Ginevra Elkann’s classic beauty and old-world charm might be an inheritance from her grandmother Marella Agnelli, but her Roman apartment reflects her life as a busy, modern woman — producing films, running a museum and taking care of a young family.
In his novel “The Baron in the Trees,” Italo Calvino writes of a young Ligurian aristocrat who, fed up with the world around him, climbs a tree and decides never to come down. It’s tempting to imagine that a similar feeling urged Ginevra Elkann, the eldest granddaughter of Gianni and Marella Agnelli, into the fifth floor of a limestone palazzo among the treetops at the edge of the Villa Borghese gardens. This bright aerie affords views of the jewels of Rome: the Villa Borghese, the Villa Medici and the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, but best of all a long and uninterrupted line of the city’s famous pini parasole, the umbrella pine trees whose leafy tufts hang over the ruins like a ribbon of low clouds.
“The trees are the main thing,” Elkann says, in a languorous contralto that suggests no single native tongue. “Up here you have a sense that you’re floating. You don’t feel that you’re in a building, or that you’re in Rome, for that matter. To be disconnected is the point.”
In a family flecked with splendor and scandal, Elkann has always floated above the intrigue that clings to the clan: her grandfather’s love affairs, her uncle’s suicide, her mother’s lawsuit against and subsequent ostracism by the family, a brother in rehab, and Fiat, the company that once earned the Agnellis one of the greatest fortunes in the history of Europe, recently back from the brink of bankruptcy. “The press always compared my family to the Kennedys — so much bad luck,” says Elkann, dressed all in black, her chocolate curls punctuated by a single lock of blue at the nape. (Valentino invited her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s punk-themed Costume Institute gala last fall and she colored her hair to match her blue ball gown. There was a little blue remaining when the film she produced last year, Noaz Deshe’s “White Shadow,” won the Lion of the Future award at the Venice Film Festival, so now she maintains a cerulean streak for good luck.) “My mother was very good about giving us a life that was, let’s say, as normal as it could be, not a crazy jetting life at all,” she continues. “That’s been helpful. It’s given me the drive to be someone in the world rather than just sitting around.”
Elkann has been busy indeed, with myriad film projects and as the president of the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, the Renzo Piano-designed museum in Turin built around her grandparents’ trove of masterpieces from Canaletto to Matisse. And lately she has been putting the finishing touches on what she describes as her first grown-up apartment, a flat that she and her husband rented last fall in an elegant neighborhood at the northern edge of Rome’s historic center. The apartment isn’t massive or grand, and Elkann had no particular vision for the place beyond something cozy and easy to live in, not cluttered, never stressful to manage. “We can hear the kids when they need us,” she says.
A roving creature for most of her 34 years, Elkann was born in London to Margherita Agnelli, Gianni and Marella’s only daughter, and Alain Elkann, a writer and the scion of eminent French and Italian Jewish families. Her parents divorced when she was a little girl, and with her mother and stepfather, the Russian count Serge de Pahlen, she moved to Rio de Janeiro and then to Paris. Elkann returned to London for film school, followed by a stretch in New York before her family summoned her to Turin, the seat of the Fiat company, to run the pinacoteca. Five years ago, a romance with Giovanni Gaetani dell’Aquila d’Aragona, an Italian nobleman and race-car driver who runs his family’s farms, brought her to Rome. The couple had a small wedding at her grandmother’s home in Marrakesh in 2009 (followed by a massive party at her father’s villa in the Piedmont), and they now have two sons, Giacomo, 4, and Pietro, 1.
To do up the new apartment, Elkann sought the advice of an old pal of her grandmother’s: Federico Forquet, who had a brief but brilliant career as a couturier in the 1960s before easing into interior design. He imposed his taste for cream-colored walls, introduced Elkann, not exactly a local, to Rome’s best workmen and helped position furniture, art and objects that the couple had amassed over the years. The entry hall houses Gaetani’s racing trophies, which his wife knew she would have no choice but to embrace. “I decided that instead of trying to hide them or scattering them here and there, we would give them their own room,” says Elkann, who pushed the point by placing a huge, gleaming Ferrari Formula One engine on a pedestal in the room’s center. She pulled some strings — Fiat is the majority owner of Ferrari — and gave it to her husband as a birthday gift.
The couple occasionally dips into Rome’s rather tribal social life, where, Elkann says, “everyone knows each other and has known each other forever.” But most nights they dine together in the kitchen, where Martino Gamper, the Italian furniture designer who resurfaces old pieces with vibrantly colored parquetry, provided the butter-colored cabinet and the kitchen table. The wide floorboards are painted a shade of gray that Elkann puzzled over for weeks. “I get obsessive that way,” she says, “whereas Giovanni, though he has a taste for beautiful things, will say, ‘You handle the details.’ ” According to Elkann’s close friend (and second cousin) Coco Brandolini, the Elkann sensibility usually balances rigor with nonchalance. “I think Ginevra’s family, her grandmother specifically, has a strong influence on her,” Brandolini says. “She and Marella have in common this way of dressing and decorating that is both very simple and extremely sophisticated. Ginevra is one of those rare women who understand that it’s much more elegant to be comfortable than to be uncomfortable.”
Behind the kitchen is Elkann’s favorite room, a sort of home theater that becomes a playroom or second guest room when the need arises. Beneath an intricately beamed gable, Rachel Feinstein’s “Panorama of Rome 2012″ hangs on three walls. In a room with no view, this trompe l’oeil fantasia of classical and baroque monuments, painted onto a mirror, provides views of Rome that the rest of the house comes by honestly. Elkann says that Feinstein wasn’t sure how to finish the painting until an old photograph of the Piazza San Carlo in Turin caught her eye. “With me from Torino and Giovanni from Rome, we felt it was the perfect piece for us,” she explains.
When Elkann took the reins of the pinacoteca, in 2006, its mission was still unclear. And then she had the clever idea of turning this museum born out of a collection into a showcase for other collections — from contemporary African painting to outsider art to Jean Prouvé furniture to reliquaries. “The challenge is to show something other than a blue-chip collection, which is great for whoever’s collecting it but doesn’t really give people a chance to see something they haven’t seen before,” Elkann explains. “I prefer to discover something more eccentric or personal, someone’s cabinet de curiosités.”
Elkann’s own heterogeneous assemblage of paintings and photographs, by Lara Favaretto, Pablo Bronstein, Francis Alÿs, Edward Kay and others, fills the apartment’s great room, so bright from the broad terraces on both sides that it could be mistaken for a conservatory. Despite the contemporary art clustered on walls and leaning against windows, the room offers a reminder that Elkann is Marella Agnelli’s granddaughter after all. A small round table is draped in a faded suzani, puddling at the floor, a flaking iron lamp terminates in a pleated shade fashioned from an old sari and cushions are covered in Moroccan point de Fès. There is also plenty of that Agnelli signature, wicker. “It’s in all her homes,” Elkann says, “and even though my grandparents had a different style of life, in huge homes with lots of staff, she always made things feel relaxed, never pompous.” (Agnelli, now 86, is apt to reserve her grandeur for those who traffic in status symbols and easy flash: Touring Sid and Mercedes Bass’s New York apartment, full of spectacular art and antiques, she supposedly whispered of her hostess, “It will take her another lifetime to understand wicker.”)
Perched on a side table, an old photograph of Agnelli, her head tilted to the side to display a legendarily long neck, seems to preside over the room. Elkann recognizes her nonna’s hallowed position in 20th-century society, as wife of a man Italians referred to as il re (“the king”) and one of Truman Capote’s swans. (Capote once told the Washington hostess Katharine Graham that if Agnelli and Babe Paley were both in a Tiffany’s window, “Marella would be more expensive.”) “It’s easier to be the granddaughter of an icon than her daughter,” Elkann says, offering a hint of sympathy for her alienated mother, who incurred the familial wrath when she contested her prodigious inheritance seven years ago. Though she prefers not to discuss the matter, Elkann acknowledges that she and her mother are on speaking terms again.
To be a quiet cove at the edge of a turbulent family sea: This has been Elkann’s way, and while her brother John runs Fiat and her brother Lapo embraces the dolce vita that his grandfather embodied, she is doing her best to keep her young sons out of the currents. In a country where some say that nepotism is a religion more powerful than Catholicism, Elkann might be expected to walk on water. “Obviously I’m an insider,” she says. “But I didn’t grow up in Italy. I didn’t see the same comedies or listen to the same music. In a way I don’t know where I’m from.” Elkann was raised in the Russian Orthodox religion of her stepfather, though she studied Jewish history in college and remains devoted to Jewish causes. She is raising her sons in the Catholic Church — at the request of her husband and, she says, “in an effort to reduce the complexity of the situation.”
Elkann gazes into a distance shaped by those ancient trees. “I try for my children to have the most normal life. Obviously they’re spoiled. I’m not saying they’re not, because we’re all very spoiled.” She sighs. “But within that I’d like them to be as down-to-earth as possible.”
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