An Insider’s Peek at Valentino Legend Giancarlo Giammetti’s Sprawling Roman Palazzo

It began on the Via Veneto, July 31, 1960. On a warm Sunday night, the paparazzi were prowling the cafés, waiting to snap a screen goddess or perhaps a dowager principessa—the scene Federico Fellini immortalized when La Dolce Vita was released earlier that year.

Giancarlo Giammetti was an unlikely player in this decadent Roman mix. The 18-year-old architecture student’s father owned an electronics store. But the shop was a block from the fashionable Café de Paris, which gave the elder Giammetti as well as his son privileges to a regular table.

Giancarlo was ensconced in his seat when Valentino Garavani walked in. The 28-year-old Northern Italian already had a worldly air, having apprenticed in Paris with Jean Dessès, couturier to the Greek court and European nobility. Newly arrived in Rome, Garavani was launching his own label. He was “incredibly seductive, with his deep tan, blue eyes, and soft but intense way of speaking,” Giammetti wrote in his 2013 Assouline book, Private: Giancarlo Giammetti.

“Where can I find you?” Giammetti asked after a short chat.

“Via Condotti, undici,” Garavani replied, giving Giammetti the address of a baroque 16th-century palazzo where he had rented the second-floor apartment to present his first collection. The year before, on a makeshift runway in a frescoed salon, he’d sent out 110 looks. Among them was an hourglass-shaped cocktail dress of draped tulle bright as a poppy. The first dress Valentino ever produced in red, it was so delightful he gave it a name: Fiesta.

By September, following a rendezvous on Capri, Garavani and Giammetti were a couple. The rest is fashion history: With Giammetti running the business side, Garavani became an international superstar. The Valentino brand established its headquarters in a sumptuous Renaissance palazzo at 22 Piazza Mignanelli (just around the corner from Via Condotti and the Spanish Steps), and the partners created outrageously extravagant homes for themselves on two continents. (“They’re so fancy, they put me to shame,” Gianni Agnelli once said.)

After staging an epic three-day celebration in Rome in 2007, Garavani and Giammetti bowed out of the business in a blaze of glory and chiffon, which director Matt Tyrnauer captured in his hit 2008 documentary, Valentino: The Last Emperor. (Now under the creative direction of Alessandro Michele, the Valentino brand is majority-owned by Mayhoola, a Qatari investment fund; in 2023, Kering acquired a 30 percent stake in a deal that gave it the option to buy the remaining 70 percent within five years.)

In retirement, Garavani and Giammetti hardly faded away. Front-row fixtures at nearly every Valentino show, they entertained friends like Gwyneth Paltrow, Anne Hathaway, and Madonna at their homes and aboard the TM Blue One, their 152-foot superyacht.

“There’s nothing else like it,” says Hathaway about the duo’s world. “It’s elegant, intentional, and elevated, yet relaxed, cozy, and fun. They are able to choose a lot of things that we think of as contradictory and make them complementary. I’m always amazed at how inspired and recharged I feel when I come away from my time with them.”

In 2016 the pair launched the Fondazione Valentino Garavani e Giancarlo Giammetti (FVG) to support their charitable and cultural endeavors. Now, as they sail into their golden years—“Vava” turned 93 in May and “GG” is 83—they are about to unveil their legacy project: an international center for the arts, fashion, and culture housed in a 10,800-square-foot palazzo next door to their old headquarters, which they have dubbed PM23, from its address in Piazza Mignanelli. What’s more, while Giammetti was overseeing the renovation of that building, he acquired a lease on the second-floor apartment on the Via Condotti.

Over the past decades it had been occupied by Anna Bulgari Calissoni, a matriarch of the jewelry dynasty, members of which own the palazzo. (LVMH, which acquired the majority stake in the Bulgari brand in 2011, operates its flagship boutique on the street level.) A few years ago Giammetti heard that the elderly Calissoni had died. “I jumped on it!” he recounts, referring to her apartment. In fact, he already had a stunning apartment on the fourth floor, which Peter Marino decorated for him. On the second floor, where frescoed walls, marble floors, and beamed ceilings were still intact, Giammetti envisioned a regal office where he could conduct business and entertain on behalf of the FVG.

As reimagined by the Milan-based design firm Studio Peregalli Sartori, it is now a space fit for a fashion monarch as well as a showcase for Giammetti’s stellar collection of modern and contemporary art. Most recently, two monumental paintings by Anselm Kiefer—heavily layered with emulsion, shellac, coal, lead, and gold leaf—were hoisted upon the walls of the very salone where Fiesta made its debut.

But don’t call it an apartment: I was informed in writing by the FVG communications office that this publication “must mandatorily refer to” the location as the “presidency offices of Fondazione Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti.”

It’s just a three-minute walk from (acronymically) POFVGGG to PM23, where Garavani and Giammetti have an even more famous landlord—the pope. More specifically, the building has belonged to an arm of the Vatican known as the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, or Propaganda Fide. Established by Pope Gregory XV in 1622, the organization was tasked with “the transmission and dissemination of the faith throughout the whole world.” It was the mother of all influencers. Twenty-three Piazza Mignanelli was its printing house: books, pamphlets, manifestos, and the like were produced here and shipped to people across the earth to make believers out of them.

Garavani and Giammetti are firm in their own beliefs. “Beauty has always been the value that has inspired us,” they wrote in their mission statement for PM23. “We believe it has the power to elevate, transform, and leave an indelible mark on people’s lives.”

In addition to sponsoring a variety of educational activities aimed at incubating new design talent, they plan to hold two major exhibitions a year, spanning art, fashion, and education. For the inaugural show, entitled “Horizons | Red,” they chose to explore their signature color. “It was the easiest way to start,” says Giammetti. According to Pamela Golbin, one of the show’s two curators, this is the first exhibition focused on a single color, bridging the worlds of contemporary art and fashion.

The clothes, all designed by Garavani, have been borrowed from his archives. “Valentino was the only couturier to create a distinct oeuvre based on a single emblematic color, Valentino Red. His collections repeatedly featured a red silhouette, which evolved into his leitmotif par excellence,” notes Golbin, previously head curator of the Department of Fashion and Textiles of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

The designer himself puts it more simply. Valentino Red “makes a woman very happy because she looks sensational,” he has said.

Alongside the gowns, the exhibition will feature 33 works of art created by European and American greats, including Picasso, Bacon, Rothko, Twombly, Warhol, and Basquiat. While a number of them belong to Giammetti, many are on loan from private and public collections.

In the case of a six-by-six-foot 1983 Basquiat oil titled In This Case, ownership has transferred. Giammetti bought it in 2007 from the Gagosian Gallery and hung it in his New York City apartment. It is one of three large-scale skull paintings the artist created in the early 1980s—now considered a holy trinity in his oeuvre. In In This Case, the splattering of blood-red paint gives the skull demonic energy. Much as Giammetti loved the iconic picture, he sent it to auction at Christie’s four years ago, where it fetched $93,105,000. “I sold it to start our foundation,” he explains. The identity of its current owner is unknown (though informed sources say it is reportedly Bernard Arnault). Whoever it is has graciously loaned it back to PM23 for the exhibition.

Several of the most compelling paintings in the exhibition were created by Italian artists such as Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Alighiero Boetti in the 1950s and 1960s when, after the horrors as well as the drabness of the war years, artists were rediscovering red. “Red was reborn in painting with an unmistakable new vitality, endowed with extraordinary energy and talent,” says Anna Coliva, the show’s other curator.

According to Coliva, who was formerly the director of the Galleria Borghese, Garavani and artists of his time were tapping into the same vein, as it were: “With his red, [Garavani] grasped the roots and effects of a momentous, parallel transformation occurring in art.”

“At this point in our lives, Valentino and I wanted to give something back,” Giammetti explains to me about PM23 during a chat in Rome last winter. “I didn’t want to do a wax museum with clothes. We see too much of that. It’s not just about clothes, be they beautiful, less beautiful.… I wanted to do something…more alive,” he says.

“Beauty is not just about aesthetics,” he adds. “Beauty is about feelings, beauty is about creation. There is something magic in the word beauty—especially in these times, when things seem so ugly, so miserable.”

It’s rather fitting that Giammetti lives upstairs from Bulgari, considering his close relationship with Elizabeth Taylor, who was a superfan of the jewelry house. (“The only word she knows in Italian is ‘Bulgari,’” Richard Burton once quipped.)

Only a few months after Garavani and Giammetti met at Café de Paris, a well-connected friend of theirs talked up the fledgling designer to Taylor, who had arrived in Rome to begin production on Cleopatra. “Okay, let’s see some clothes,” said the star. As Giammetti recalls, Taylor arrived and liked something. “I need it for tomorrow night,” she said, for the premiere of Spartacus, the Kirk Douglas gladiator epic.

Then came the deal. “Elizabeth liked…gifts,” Giammetti explains. “She said, ‘If I get my picture taken in it, you give me the dress.’”

Needless to say, she was photographed in it, and the house of Valentino got on the map. It was the start of a lifelong friendship between Taylor and the boys.

As for the relationship between Garavani and Giammetti, it evolved over the decades. Their first 12 years, they spent nearly every day and night together. In 1972 they broke up romantically. “Transforming our relationship into something new was a gradual process. But I soon realized that Valentino would always be family,” Giammetti says.

“Our closeness, the way we needed each other—it was above everything else, it was stronger than whatever happened to us. What was most important was that we were always there for each other. We are there for each other.”

“He’s okay,” says Giammetti about his partner’s health today. “But he’s not walking well. That’s why he’s upset, that’s why he doesn’t want to see anybody. He doesn’t want to be seen in a [wheel] chair.”

“Two years ago, when Mr. Giammetti contacted us about working on the Via Condotti project, I was a bit intimidated. He is a mythological figure,” says Laura Sartori Rimini of Studio Peregalli Sartori. She and her partner, Roberto Peregalli, know something about mythological figures. They began their careers working for the revered Renzo Mongiardino, whose client list included the loftiest names in European society (Rothschild, Agnelli, Niarchos, and Brandolini d’Adda among them). “Our master,” as Rimini and Peregalli still reverently refer to Mongiardino, also designed a villa on the Appia Antica in Rome for Garavani, where the designer still lives today, and a country house in Cetona, Italy, for Giammetti.

Palazzo Maruscelli Lepri, as the building on Via Condotti is named, was built around 1660. Rimini and Peregalli (who have recently also been working with Marc Jacobs on the interiors of his Frank Lloyd Wright–designed house in Rye, New York) were delighted to find that the second floor retained much of its ancient Roman fittings. At the same time, the design duo sensed a narrative. “It’s a Roman love story,” Rimini says about Giammetti’s life in the Eternal City. “So it was important to me that we keep the Roman soul of the apartment. It was about restoring it, yet bringing in some contemporary atmosphere.” (“While being really respectful of tradition, there is something amazingly rebellious about [Giammetti’s] taste,” says Hathaway.)

Hence, one finds, for example, Zaha Hadid’s gleaming white and asymmetrical Aqua table (2006), which Giammetti uses as his desk. Above it is a black and red Calder mobile. Nearby, there’s Study for Portrait, an oil on canvas by Francis Bacon; Untitled (14 Papers From Silverwood), an oil and colored pencil on paper by Cy Twombly; and a large untitled watercolor on paper by Kehinde Wiley. And then an absolutely striking Basquiat from 1984: a skeletal figure painted in black acrylic on a white wooden door—one of the found objects on which Basquiat disseminated his defiant iconography.

Looking at the Basquiat triggers another memory for Giammetti. In the early 1980s the artist came to Rome with his girlfriend, the model Leslie Winer, who was shooting an ad campaign for Valentino. The shoot took longer than planned. As Giammetti recollects, the model and the artist spent most of their time in Rome cavorting. One morning, according to Giammetti, the company’s public relations director Daniela Giardini arrived at her office in Piazza Mignanelli to find Basquiat sprawled on the floor, asleep.

Such storied lives on the global stage Giammetti and Garavani have led. Now it’s all coming back to the very blocks where “two young, young men had a vision and bet on themselves,” as Hathaway puts it. During my visit in February, I asked Giammetti to describe his emotions as he moves into the second floor on Via Condotti and prepares to open PM23. “Listen, there is still so much work to be done right now,” he responded. “I don’t feel the emotions, just the stress.”