Alain Elkann Interviews

ALWAYS ON A ROLL. Rolf Sachs is an artist born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1955 who works across a diverse range of media, from photography, painting, sculpture and installation, to interiors and set design.  In 2018 he moved to Rome where he opened a new studio in 2020.   From July 17, 2025 to October 25, 2025 the Kunsthalle Schweinfurt in Germany presents Rolf Sachs: be-rühren, his most comprehe...

BUILDING EXPERIENCES FOR LIFE STORIES.  David  Prior is a travel writer, editor, and the founder of Prior, a travel and media company that curates immersive journeys and offers custom travel planning. He was formerly a contributing editor at Condé Nast Traveler and Vogue Living, and his work has appeared in various publications like T: The New York Times Style Magazine and WSJ. "Australia is the m...

WORKING FOR GLOBAL SECURITY.  Sir John Chipman   KCMG is Executive Chairman of The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).  As former Director-General and Chief Executive of the IISS he directed its growth globally as the world's premier institute providing facts and analysis on international security issues. He developed the IISS role as a convener of vital inter-governmental summit...

PORTRAYING THE DESTRUCTION OF CULTURE.  Piers Secunda studied painting at Chelsea College of Art in London. Since the late nineties he has developed a studio practice using paint in a sculptural manner, rejecting the limitations imposed by the canvas. Piers' work examines some of the most significant subjects of our time, such as the deliberate destruction of culture. "I make the work so that in t...

STANDING FOR CLARITY AND COMPLEXITY.  Emily  Greenhouse  has been the Editor of the prestigious New York Review of Books magazine since 2019. She is the first woman to be sole editor of the magazine,  and when she was appointed was the youngest editor in  its history. "What we publish is very accessible and very delightful" "We are a very jousty magazine." "It is our job to talk about complex thin...

A LINEAGE OF THE REAL AND THE AUTHENTIC.  Luc Tuymans is a Belgian visual artist, many of whose paintings explore people's relationship with history and confront their ability to ignore it. World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust is a recurring theme in his many faceted work. Tuymans is a key figure of the generation of European figurative painters who gained renown at a time when many belie...

CURATING THE VERY DIFFERENT IDENTITIES OF THE PELLICANO HOTELS GROUP.  Marie-Louise Sciò is CEO of the Pellicano Hotels group in Italy, which today comprises Hotel Il Pellicano in Porto Ercole in Tuscany, La Posta Vecchia Hotel near Rome, and Mezzatorre Hotel & Thermal Spa in Ischia. The youngest child of hotelier Roberto Sciò, Marie-Louise studied design and architecture at the Rhode Island Schoo...

SINGING WITH THE PIANO.  Ludovico Einaudi is an internationally celebrated pianist and composer. Born in Turin, Ludovico is the son of two exceptional people. His mother, the pianist and composer Renata Aldrovandi, was the daughter of the conductor and composer Wando Aldrovandi and had a great influence on his future life. His father Giulio Einaudi was a famous publisher and chairman of the Giulio...

EDITING A MAGAZINE OF MAGAZINES. Donatien Grau is a philologist who currently serves as Head of Contemporary Programmes at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and is also the co-founder and Editor of a new English language magazine called Alphabet. "We all have many lives, and the key to the magazine is that each of those lives includes an artistic element." "Thinking is always in danger." "Remaining true...

SPEAKING TO THE DEFEATED. Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher based in London. His research concerns the metaphysics, politics and history of world-building. His books are Technic and Magic (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Prophetic Culture (Bloomsbury, 2021) and his next book Otherworlds, Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History will investigate the history of cosmological imagination during times...

A REMARKABLE BOOKSELLER. James Daunt is the founder of the Daunt Books chain in the UK, and has been managing director of Waterstones, the bookshop chain of more than 300 stores, since 2011. In 2019 he also became CEO of Barnes & Noble, the American bookstore chain of some 650 stores. An Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Daunt was appointed Commander of the British Empire (CBE) i...

A LARGE MUSEUM IS LIKE AN OPERA.  Laurence des Cars is a French museum curator and art historian who President Macron appointed President and Director of the Louvre Museum in September 2021, becoming the first woman to hold the position in the establishment's 228-year history. Her previous role was President of musée d'Orsay and musée de l'Orangerie. Laurence des Cars is the author of several book...

GOOD GOING.  Graydon Carter  launched his enjoyable digital weekly newsletter  Air Mail   in 2019. He was the editor of  Vanity Fair  for twenty-five years, and under him  Vanity Fair  won numerous awards. Named to the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame, he is also an author and editor of books, a producer of plays and documentaries, and a restaurateur. In the newly published memoir...

AFRICA: FACING THE FACTS.  Guillaume  Bonn  is a documentary photographer who has commented on conflict, social and environmental issues for the last 25 years. As a contributor to the New York Times and Vanity Fair he covered topics ranging from the conflict in Northern Uganda, the Darfur humanitarian crisis and the ivory trade in African elephants.  Bonn  grew up in Kenya and his subsequent repor...

EDUCATING THE CONSUMER ABOUT COFFEE AND TEA.  DAVID VEAL has been deeply involved in both the coffee industry and the tea industry for over 40 years. He is the former Executive Director of the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe and is currently Executive Director of The European Speciality Tea Association, a position he took up in May 2019. "There is a commonality between tea and coffee, and...

HUMANISE: A DEEPLY PASSIONATE MANIFESTO.  Thomas Heatherwick is a British designer whose varied work over two decades is characterised by its originality, inventiveness and humanity. As the founder and design director of Heatherwick Studio, Thomas now heads a team of over 250 problem solvers dedicated to making the physical world around us better for everyone. This team wants to see a world where...

ART ELEVATES YOU EVERY DAY. Cécile Verdier is President of Christie's France. She graduated from Sciences Po and Art History at Paris IV, before spending 4 years at Christie's as Head of Valuations then moving to the 20th Century department, in parallel of taking the hammer for Christie's France since the inauguration sale in 2001. From 2008 to 2018, she was heading the 20th Century Design Departm...

RESTORING AND MAINTAINING EYESIGHT. Professor  Sheng Lim is an internationally renowned ophthalmologist and consultant at St Thomas' Hospital in London.  He was trained in the UK and also spent one year as the International Glaucoma Association's postdoctoral fellow at the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota. He was promoted to Professor of Ophthalmology (Glaucoma Studies) at King's College London in 2020, in...

BEAUTIFULLY TRANSFORMING WALLS AND ROOMS.  Idarica Gazzoni Frascara 's hometown is Bologna, Italy. After she studied with Van Der Kelen in his painting school in Brussels, Belgium, and learned the technique of faux bois and marbleizing she became a passionate artist, painting rooms and walls and ceilings in Italy and many other countries. In 2009 she founded Arjumand's World and opened her first s...

A CROSS DISCIPLINARY WORLD FOR YOUNG ARTISTS.  Jonathan Reekie has been Director of Somerset House Trust in London since 2014. During this time, the renovation of the historic site with its grand Renaissance architecture has been completed, including the launch of Somerset House Studios for artist residencies. Reekie has established Somerset House as a home of cultural innovators and in 2025 Somer...

WORKING WITH THE BRAIN. Alastair Buchan is a British-Canadian doctor who specialises as a clinical neurologist. His main research interest is how to make neuroprotection a reality in the clinic.  He currently holds the Chair of Stroke Research at the University of Oxford. From 2008 until 2017, he served as the Dean of Medicine and the Head of the Medical Sciences Division at the University of Oxfo...

CHANGING TASTE AND VALUE.  Jussi Pylkkänen  is now an independent art advisor. After 38 years of service, his career at Christies culminated in the global presidency of the auction house. Among his many outstanding achievements, in 2017 he was the auctioneer at the sale of the world's most expensive painting, Leonardo da Vinci's  Salvator Mundi,  sold at auction at in New York for $450,312,500, a...

PASSIONATE ABOUT HOW PEOPLE RELAX. Andrea Wong has vast experience in the leisure and entertainment industry on both sides of the Atlantic. Wong was President, International Production for Sony Pictures Television and President, International for Sony Pictures Entertainment based in London. Prior to that, she served as President and CEO of Lifetime Cable Networks. She now serves on the boards of L...

BETWEEN WORLDS. Priscilla  Rattazzi was born in Rome in 1956, attended Atlantic College in Wales, UK, and moved to the United States in the 1970s where she studied photography at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. The themes of her recent London solo exhibition, titled Between Worlds and at Robilant+Voena, offer a reflection of the photographer's life, with an interlinking chronology, examining h...

CREATING A CULTURAL HUB. Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu are the co-founders of Magazzino Italian Art, a museum and research center dedicated to postwar and contemporary Italian art that is located in Cold Spring, New York. Magazzino opened in 2017 at the former manufacturing site of Cyberchron rugged military computer systems. The name Magazzino translates as "warehouse". "Magazzino made the step...