April, 2015 | Beyond

In Search of Madame Butterfly

That snowy evening in March 1900, it seemed as if all of New York high society had crowded into the Berkeley Lyceum Theater on West 44th Street. The auditorium, glittering with ladies in pearls and fashionable off-the-shoulder dresses, flourishing lorgnettes and escorted by evening-suited gentlemen, buzzed with excitement. Before them lay an extraordinarily exotic scene: a set painted with blossom-laden cherry trees, wooden and bamboo houses of the legendary Yoshiwara pleasure quarters of Tokyo, a cluster of Japanese actors dressed in outlandish costumes, and in the center, a single, tiny, dainty figure, her head tilted coquettishly. With her stiff brocade kimonos, foot-high wooden clogs and knotted hair studded with tortoiseshell hairpins as long as knitting needles, she was utterly exquisite. As an enigmatic smile flickered across her face, a hush descended on the auditorium. Then, with a flutter of her fan, she began to dance.

Japan had been open to the West for less than 50 years after centuries of isolation, and almost immediately Westerners had gone mad about its wonderful arts. On both sides of the Atlantic, Japonisme was all the rage. Vases, swords, netsuke, woodblock prints and blue-and-white porcelain were treasured collectables, fashionable ladies wore kimonos as exotic evening dress and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado had been a smash hit. But while society had heard about the mysterious geisha of Japan, no one had ever seen one. And now suddenly here was Sadayakko: “like a woodblock print come to life”, as one admirer said.

My own journey through 21st-century Japan in search of Sadayakko’s history could not have started farther away from the gilded world in which the geisha lived. Stepping out of the spectacular high-tech steel and glass halls of Kansai International Airport, which floats on an artificial island off the coast, I take the train to Osaka, where (as I always do when I arrive in Japan) I feel as if I’ve been transported into the future. Once a seaport, Osaka has long been the commercial heart of the country, home to merchants famous for their business acumen. Nowadays it’s a city of futuristic skyscrapers crammed side-by-side with ancient temples, quiet parks and tiny tile-roofed shrines guarded by carved stone lions. Neon lights the sky, buildings tower into the clouds, shops gleam with fashionable gadgets. On Midosuji Dori, the so-called Champs-Elysées of the Orient, home to The St. Regis Osaka and lined with sophisticated boutiques, there’s a rush of noise and bustle and crowds. A dozen lanes of traffic hurtle between the gingko trees that shade the sidewalks, hawkers sell roasted chestnuts and people in designer labels, business suits or the occasional kimono hurry to work or sip cappuccinos in the nearby Starbucks. Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Apple are here alongside shops selling gold, kimonos and silk-covered sandals.

It’s hard to imagine that just over 100 years ago, in Sadayakko’s time, the city was a maze of tiny streets, the widest just broad enough for very early motor cars, the back alleys so narrow that not even a rickshaw could squeeze through. It was in 1899 that she had set off with her husband, Otojiro, and a small group of actors, to America: the first professional Japanese theater troupe ever to tour the West. And it was then that her own journey to superstardom had begun: her transformation from a geisha to the most famous Japanese woman of her time, the woman who inspired Puccini’s opera, Madame Butterfly.

In her youth Sadayakko had been Japan’s most famous and desired geisha. From the age of four she was trained in dancing and singing, and she went on to become the mistress of the prime minister, Hirobumi Ito. Geisha were trendsetters and, as well as wearing multi-layered embroidered kimonos, Sadayakko experimented with western bustles, bonnets and high-heeled shoes, rode horses and played billiards.

In spite of being famous in Japan as a geisha, she wasn’t an instant hit when she arrived in America. At first the troupe had planned to perform as they had in Japan, using only male actors. But they realised that to appeal to American audiences they needed a female star. As a geisha, Sadayakko could dance and sing and perform kabuki plays, and she was beautiful. No sooner had she landed in San Francisco than word quickly spread across the country, and a tour was arranged. In Boston she drew record audiences and rave reviews. In Washington, she was asked to dance before President William McKinley. By the time she reached New York, she was a superstar.

It wasn’t just in America that the Japanese dancer’s reputation soared. In London she performed for Edward, Prince of Wales. In Paris, Picasso painted her four times. She went on to tour with the then-unknown dancer Isadora Duncan through Germany and Austria to Russia, where Tsar Nicholas II held a banquet in her honour. And finally she reached Italy, where Puccini was working on his Madame Butterfly, based on a short story by the American writer John Luther Long and the popular play by David Belasco. So spellbound was Puccini by her performances in Milan that he radically altered his new opera, modelling his Cho-Cho-San on her. She became not just the role model for Madame Butterfly, but an icon herself.

Everywhere she went, she was celebrated. When she eventually arrived back in Japan in 1902, at the port of Kobe, there were crowds waiting to see her as she came down the gangplank. Photographs show her wearing a huge white hat and fashionable flouncy Paris gown, riding in her carriage through streets lined with people. She was Japan’s first woman superstar.

With the money they’d made traveling, she and Otojiro decided to make their base in Osaka where they built a brand new theater: the most advanced in Japan. In the West they had performed kabuki plays adjusted to Western taste. Here they would introduce Japanese audiences to Othello, Hamlet, Salome and La Dame aux Camélias.

Pictures of the grand opening of the Imperial Theater in February 1910 show an Edwardian-style music hall embellished with Japanese flourishes, and a kabuki-style walkway running through the audience. The area is now crisscrossed with boulevards lined with office blocks, and although it has long since disappeared, I wanted at least to get a feeling of the world in which they worked: the entertainment district where people flock to see bunraku theatre, with its realistic puppets enacting heart-rending tragedies, and traditional kabuki theatre.

The entertainment district today is nothing like the one in which Sadayakko would have worked. The heart of it, Dotonbori Street, is a pedestrian mall jammed with restaurants and bars, with a giant mechanical crab waving its claws above the city’s most famous crab restaurant, and lights so bright they hurt the eyes. There are restaurants selling every manner of food you can imagine; noodle stalls with three-dimensional golden dragons on the billboards overhead; restaurants serving blowfish that can poison you if not properly prepared; bars and cafés open 24 hours a day. Dotonbori canal runs alongside and on the bridge above the canal is a building walled with giant rectangles of pure light. It’s brash, noisy and exciting.

In Sadayakko’s day, things were simpler and quieter. Pleasure boats bobbed on the river, and low-rise buildings housed teahouses and restaurants hung with flags and lanterns, with people selling fireflies in cages outside. Just around the corner was the Shinmachi pleasure quarter and the geisha district, where Sadayakko would have felt completely at home.

Although in Osaka she and Otojiro lived extremely happily, building up a reputation for their theater, and their own performances, it was short-lived. In 1911, Otojiro fell ill and died shortly afterwards right on the stage, leaving Sadayakko a widow at the age of just 40. But Sadayakko was nothing if not a survivor. When she was a young geisha, a young man called Momosuke Fukuzawa had been the love of her life, and they had never forgotten each other. When he resurfaced, by now a business mogul, they rekindled their affections, and, leaving his wife behind in Tokyo, he set about building a mansion for Sadayakko in Nagoya, central Japan.

Thirsty for the next chapter in the actress’s life, I take the bullet train from Osaka, past the beautiful city of Kyoto, past paddy fields, plains and distant mountains. On arrival in the sprawling metropolis of Nagoya, bristling with buildings, I ask whether anyone knows of the house in which Sadayakko and her lover lived. The locals, I learn, called the house Futaba Palace, after the area in which it is situated, a suburb in the shadow of Nagoya Castle, with its impressive double keep and roof ends topped with giant bronze carp.

I take the subway to Futaba, a quiet residential district, where the house has been reconstructed. I round a couple of corners and there it is, with its precipitous red roofs, bigger and more ornate than I had imagined: like a grand country manor, with wood-panelled walls and heavy velvet drapes tied back with cords, and Art-Deco stained-glass windows depicting flowers and landscapes and languid ladies. There’s a tea ceremony room with sliding paper screens and an alcove with carefully arranged flowers. And there, in a case, are the courtesan’s embroidered kimonos and the 12-inch-high clogs which she wore when she thrilled the West with her dancing, as well as the gorgeous tea gowns, high-heeled shoes and feathered hats she brought back with her from Paris and New York. Beyond the great curved staircase down which Sada would sweep, in the couple’s private quarters, are photographs of Momosuke, handsome in his indigo kimono, with Sada in a simple checked kimono, her hair in an elegant chignon, kneeling at his feet.

Although this was clearly a house in which they spent a great deal of time, it wasn’t their only home, or their most impressive one. Momosuke’s business at that time was constructing hydroelectric dams along the river Kiso, nearby, and not wanting to be away from her, he built them a country villa halfway down the river.

As I discovered when I arrived in Japan 20 years ago, one of the great joys of traveling here is the train network: bullet trains supplemented by local services that go right into the heart of the countryside. The local train I take trundles off into the hills along the edge of the Kiso river, through spectacular mountain scenery. Forests plunge to the water’s edge, smoke-like clouds billow in the hollows and the mountain cherries are just coming into bloom. I get off at a village called Magome, stopping for the night to complete the journey, as the actress would have done herself, on foot.

Magome is little more than a stretch of inns and restaurants, a place where the present has yet to intrude, with no cars or electric cables visible. A huge waterwheel turns, creaking and splashing. I catch a whiff of wood smoke. The steep cobbled road is lined with wooden houses whose tiled roofs are weighted down with stones to keep them in place during the winter snows. There are balconies and sliding wooden doors, and strings of orange persimmons hanging out to dry. I look back from the top of the slope and see mountains looming blue in the distance.

Here, I spend the night in an old inn with an earth-floored entrance and watch the sun go down over the mountains from a bench. Lanterns glow, and I hear shouts and laughter from the inns along the street. I dine on grilled river fish, rice and lotus root, then climb the steep stairs to my room where my bedding is laid out on tatami mats.

Next morning, I set off early and walk to the top of the village from where the path plunges into thick bamboo glades and groves of cryptomeria trees. In Sadayakko’s time this was a major highway, known as the Inner Mountain Road, along which people used to walk or travel by palanquin on the long journey between Kyoto and Tokyo. Now it’s a woodland track, but still neatly paved with stones along its length, and shaded by a thick canopy of trees. In places, like the path up the Magome Pass, it’s so steep that it has been cut into steps. At the top there’s a teahouse, a weather-beaten wooden building with slatted doors. I peer inside, but it seems this place hasn’t been used for years.

Walking downhill to the Kiso Valley below, I glimpse a cluster of roofs. It is Tsumago, a working village that, like Magome, is determined to remain in the past. Even the postman wears 19th-century uniform. In the old days the larger villages along the road had an inn for VIP guests, and the one in Tsumago is particularly grand. In 1860 an imperial princess rested here on her way to marry the second-to-last shogun, and a few years later Emperor Meiji stopped to take refreshment. I tiptoe across the vast tatami-matted rooms and admire the decor. Inside, beautiful carved fretwork frames the paper doors and outside are two tiny gardens: one with a carp pond, the other planted with moss and decorated with two perfectly-placed stone lanterns.

I check into a more modest inn. Sitting outside in the evening, it is pitch black: there’s no moon and no street lighting. It seems to accentuate the rushing sounds of the river, the rustling of wild animals and the smell of fresh country air.

The next day I set out with a local historian called Takashi Toyama, who has lived here his whole life, in search of Sada’s country villa. The house which he takes me to couldn’t be prettier. Situated on a hill on the other side of the river, which we get to via a miniature Brooklyn Bridge, the three-storey 1919 house is handsomely constructed from rounded stones taken straight from the Kiso below. There is a balcony and a conservatory with tables and wicker chairs where the couple would sit and admire the river, a dining room for entertaining, and a lounge with chandeliers and huge windows that they would throw open. It’s a lovely, breezy country retreat.

Toyama then takes me to see Momosuke’s dams. He built seven in all, beautiful stone constructions decorated with Art-Deco designs, which continue to supply Kyoto and Osaka with electricity to this day. It’s amazing to realize that some of that extraordinary neon back in the city is powered by rainfall in these beautiful mountains. En route, to my delight, I meet a beaming, wizened old man who remembers seeing Sada on her red motorbike, bumping along the rough country roads in Western clothes, back in the early 1920s, when he was a very small boy. She used to smile at him and give him chocolate: a rare treat in this tiny out-of-the-way village, where no one knew who she was or cared what she did.

After the dams had been completed the couple spent most of their time in their palatial home in Nagoya, but they still found excuses to come back to their rural home here. It was a place to which Sada could return to the traditional old Japan of Madame Butterfly, with its white-faced geisha and the plangent melancholy notes of the shamisen, its tea ceremonies and flowers arranged with Japanese precision.

Strolling around the rooms, with their cabinets full of memories, Sadayakko’s fans and parasols and old photographs, I can almost see her here with her beloved Momosuke, dancing for him in her embroidered kimono, with her hair in a bouffant coil, or on her knees whisking up green tea in a priceless stoneware tea bowl. For a moment, if I close my eyes, I almost forget that I’m in a country whose landscape is traversed by bullet trains and whose skylines are dominated by soaring steel and glass buildings. In my quest for Madame Butterfly, I have discovered something equally beautiful: the real old Japan.

Photographs: Magnum Photos

Your address: The St. Regis Osaka

P. J. O’Rourke

1. Across America in a ’56 Buick, 1977

I hadn’t traveled much until I was 30 and drove a very used car from Florida to California. It couldn’t go fast enough for Interstates so there was lots of scenery. I got stranded in most of it. The car broke every day: fuel-pump failure between a New Mexico cattle roundup and the only liquor store for miles; Mid-Mojave, a radiator leak. The transmission locked itself in reverse on Santa Monica Boulevard. I had to drive the last two miles backwards. There’s something to be said for staying home.

2. Into the Beqa’a Valley, 1984

During Lebanon’s Civil War I went with journalist Charlie Glass to Ba’albek to interview the ferocious leader of an extremist Shiite militia. I was terrified. After a day spent largely being held at gunpoint we went to the magnificent, if bedraggled, Palmyra Hotel, where we were the only guests. Charlie bribed a waiter to bring us a bottle of arak, which we hid under  the table. Over surreptitious swigs we managed to piece together from memory the whole of Yeats’ The Second Coming. Poetry is great solace, if you’ve got something to drink.

3. The Baja Peninsula, 1984

Later that year a pal and I took our girlfriends on a Jeep ride down Mexico’s Baja peninsula, off-road, sleeping in tents. The only flat place in the Baja is where you land after rolling off something steep. Every living thing has a prickle, a thorn, a fang or a stinger. The temperature was 110F. The food was… “Sea turtle is like beef,” said the poacher/cook, “except for the smell.” By La Paz the women insisted on a hotel. The Jeep’s undercarriage collapsed at the door. The women flew home. Some journeys are for couples. Neither couple is together today.

4. Driving Around in South Africa, 1986

Apartheid was still in ugly force. I visited English suburbs, Soweto, Boer settlements and various “homelands”. An American seemed welcome any-where; I don’t know why. I especially enjoyed the KwaZulu capital, Ulundi: world’s smallest Holiday Inn with maybe five rooms. No television reception but a VCR at front desk, wired to bar-room TV. Just two tapes: Zulu and Zulu Dawn. Many patrons had been extras in the latter. I brought an illustrated history of the Zulu War to the bar. All were fascinated. Let us not discount journeys taken on barstools.

5. Through the Gulf War into Kuwait, 1991

When the ground war began I was in Saudi Arabia with a convoy of reporters. Our plan was to stay behind the front line as troops advanced. But in modern warfare there is no front line. It was midnight. The oil wells were aflame. Iraqi tanks littered the road. Explosions could be heard. The only map we had was in a Fodor’s guide for businessmen. Buildings began to loom. Was there another city between the Saudi border and Kuwait City? There wasn’t. At dawn we were in liberated Kuwait, greeting the troops liberating it. Nothing wrong with getting ahead of yourself.

6. The Trans-Siberian Railroad, 1996

My wife asked, “Will the trip be fun?” The lady behind the counter said, with Russian poker face, “It will be long remembered.” The train was filthy, stuffy, slow. No hot water in the bathroom. Dining-car fare inedible. But amazing sightseeing. Mountains to awe Sir Edmund Hillary. Forests to daunt Paul Bunyan. We stopped at Lake Baikal. Gorgeous. Empty. I stuck a toe in the July water: 32F. Because a place is beautiful doesn’t mean you have to go there.

7. From Islamabad to Calcutta, 1998

Land Rover sent two vehicles around the world promoting its Discovery II. I joined the leg across the Indian subcontinent. The Grand Trunk Road was a combination of highway, front parlor, playground, factory floor, barnyard and emergency room for one billion Indians. India’s trucks seemed to lack brakes, lights, speed limits or anyone awake at the wheel. We bet on how many fatal accidents we’d see each day. The top score was more than 25. It’s wrong to say, of certain places, that life there is cheap. But it can be brief.

P. J. O’Rourke’s latest book, The Baby Boom, is published by Grove Atlantic

High Society

There are plenty of places you might expect to see a roaring fireplace: a cozy bar in Aspen, a Renaissance palace in Florence, even a welcoming living room in Lhasa. The last place you’d think to discover one is at 39,000 feet. But times, and flying, are changing.

It’s 9AM on a soggy November Thursday in London and Elisabeth Harvey, a designer of interiors for private jets, is showing me sketches of the fireplace she will soon be installing in a Falcon 7X. A fireplace? Surely that’s against aircraft safety regulations? Not so, she says. “The technology to install a fireplace is available today, and we have customers.”

Orders for sky-high fireplaces can only mean one thing: the world’s high-fliers are flying private again. The turnaround from the slump of 2008, when many private jet firms went bust, is remarkable.

Bombardier, one of the world’s major private aviation companies, has just received the largest order in its history: more than 245 business jets worth up to $7.5 billion. The firm says that one of the fastest growing segments of the market is the one for large aircraft. These can cover more than 5,000 nautical miles non-stop, have up to 3,000 cubic feet of cabin space and cost around $50-70 million.

These most technologically advanced aircraft are being snapped up by a new breed of plutocrat, as well as by firms that offer fractional ownership or a jet card that allows prepaid, fixed hours of airtime. As demand rises, so have levels of comfort, speed and technology. In particular, some buyers want their jets to look, feel and even smell like their homes – and their yachts, too, while they’re at it.

“For the fireplace, we took inspiration from the domestic environment. Clients want a habitat similar to those they already own and feel comfortable in,” says Harvey, who is head of the design studio at Jet Aviation, a Swiss-based private aircraft specialist with around 4,500 employees across the globe.

A fireplace isn’t the only new must-have for the private jet set. Take a look above your head at the latest accessory offered in larger Boeing private jets that cost from $200m. No, your eyes are not deceiving you. That really is an Italian chandelier. But don’t worry about it swaying wildly at takeoff. It retracts into the ceiling, before dangling down again when the plane reaches its cruising altitude.

Furnishing expensive private jets with fancy lights, bedroom suites and stylish showers has always been an obsession among celebrities, sports stars and old-money billionaires. But thanks to globalization, new private-jet customers are emerging, and they have new ideas and new tastes.

A study by Citi Private Bank shows that 64 percent of Indian millionaires plan to increase their spending on private jets. Spending in Africa, whose economy is growing at the fastest rate in its history, is also at record levels. Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, has two private jets, one for short-haul trips and the other for long-haul journeys.

Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, a member of the Saudi royal family, owns the grandest private jet of all – a $400m double-decker Airbus A380. The “flying palace” has a garage for the Prince’s Rolls-Royce, a concert hall, a Turkish bath, and even a revolving prayer room that always faces Mecca.

Mexican billionaire Jorge Vergara owns an Embraer Lineage 1000: a jet that comes with a bedroom with a queen-sized bed, en-suite bathroom and a walk-in shower, a mini spa, meeting rooms for work and even a private bathroom for the crew.

India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, presented his wife with a $40m Airbus 319 Corporate Jet for her 44th birthday. It is furnished with entertainment cabins fitted with games consoles and music systems, a master bedroom and a bathroom with a range of showers. Ambani also owns a Boeing Business Jet 2 akin to a flying business hotel, equipped with an executive lounge, conference rooms, private offices and bedrooms.

Personalization of a jet’s interior is key, says Harvey. “We have fitted gold and other precious metals, rare woods, marquetry, marble, mother-of-pearl. We install buffet areas rather than galleys, use real glass mirrors and custom-designed lamps – whatever the clients find beautiful and luxurious. I recently designed a bespoke horsehair mattress for a client because they were used to sleeping on one at home.”

Prices for customized private jets are as stratospheric as their cruising altitudes. One of the most popular is the Falcon 7X made by Dassault, which costs about $50m and has a range of almost 6,000 nautical miles. Its innovative soundproofing and insulation make it one of the quietest jets in the sky – noise levels are believed to be one of the most tiring aspects of jet travel – and the ride of choice for former U.S. president Bill Clinton and movie mogul Steven Spielberg.

Other new technological innovations include computerized fly-by-wire systems that save weight and thus reduce fuel bills. And there are new radar systems by Honeywell that allow pilots to detect hazardous weather at distances of up to 300 miles, so that they can comfortably reroute to avoid turbulence.

These days, of course, luxury in the air does not begin and end with plush interiors and high-tech tricks. Those who can fly in style also want to wine and dine in style. Private aviation companies now offer personalized meals to their high-end clients, whether it’s authentic pizza from Italy or a special lunch flown in from an exclusive restaurant in the United States for around $700. Private-jet owners and operators have even started hiring special catering companies who employ the services  of chefs based all over the world. Renowned cake artist Duff Goldman and sushi master Nobu Matsuhisa offer global menus with ingredients specially chosen to retain their flavor in the dry atmosphere of a jet cabin.

Antony Rivolta has been in the private jet aviation business for the past 30 years and knows all the tricks of the trade. His company, JetPartner, specialises in bespoke catering. “We build up a portfolio of what a client likes, so we can produce whatever they wish,” he says. Eastern European clients, says Rivolta, are the fussiest eaters. Western clients are “quite happy with what is available on our usual menus.”

For VistaJet, one of the fastest-growing companies in private aviation, food is supplied by London department store Harvey Nichols. As well as made-to-order confectionary, chocolate and savoury snacks, its 30 brand-new aircraft have rich wood furnishings, lavish carpeting, designer glassware and silverware and red-striped livery and soft furnishings.

When the sky’s the limit, what’s next for the future of private aviation? “Business aviation tends to be ahead of the airlines in terms of technology,” says Rivolta. “The customers demand more than your average airline passenger. So we provide the most up-to-date hi-fi systems and Wi-fi as standard, and we’re on the verge of being able to use mobile phones freely.”

Rivolta predicts that the greatest advances will be in speed and fuel efficiency. “We will see supersonic private jets in the next five years. That means New York to London in three hours, faster than the old Concorde. New technology means we can reduce the sonic boom [which until now has prevented supersonic aircraft from travelling over land]. The whole concept of business aviation is to save time, so supersonic is the final frontier. Supersonic jets will become the ultimate travel status symbol.”

High-end couture designers are also keen to exert their influence on jet interiors. Every year, hundreds make their way to the Business Jet Interiors World Expo at London Farnborough airport in the hope of bagging a deal to develop concepts ranging from showers to dining tables. Donatella Versace has already created custom private jet interiors: seats come in white leather with the fashion house’s distinctive logo.

And just when you thought you had heard it all, there is a new frontier. No, not for you and me. Not for the crew. Not even for the engineers struggling to contain the sonic boom. Pet cabins and catering for pets at 39,000 feet are the latest perk on buyers’ wishlists. Because after all, no fireplace is complete without a cat or dog curled lazily in front of it.

British Classic

Gary Rhodes, OBE, made a name for himself in the early Nineties, bringing traditional British classics such as braised oxtail, fish cakes and bread and butter pudding into the realm of fine dining. He earned his first Michelin star as head chef at the Greenhouse restaurant in London’s Mayfair in 1996, and opened his own restaurants, City Rhodes and Rhodes in the Square, a year later. He has since launched an array of restaurants around the world, and traveled far and wide to present such TV shows as Masterchef USA and Rhodes Across China. His newest venture is Rhodes 44 at The St. Regis Abu Dhabi.

What’s your earliest food memory?

I’ll always remember the first dessert I made when I was about 13. It was a steamed lemon sponge with lemon sauce, and I’ll never forget turning it out in front of everyone at Sunday lunch. I just sat there admiring the faces around the table as this lovely thick lemon sauce dribbled down the sponge. I thought to myself then, “I want to be a cook.”

Who taught you to cook?

My mother was really accomplished in the kitchen, and I was one of those children who wanted to help out a lot. Even today I still don’t believe I can match her lasagne. Peter Barratt, one of my tutors at catering college, was a genius, though – anyone who was taught by that man would say he was an amazing chef.

What’s the best thing you’ve ever eaten?

Guy Savoy in Paris makes an incredibly creamy globe artichoke soup, with shavings of black truffle and Parmesan cheese, served with truffle brioche buns that are lightly toasted and spread with melted truffle butter. It makes me go weak at the knees. I’ve been to his restaurant six times to eat it.

What do you like to cook at home?

When I’m working in a restaurant I taste all the time, so by the time I get home I’m sick of the sight of the stove. People come over to our house expecting a big Michelin-star meal, but I’m not that kind of guy. I’ll just do a bit of fish, a bit of risotto and a big platter of cheese. Fish is the only thing I insist on cooking at home because I am fussy. Otherwise my wife, who I met at catering college, does most of the cooking. Try as I might I cannot match her roast. She manages to do the meat and all the trimmings such as cauliflower cheese, runner beans, carrots, gravy and lovely Yorkshire puddings all by herself – I’d need four other cooks with me.

What do you find most rewarding about being a chef?

You never stop learning. If people give me advice on our Arabic dishes, for example, for which there will be any number of recipes from all over the Middle East, and I think that those comments will improve things, I will definitely make that change. I never, ever want to stop cooking – it’s a continuing education and it keeps your mind alive.

What’s your favourite food?

I’ve always loved cheese, especially gorgonzola or a really runny brie de Meaux with truffles running through it. Years ago my wife Jennie wouldn’t touch cheese, and now we’ll both sit there together, munching into cheeses and tucking into a good bottle of wine. I find that quite romantic sometimes, just sitting, eating and chatting, without any pressure.

What style of food are you serving at Rhodes 44?

I wanted to do great British classics – my braised oxtail with mashed potato has been unbelievably well received – but at the same time venture into some local Arabic dishes, too. For afternoon tea we’re doing little pecan pies, Victoria sponges, scones with clotted cream and jam, and tiny quail’s-egg sandwiches. I’ve also done my own interpretation of a mezze platter, which has been very popular. We’ve made our own baba ghanoush, our own falafel with a tiny bit of melting feta cheese in the middle… Just as my scallops with a devilled sauce were on the menu in London for ten years, I’d like to think that our mezze platter would last a lifetime with us here.

Is there anything you would never put on the menu?

Tripe. I cannot abide it.

How do you find inspiration for your new dishes?

Sometimes I just wake up in the middle of the night and there’s a new creation in my mind. I’ll tell my wife, and she usually says, “Give it a go.” But she’ll also tell me if it sounds awful.

Who would be at your last supper?

Marilyn Monroe – she was stunning. Bill Clinton is a man I’ve always wanted to meet, too, and Martin Luther King would have to be there. Also Stevie Wonder. Oh, and I’m a massive Manchester United fan, so Sir Alex Ferguson [the legendary former manager] should definitely be invited.

Your address: The St. Regis Abu Dhabi

Walls of Fame

On a chilly November night last year, about 120 people squeezed into the King Cole Bar and Salon at The St. Regis New York. The co-host of the evening, fashion designer Jason Wu, wore a dark suit and a slim black tie and stood in the center of the wood-paneled room, welcoming friends and colleagues to a party to celebrate the reopening of the bar after a months-long refurbishment. A DJ played jazz, and models in Wu dresses and celebrities including Emily Mortimer and Uma Thurman dotted the crowd. But the star of the night was a brilliantly-colored painting, just back from a $100,000 restoration and rehung in its place of honor above the bar where it has presided over similarly chic events for almost eight decades.

One hundred and ten years ago, John Jacob Astor IV asked a young artist named Maxfield Parrish if he would like to paint a mural to hang in the bar-room of The Knickerbocker Hotel, Astor’s glamorous new flagship on 42nd Street and Broadway in New York City. The fee was $5,000, extremely generous for the time, but it came with caveats.

First, the subject of the painting had to be Old King Cole, and second, while Parrish would have complete artistic freedom in how he depicted the nursery-rhyme character, he had to use Astor as the model for King Cole’s face.

“At first, Parrish wasn’t sure he wanted the job,” explains Laurence Cutler, chairman of the National Museum of American Illustration and an expert on the artist. “He didn’t like being told he had to do anything.” Parrish had other concerns as well: he came from a conservative Quaker family that frowned on alcohol and wasn’t thrilled that his work would hang in a bar. Plus, he had already painted a version of King Cole for the Mask and Wig Club, a private theater club in Philadelphia.

But Parrish’s father, an established artist with connections in Philadelphia and New York society, encouraged him to reconsider. “Basically, he explained how unadvisable it would be for somebody just starting their career to say no to somebody like Astor.”

Parrish had recently moved from Philadelphia to Plainfield, New Hampshire, where he and his wife, Lydia, were expanding a small estate they had built called The Oaks, which they would live in for the rest of their lives. He realized that the fee, the equivalent of $130,000 today, would set them up well and accepted the commission. He began work on Old King Cole in a studio that was too small to hold the whole mural, so he painted the three 8 feet x 10 feet panels one at a time. He placed the king in the center, flanked by jesters and guards. It was a more dramatic, less cartoon-like depiction than his first version of Cole for the Mask and Wig Club and, when it was installed at the hotel in 1906, it instantly became part of the fabric of a city and a culture hurtling toward the excitement and excesses of the Roaring Twenties. “The Knickerbocker Bar, beamed upon by Maxfield Parrish’s jovial, colorful Old King Cole was well crowded,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise.

Parrish picked a good time to accept a mural commission. At the turn of the century, wealthy industrialists like Astor were building mansions as quickly as they could and hiring artists to adorn the walls. “It was the golden age of American mural painting,” says Glenn Palmer-Smith, a painter and author of Murals of New York City. “There was competition to see who you got.”

Established artists were able to command huge fees, but the appeal was more than just financial. The country had recently glimpsed the nuance and complexity of mural painting at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, which featured frescos and murals by some of the US and Europe’s most prominent painters. American architects and artists were eager to embrace the medium.

Not long after the fair, ten of the country’s best-known illustrators and painters, including Henry Siddons Mowbray and Robert Lewis Reid, collaborated on a mural depicting the history of law for the lobby of the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division building on Madison Avenue, which opened in 1900. “Can you imagine ten top artists collaborating on anything today?” says Palmer-Smith.

Dozens of similar projects began around the country. In the beginning, many of these works were commissioned and paid for by some of America’s wealthiest families. Along with his contribution to the Supreme Court Building, Mowbray painted a mural on the ceiling of the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, New York and one at John Pierpont Morgan’s library in New York City, which is now a museum. Another popular turn-of-the-century artist, William de Leftwich Dodge, spent most of his career painting murals for private homes and public buildings, including four for the lobby of the Astor Hotel in Times Square around 1900, titled Ancient and Modern New York. In the 1930s, William Randolph Hearst commissioned Dean Cornwell to paint a mural in the Raleigh Room restaurant at the Warwick Hotel. (After a disagreement over the fee, Cornwell added less-than-heroic scenes, including a man urinating on Sir Walter Raleigh.)

Towards the middle of the 20th century more and more murals were commissioned by businesses, local governments and, starting in 1939, by the Works Progress Administration as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. The largest of these latter was James Brooks’s 235ft circular mural, Flight, at the Marine Terminal at LaGuardia Airport, which depicts man’s dream of conquering the skies, from ancient mythology through to modern-day reality.

Parrish went on to paint eight additional murals over the course of his long and influential career, including The Pied Piper in 1909 for the bar at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. But Old King Cole is arguably his most famous. It has all the hallmarks of his later illustrations and prints, including bold, luminous colors, classical architectural forms, and an impish sense of humor. “It launched his career,” says Laurence Cutler. “Immediately afterwards he received a commission to illustrate a cover for Harper’s Magazine, and from then on he worked non-stop for the next 40 years.”

When the Knickerbocker closed in 1920, Old King Cole went into storage, then briefly hung in a museum in Chicago, and was finally installed at The St. Regis, an Astor-owned hotel, in 1932. There, at the heart of Millionaires’ Alley, as 55th Street was called at the time, it made the transition from artwork to icon.

Longevity alone might explain the King Cole Bar’s popularity – New York City has been torn down and rebuilt so many times that its residents develop emotional attachments to places and things that survive the constant reinvention. But it is Parrish’s painting that patrons love and return to see over and over again.

Murals have adorned some of the city’s most famous eating and drinking establishments, and Old King Cole is just one of a long list of favorites. In the early 1930s, the restaurant Café des Artistes on West 67th Street fell on hard times as the city struggled with the effects of the Great Depression. Located on the ground floor of Hotel des Artistes, an artists’ cooperative apartment building, the café served the tenants who lived upstairs, as well as the general public. Howard Chandler Christy, a prominent painter and illustrator who resided at the hotel, offered to paint a mural that would, according to Palmer-Smith, bring in “crowds of new customers”. For a fee of $2,000, he composed a series of nudes in bucolic settings – frolicking in water, playing on swings, posing with parrots.

The work has a dreamy, salacious quality that shocked and, as Christy anticipated, enticed the public. Café des Artistes became a crossroads for the art and business communities. Generations of New York’s top editors and gallery owners, bankers and stockbrokers met there for quiet lunches and dinners, or a drink at the bar, which The New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton describes as having been, “one of Manhattan’s great dark-and-quiet cuckolding spots”. In 2009, after more than 90 years in business, the café went bankrupt and closed. When a new management team moved into the space in 2011, they changed everything about the room, but kept the murals in place. Now called The Leopard at des Artistes, the restaurant and its nudes have garnered excellent reviews and host a new generation of New York power brokers.

New York’s tradition of murals enjoys constant reinvention. In the late Nineties Sol Lewitt was commissioned by Christie’s to create a mural three-storeys high for the entrance to 20 Rockefeller Plaza. The artist submitted four designs, and the auction house plumped for Wall Drawing No 896, Colors/Curves, a voluptuous collage of bold undulations in red, blue, yellow, green, lavender, orange and black.

In 2006, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and three partners purchased Ye Waverly Inn, an historic Greenwich Village pub that had for years offered an old-world New York dining experience. Carter and his partners dropped the “Ye” and transformed the inn into one of the most popular and celebrity-filled restaurants in the city. During the redesign, they kept many original fixtures but commissioned illustrator Edward Sorel to create a mural that celebrated notable residents of Greenwich Village. He painted an outdoor scene filled with 43 caricatures in illuminating, sometimes hilarious poses. Norman Mailer lies naked and staring, Narcissus-like, at his reflection in a pond. Dylan Thomas sits on a rock looking unremarkable with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, except that his lower half is drawn with a satyr’s legs.

Back at The St. Regis New York, an early evening crowd is enjoying cocktail hour. A wide and shallow room adjacent to a more formal white marble lounge and dining area, the King Cole Bar has a polished wood ceiling and walls and is furnished with low cocktail tables and chairs. Twin mirrors flanking the black granite-topped bar scatter glimmers of Parrish’s brilliant palette around the room. The bar is far enough removed from the rest of the hotel to feel like its own entity, but close enough to serve as easy landing spot for newly arrived travelers seeking respite from Midtown New York’s hustle. The range of famous people who have enjoyed drinks in the bar over the decades (Salvador Dalí, Marilyn Monroe and Ernest Hemingway, to name just a few) is well documented, but it also hosts neighborhood regulars, out-of-town shoppers, and a chic slice of New York nightlife.

Old King Cole has a secret that any Parrish expert, St. Regis bartender, or knowledgeable 14-year-old boy will happily share. “He is called the Flatulent Monarch,” says Cutler. “If you look carefully you can see that the king is raised off his seat and that the jesters and guards are reacting to him passing gas.” Although Parrish publicly denied it, the story of his revenge on Astor for having insisted on being included in the painting became part of the mythology surrounding the artist. “Parrish had a bet with his friends that he could paint absolutely anything,” said Palmer-Smith. “Old King Cole proved it.”

Your address: The St. Regis New York

The Kids Are All Right

Walking into the New York office of social media company Mediabend, the first things one notices are its energy and its interiors. Beyond its buzzing staff, creating such luxury shopping sites as Lifestyle Mirror and Elizabeth Street, are an American flag owned by John F. Kennedy and a massive photograph by the late Dennis Hopper, and after them a series of four enormous expressionist paintings – forged not by some famous abstract painter, but by the owner’s young daughter.

Family bonds, clearly, are key to the success of Emanuele Della Valle – if not financially, then emotionally. “My family was equally happy when we had very little,” he says, noting that his family’s wealth, stemming from the Tod’s empire of which his father is CEO, only became a vast fortune in the past couple of decades. “I got the lesson of humility and hard work from an early age from my grandfather. At one point, he lived in immense poverty, surviving on a piece of bread a day. From him, we learned it’s about what you do, not about your last name.”

Della Valle isn’t the only modern-day heir to abandon a facile trust-fund life and strike out on his own. Although many of the young rich may have brand surnames so powerful that they’re virtually synonymous with their homelands (take the royal David Linley in London, or the American newspaper heiress Amanda Hearst), these days it simply isn’t chic – in fact, it’s frowned upon – to live the life solely of a socialite or playboy.

While this younger generation is clearly aware of how they appear in the media, it is not just social approval that appears to drive them. A streak of entrepreneurial endeavor seems to have evolved, a goal to get their hands dirty, and to have their company or cause become a self-earning business entity.

This is true all over the globe. At the age of just 28, for instance, Carnival Cruiselines heiress Sarah Arison is becoming one of the most important arts philanthropists in the United States. Charlotte Dellal, granddaughter of the notorious gambler “Black Jack” Dellal, spearheads the accessories brand Charlotte Olympia. Sam Branson, son of Virgin founder Richard, runs a film company specializing in ethical content. Camilla Al Fayed, whose father once owned Harrods, is attempting to overhaul the fashion label Issa.

“There is no such thing as ‘society’ today,” observes the social arbiter David Patrick Columbia, editor and co-founder of newyorksocialdiary.com. “Society is driven by money and the ability to make it.”

Columbia rightly notes that the jetset days documented by photographer Slim Aarons, culminating in the heady excesses of the 1980s, are long past. The vanishing of café society has pervaded the consciousness of a new generation. It is no longer just about buying a $10,000 ticket to some charity function, but turning their cause into a self-financing business entity that earns them both legitimacy in the outside world and the satisfaction of having done it themselves.

Many parents spurred their offspring on towards independence. “I didn’t have the choice of doing nothing,” says the young Chinese jeweler Bao Bao Wan, the granddaughter of Wan Li, former Chairman of the National People’s Congress, who grew up within China’s presidential compound. The former Paris debutante has since seen her luxe jewelry represented around the world – no mean achievement with “Made in China” stamped on it. “But then, one of my missions is to solve that misunderstanding and to open that knot,” she says.

Jaisal Singh, descendent of one of India’s most illustrious families, says he was always expected to forge his own identity. “My parents were very, very tough on me to do something,” he says. Today he and his wife own Suján, the preservation-minded luxury hospitality brand responsible for Jawai, the country’s latest luxury leopard camp. “It wasn’t like I had an open checkbook from my family, either. I had access to the family legacy, but it was sink or swim. We had nothing in the bank.”

Many others who were never expected to own a business have excelled. Tamara Mellon, the brains behind Jimmy Choo, recalls her English headmistress telling her and her fellow female students, “Don’t worry about the education. You’re all going to get married, and it’s going to be absolutely fine.”

Often, when the scions of successful families do get there, they don’t always get the credit they deserve, Mellon says. People tend to forget all the nameless jobs, such as working at fashion boutique Browns, that she undertook prior to her great shoe success. Instead they dwell on the fact that she is now one of the wealthiest women in England. “They forget what it took to get where I am,” she says, adding that the gender discrimination she encountered along the way “rots the ground underneath you. I fought for what I earned. Even after all that, you still get derided and questioned as to whether you really have ability.”

No matter their disparate backgrounds, successes such as Mellon or Singh stress that motivation stems from their families. How that is communicated, though, varies. “If a parent is looking for their child to fulfill the parent’s dream, then of course that’s unhealthy,” says the rock ’n’ roll jewelry designer Ann Dexter-Jones (anndexterjones.com). “You’ve got to nurture them to feel good about their own strengths.”

Dexter-Jones’s five offspring, from her marriages to Laurence Ronson of Heron International and the rocker Mick Jones, are a case study in pursuing their private passions. Mark Ronson, Samantha Ronson and Alexander Dexter-Jones are flourishing musicians, songwriters and composers; Charlotte Ronson is an accomplished fashion designer; and Annabelle Dexter-Jones is a rising actress.

Their mother’s rule, she says, was to not treat her children like hand-puppets. “I impressed upon them that success is not about fame, money, or status. It just may happen to be a result.” And although they mingled with the likes of Mick Jagger, Michael Douglas, John McEnroe and Joan Didion, being surrounded by fame was never allowed to go to their heads. “None of my kids believe in any sort of nepotism,” says Dexter-Jones. “They do it their way with pride.”

Although connections do, of course, help. And why not? Plum Le-Tan’s introduction of her daughter Olympia to Gilles Dufour, for instance, helped her to get an internship and subsequently become his muse at Chanel. “I’m quite happy to assist in any way I can to help young kids get a foot on the ladder,” says Le-Tan. “Connections help.”

Amanda Hearst, the 30-year-old great-granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, admits that her background does carry weight. “If my last name helps get me access to something I care about, then I say, ‘Let’s go for it’,” she says, with particular reference to Friends of Finn, the charity she founded to raise money to eradicate inhumane puppy mills. Alongside friends such as Georgina Bloomberg, Kick Kennedy and Kimberly Ovitz, the young socialite has helped to ensure the closure of several deplorable puppy farms. “Whatever you do, it’s got to feel visceral,” she says.

Her passion is much admired by John Kluge, whose late father was once the richest man in America. Kluge co-founded Toilet Hackers to try to provide better sanitation facilities around the world (one child, he says, dies every 17 seconds due to a lack of clean water and poor hygiene).

His father, also John Kluge, donated the vast majority of his multibillion-dollar estate to philanthropic causes – something his son doesn’t begrudge. “It’s a blessing,” he says. “I don’t have the luxury of not being able to work for a living, and I get to go out and create my own personhood and achievements.”

Although having the same name as his father can have its disadvantages, too. “Often people assume that if you come from a family with means, then you have the same resources, and that can be a hurdle when raising money.”
Hard work, and bits of luck perhaps, will determine whether this new generation achieves its destiny. Not everyone can be Tory Burch, the laser-focused former socialite turned fashion mogul. They readily concede their good fortune, but point to their parents for their inspiration.

“If you come from a family of clear personalities, no matter if it is a tycoon or someone who runs a café in a small town, it is perhaps not as easy to do what you want to do,” says Della Valle. “But they have lived a life, so why not try to learn the treasures of their experiences? I always listen to my father’s advice. I may do something different afterwards, but he’s a no-nonsense guy and he respects me for it.”

“No matter what your background,” he adds, “the integrity of a human being comes from the family and the work you do.”

California Dreamer

During the week, Andy Linsky can invariably be found behind the wheel of a conventional, modern car as he drives between some of the most prestigious properties in and around Palm Springs, going about his business as one of the region's leading real estate agents. But in his spare time, Linsky is more likely to be spotted wafting along Palm Canyon Drive in a time-warp classic from the large and impressive collection which he keeps fully maintained and ready-to-roll in an 8,000 sq. ft. warehouse near his home.

“I’ve been interested in cars since the age of 4,” says 63-year-old Linsky, “but I didn’t get around to owning a classic automobile until the early 1990s when I bought a 1971 Lincoln Continental. It proved to be a false start. I found I wasn’t ready to deal with the foibles of an old car, so I sold it on.”

Linsky, who is also a passionate collector of contemporary art and wristwatches, revisited classic car ownership in 2000 with the purchase of a 1966 Rolls-Royce with drophead coupé coachwork by Mulliner Park Ward. “I sold that, too, and have regretted it ever since, but then I began buying more cars and, at one point, owned 25. That is now down to 18, two thirds of which are British or European, with the other third being American. I tend to buy those that were around when I first had a driving licence but couldn’t afford to own – although I have managed to buy an almost exact duplicate of my first new car, a 1972 BMW 2002tii in Inca orange.

Linsky purchases mainly from specialist auction houses and, more occasionally, from dealers or private sellers. “I try to buy the very best cars I can find, usually ones which have been restored to exceptionally high standards,” says Linsky, who counts among his stable a 1967  Rolls-Royce and a 1963 Cadillac that were previously part of the renowned, multi-award-winning Nethercutt Collection in California.

“I think that’s a better way of doing it than buying a car in poor condition and having it rebuilt,” he continues. “It’s also very important not to simply park them up and forget about them. They need to be used. For that reason I employ someone to manage the collection, servicing and maintaining the cars, as well as driving them on a regular basis.”

Like most collectors, however, there are still one or two cars that Linsky longs to own. “I would very much like a Bentley Continental Flying Spur with Mulliner coachwork, and an Aston Martin DB6,” he says. “But these two particular cars have become very expensive. So now, I’m on the lookout for a 1968 Ford Torino GT Fastback in Lime Gold. That was the first car I ever owned, and I’d like to have another, but it’s proving very difficult to find one in that exact same color.”

Spoken like a true perfectionist.

Carnival of Color

Once seen, a Beatriz Milhazes canvas is never forgotten. The 54-year-old Brazilian’s palette races through tangy citrus, raspberry, blueberry, coral, mint, scarlet and sky-blue. Sharpened here and there by linear shapes, the leitmotif is the sphere, often figured as a tropical flower. But she explodes the curves into fragmented arabesques that swirl and spiral across the canvas.

Rather than working directly on canvas, Milhazes paints on sheets of plastic which she then lays on to her surface and peels away. From a distance, her paintings possess flawless, graphic sheen; close up, subtle shifts of tone and texture inject a vigorous, carnal vitality.

Today, her oeuvre has garnered worldwide recognition, with works residing in New York’s Guggenheim Museum and MoMA. In 2012, her painting My Lemon sold at Sotheby’s for $2.1 million, making her Brazil’s most expensive living artist at the time.

Last year the Paço Imperial cultural center hosted her first retrospective for ten years in Rio de Janeiro, her native city. For Milhazes, the experience was thrilling. “The pulse of this city is incredible right now,” she tells me at her studio in Rio. But it was nerve-racking, too. “People say, ‘I love your work’, but many have only ever seen it in books.

”This year, her sights are set on her first major U.S. retrospective, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Milhazes is keen to make her mark on a city she views as “a bridge between North and South America.” She is also enthused by the museum’s spectacular new building, whose glass walls are framed by a pergola of hanging gardens.

“I love the way that nature is integrated with the space,” she says, adding that the rapport with flora mirrors the tension in her own work, which thrives on the clash of landscapes. “I love to be surrounded by the city and yet also by nature. That’s why I love Rio and Miami.”

Your address: The St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort

Super Tuscans

In Italy, luxury has long been associated with food. When Catherine de Medici, great-granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, moved to France in 1633 to marry Henry II, a bevy of cooks followed in her wake, heralding the first export of Florentine cuisine that would go on to spread across the globe. Some 400 years later, many of the world’s most prized gastronomic products are still produced in Tuscany, from single-estate olive oils to sought-after wines, cheeses and treasured truffles.

Remarkably, many of these highly regarded foodstuffs are still produced by the same families who once fed Europe’s aristocracy during the Renaissance. Here, we profile three of them: two noble families, the vintners Marchesi Antinori and the olive-oil producers Marchesi Mazzei, who have been growing grapes and olives for more than 600 years; and the Brezzis, the Tuscan kings of truffles.

The Brezzi Family

Eugenio Brezzi was six years old when he found his first white truffle. Standing by his father in a pine forest collecting cones, he suddenly saw a strange dog digging something up. It was a truffle. Thrilled by the idea of a creature helping man to find such a treat, he took his father’s dog Lola into the forest the next day and found two more. And so began the world-renowned Eugenio Brezzi truffle business.

Today, the 93-year-old is as passionate about the fungi as he was as a child, explaining how the seasons bring different qualities to the truffle. “The white Alba truffle, the most valuable, ripens in autumn,” he explains. “The best ones will have been nibbled at by animals, which only go for the truffles with the strongest scent,” adds his son Valdimiro, who now runs the family business at Grosseto, near the Tuscan coast.

Like many family businesses, the company headquarters abuts the family home, and it is filled with memorabilia from the family’s other passion, travel. The walls are a patchwork of photographs recording epic trips around the world in cars, on motorbikes, horseback and on foot, and there is an enormous map criss-crossed in thick black pen showing itineraries.

It is beyond this office that the truffle rooms lie: spotless areas in which the fungi are inspected, scrubbed, stored, packaged and exported to prestigious stores throughout Italy and across the world as far as Australia and the United States. Here, three members of staff work diligently with their organic gold, some packing up whole truffles, others making white truffle purée to a recipe created by Eugenio Brezzi many years ago.

The Brezzis use no chemical aromas; all of their products are 100 percent natural. “To do things well is the best lesson in economics,” explains Valdimiro, taking a handful of perfect white truffles from a fridge: all perfectly shaped, unmarked and absolutely fresh. This little pile, he estimates, will be worth about $11,000.

Although the Brezzis are master truffle merchants and renowned throughout the world, theirs is a business for which they cannot plan. The truffle grows entirely wild, they explain, and no one can anticipate where it will grow or can plant it. Which is why the family explores forests all year round. Between December and March they will go out hunting for black truffles, also known as a Périgord truffle. Then comes the season for white spring truffles, followed by black summer truffles and finally the white Alba truffles.

A good harvest depends purely on nature’s goodwill. “The deeper in the ground the truffle is found, the better it is,” explains Valdimiro. And it is only the best specimens that will be sold. “If they’re less than perfect, we eat them ourselves.” Which is why Eugenio, Valdimiro and his son Ludovico have just enjoyed truffles with their lunch. As perks of the job go, it’s one that many of their customers would surely envy.

The Antinori Family

Who needs sons when you have three daughters – particularly ones as capable as the progeny of legendary winemaker Piero Antinori? Today, alongside their father, Albiera, Allegra and Alessia Antinori run Marchesi Antinori, one of Italy’s best-known wine labels.

Since their ancestor Rinuccio di Antinori started growing grapes at Castello di Combiate near Calenzano in 1180, the family business has expanded all over the world. Today, having passed through 26 generations, it employs almost 400 people worldwide and has vineyards comprising 1900 hectares in different regions of Italy and 540 hectares of vineyards abroad, from California’s Napa Valley to Chile, Romania and Malta.

While Albiera, the eldest of the daughters, spearheads worldwide marketing, Allegra oversees Antinori restaurants and Alessia, the youngest, runs a family farm near Rome, producing organic wines and cheeses sold in the family restaurant, La Cantinetta Antinori. The first restaurant opened in 1957 in Florence, and it now has offshoots in Zurich, Vienna and Moscow, with another due to open imminently in Baku, the oil-rich capital of Azerbaijan. “The idea is to export our gastronomic lifestyle around the world, centered around our wines,” explains Allegra.

Keeping the Antinoris’ rich heritage alive is constantly on the sisters’ minds – hence their decision to move from their historic headquarters in a 16th-century palace in the heart of Florence to Il Bargino, a splendid avant-garde cellar in Chianti’s rolling hills. More like the sprawling control center of a Bond villain than a wine vault, the 540,000 sq. ft. building is seamlessly integrated within the landscape and almost totally camouflaged. The only part completely visible to the naked eye is a panoramic terrace from which visitors can admire the vineyards, planted mainly with sangiovese grapes.

As Albiera shows us round their new cellars, her handsome features every bit as classic as those of a Renaissance Madonna, she explains how the company reached a turning point in the 1970s with the creation of its flagship wine, Tignanello. A blend of sangiovese with non-traditional grapes cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc, which was then aged in small French barriques, it was hailed as a Super Tuscan in America, and was a harbinger of the success to come. “It was then we realised that the quality of the grapes was paramount,” continues Albiera. “We knew we had to work during every phase in the vineyards, as well as in the cellar, with the aim of producing the best possible wines without compromising the purity of typical Chianti terrains.”

Although the family’s vineyards are among the oldest in Tuscany, it is essential, Albiera says, for the Antinoris to continue to move forward. “We are always experimenting, because there could always be something new we could improve on. That might be in the vineyards and the cellars, seeing new clones of local and international grapes, experimenting with cultivation techniques, altitudes, fermentation and barrels. And that’s what is exciting: as a family, our work is never done.”

The Mazzei Family

Among the ten oldest family businesses in Italy is that of the Florentine Marchesi Mazzei. They have been making wine and olive oil for nearly 600 years at Castello di Fonterutoli, where they live for part of the year. Known since Roman times as Fons Rutolae, a stopover for travelers commuting between Florence and Siena, the estate came into the family in 1435. It was here that Filippo Mazzei lived during the mid-18th century before traveling to America, at the behest of Thomas Jefferson, to plant vineyards at his estate at Monticello in Virginia: the first in that part of the New World.

Today, Fonterutoli is principally run by two of the middle Mazzei brothers, Filippo and Francesco: both CEOs. Their father Lapo Mazzei is the president, while their elder brother Jacopo and niece Livia are also on the board of directors. Their mother Carla is also active, cultivating lavender on the land, producing small batches of oils and soaps that go on sale at the shop that greets visitors at the very top of the hamlet. Like the Antinori family, they have a magnificent state-of-the-art cellar designed by the CEO’s sister, Agnese Mazzei, an architect and also a member of the board.

“We employ 54 people, but this is a seasonal business so the number of our employees increases during harvest time,” says Francesco Mazzei, as he shows us around the mill where the olive oil is produced. A keen sportsman, he sometimes cycles the 20 miles to and from Florence.

The large building is surrounded by 3,500 olive trees of different varieties – frantoio, leccino, moraiolo and pendolino – from which the celebrated Castello di Fonterutoli extra virgin olive oil Chianti Classico DOP is derived. The dark oil, rich with hints of artichoke and thistle, is sealed in a squat, dark-glass bottle that bears the family’s golden crest.

There are no great secrets, the family maintains, to producing olive oil: it is a process established in ancient times that has changed little over the centuries. But there is an art to producing the very best oils. All of the Mazzei olives, for instance, are picked by hand – mostly in November – before they’ve reached maturity to retain the fruity taste typical of Fonterutoli. They are also pressed within the space of two hours in an atmosphere with a partial, or total, absence of oxygen, depending on the variety of the olives.

The family’s investment in high-tech equipment has meant that they have been able to develop the processes even further. Oil can now, for instance, be extracted even from the smallest lots of olives, so that “cru” bottles can be produced for those with more discerning palates.

The aim, Francesco explains, is to make the same products created by their ancestors, but to make them as refined as possible. “We want to keep alive historical and family values, but with new tools, to make them the very best we possibly can.”

Photographs: Magnum Photos

Your address: The St. Regis Florence

Maps of Ages

“The maps of ancient Jerusalem are all fabrication, while celestial maps are an attempt to impose the Greek myths on to the night sky,” says Jay Walker of the Walker Library of the History of the Human Imagination in Connecticut.

Today, printed maps of the ancient world have never been as prized, or as celebrated for their rarity and their beauty. The oldest date back to the early days of printing in the 15th century, when European explorers started documenting their travels, and hit an aesthetic high in the elaborately decorated works of the Dutch mapmakers of the 17th century, the so-called Dutch Golden Age.

Although prices for antique maps start at about $100, most purchases are in the low five figures. The most expensive single printed map sold to date is Abel Buell’s A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America from 1784, which fetched $2,098,500 at Christie’s, New York in 2010. Seven-figure sales such as this are becoming more and more common, with dealers pinning great hopes on increasing interest from the Far East and Southeast Asia. “I’m off to Hong Kong for the second time in two months,” says Daniel Crouch, of the eponymous map-dealing firm in London. “Five years ago I would buy in China and sell in the U.S. Now it’s the reverse.”

What are these new buyers going after? So-called “curiosity maps”, in which land takes the form of figures – monarchy or politicians, for example – are well-liked. Among the most sought-after are Ptolemaic maps, based on the shape of the world set out by Claudius Ptolemy around AD 150; the last one sold to an individual by Sotheby’s in 2006 was printed in 1477 and fetched £2.1 million (about $3.4 million). The most undervalued, Crouch believes, are whole atlases. “You can get a globally significant world atlas collection for the same price as a mediocre Impressionist painting,” he says.

Christie’s, meanwhile, has seen prices soaring for masterpieces which are rare, in fine condition and have an excellent provenance. Just two years ago at the Kenneth Nebenzahl sale in New York, the auction house sold a 1542 portolan atlas by Battista Agnese for $2,770,500 – well above the original estimate of $800,000 to $1,200,000.

The internet has also had a huge part to play in rising prices, creating “a transparent marketplace where map and globe values can be easily traced,” according to Julian Wilson, specialist in books and manuscripts at Christie’s. “It’s also facilitated the globalization of the market, which was dominated by Western buyers ten years ago,” he adds.

Massimo De Martini of the Altea Gallery in London points out, however, that many people still like to make their purchase in person. “The internet is like our shop window,” he says. “Part of the fun of collecting is the hunt. But people still try to feel the quality for themselves.”
Experts advise new buyers to start small, looking for anything with original hand-painted colour on it, and to collect what they love. For Daniel Crouch, this is maps that are unusual. “My favourite item is an original 1930 copy of a 16th-century book called Astronomicum Caesareum by Petrus Apianus,” he says. “It’s made with moving parts and is full of dragons.” Wilson advises looking to the skies. “Celestial maps such as Star Spread by E. Hattie Rogers (1863) will pick up soon,” he says.

Perhaps surprisingly, new territories are still being charted. “NASA has produced a complete set of geological maps of the moon,” says Wilson. “One day, they, too, will be seen as a part of history.”

Where to buy antique maps
Altea Gallery, London, alteagallery.com; Antipodean Books, Maps and Prints, New York, antipodean.com; Christie’s, New York, christies.com; Geographicus Rare Antique Maps, New York, geographicus.com; Sotheby’s, New York, sothebys.com; Daniel Crouch Rare Books, London, crouchrarebooks.com

Where to see antique maps and globes
The Map & Atlas Museum of La Jolla, San Diego, mamlj.org; The National Maritime Museum, London, nmm.ac.uk; The British Library, London, bl.uk; The Newberry Library,
Chicago, newberry.org

Your address: The St. Regis New York

Images courtesy of Christie's and Sotheby's