERA.  Alvise Casellati  was born in Padua, Italy, from a Venetian musical family with important ties to the top classical music scene in the 19 th  and 20 th  centuries. He is currently serving as Artistic Director of the Teatro Massimo of Palermo, one of the most prestigious opera and dance theaters in Italy and in the world.  He is the Founder and Music Director of Opera It...

DEFENDER OF JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS.  Bianca Jagger is the Founder, President, and Chief Executive of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation (BJHRF), a UK-based human rights organisation that defends human rights and civil liberties, promotes international justice, campaigns to end violence against women and girls, addresses the threat of climate change, and advocates for the rights of Indigen...

REVIVIFYING ROME.  Thomas Clement Salomon is the director of Rome's Baroque Palazzo Barberini and the Galleria Corsini since January 2024. Palazzo Barberini is home to the National Gallery of Ancient Art, with a collection of paintings by Caravaggio and other Caravaggesque painters that now includes the very recently acquired Caravaggio Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini. Thomas studied art hi...

PIONEER OF BAROQUE SCULPTURE.  Jennifer Montagu  LVO CBE is a highly regarded British art historian whose emphasis is in the study of Italian Baroque sculpture. A daughter of Ewen Montagu, a British lawyer, writer and Naval intelligence officer, and granddaughter of painter Solomon J. Solomon RA, she studied under Sir Ernst Gombrich at the Warburg Institute, London where she received her PhD degre...

DAY TO DAY BRILLIANCE.  ANTONIO CITTERIO is an Italian architect, furniture and industrial designer. Today his cross-disciplinary practice for architecture and interior design is known as "ACPV ARCHITECTS Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel". The firm works internationally, developing projects on all scales in collaboration with a network of specialist consultants. In both 1987 and 1994, Antonio Citter...

LEADING AN INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY.  Francesco Billari  is Professor of Demography at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. He became Rector in November 2022 after having held the role of Dean of the Faculty. He has worked at the University of Oxford Department of Sociology, at Nuffield College, and at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. His recent book  Domani è Oggi offers a demogr...

CHANGING THE QUALITY OF TRAUMA IN CHILDREN AND FAMILIES.   David  Trickey is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist who has specialised in working with traumatised children, young people, and their families since 2000. He is Co-Director of the UK Trauma Council, chartered by the British Psychological Society and registered with the Health and Care Professions Council. Across all of his roles, he draws...

PROMOTING ITALIAN CULTURE AND BRIDGING CULTURAL DIVIDES.  Claudio Pagliara  is a journalist who became the Director of the Italian Cultural Institute on Park Avenue in New York in September 2025, soon after he completed his term as head of the RAI Radiotelevisione italiana correspondence office in the United States. With enormous international experience that includes living in Jerusalem for almos...

ANTHROPOLOGY REGENERATES CULTURE.  Simone  Verde  is a museologist and art historian who was appointed Director of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy, in December 2023, replacing Eike Schmidt who moved to Capodimonte. From 2014 to 2016  Simone Verde was head of scientific research at the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, and from 2016 to 2023 he directed the Complesso Monumentale della Pilotta in Parma, I...

THE REGENERATION OF THE FRICK.  Axel Rüger is a German art historian, curator and museum director. Director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam from 2006 to 2019, he previously worked as a curator of Dutch art at the National Gallery in London. He led the Royal Academy of Arts in London from 2019 through 2024, and in March 2025 assumed the directorship of The Frick Collection in New York City. "Yo...

REALISING WONDERFUL IDEAS.  Colin Bailey is a British art historian and Director of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. He is a scholar of eighteenth and nineteenth century French art, with a specific interest in the artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. For the first time ever in America, Caravaggio's Boy With A Basket Of Fruit is on show at The Morgan. "Renoir Drawings is a survey of Renoir wo...

HISTORIAN OF THE ARABS. Professor  Eugene Rogan  is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony's College, University of Oxford. He has a B.A. in economics from Columbia, and an M.A. and PhD in Middle Eastern history from Harvard.  Among many other titles, he is author of  The Arabs: A History   which has been translated into 18 languages and was named one of the best books of 2009 by  The Eco...