La Vita è Bella

Š Ryland Peters & Small 2014

La Vita è Bella The elegant art of living in the Italian style

Jill Foulston

Il Sud LEFT A black lacquer tray from Thailand keeps company with a bronze Neoclassical sculpture on the mantelpiece in the study. Andrea’s own-design checked linen covers an armchair from B&B Italia; behind it hangs a work by the 20th-century artist Alighiero Boetti.

Geometric Luxuries In the centre of Rome’s ancient Campo Marzio quarter, on the narrow streets off the Via del Corso, are the city’s most exclusive shops. It’s here, at the top of a majestic 19th-century building, that the architect and interior designer Andrea Truglio lives and works. Curiously, Andrea once renovated and furnished this apartment for a client. With some surprise, he found himself moving into it 20 years later.

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BELOW Andrea’s rainproof textiles protect the cushions on the terrace.

BOTTOM A plaster model of the façade of an 18thcentury church sits on a small console table. The squared shape of the armchair is in keeping with Andrea’s abiding taste for the geometrical.

Š Ryland Peters & Small 2014 THIS PAGE At dawn and at dusk, the scents of bay, basil, rosemary and other aromatic herbs waft over an airy paradise offering spectacular views of the gardens of the Villa Borghese and Villa Medici, as well as the Santissima Trinità dei Monti, the church that crowns the Spanish Steps. The lacquered metal chairs are by Studio Truglio.

© Ryland Peters & Small 2014 Une Coupe de Champagne THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE

The pool and garden area is completely new, and still being developed. Dry-stone walls were restored or built from scratch, the earth was resurfaced and native plants and shrubs reinstated. The pool itself was created by digging

straight into the rock; beyond it are the arid fields where farm labourers once toiled. All the houses in the area are built of stone found in these fields, and compacted earth can still be seen in the natural holes that pit the stones used to construct this masseria.

Artist’s Retreat The artist Velasco Vitali comes from an artistic family near Lake Como, where he still lives. When a friend and gallery owner invited him to exhibit in Comiso, a small town in Sicily,Velasco rented a house in the Hyblaean Mountains, a region he had never visited. What began as a busman’s holiday ended up changing his life. Even the house he stayed in unexpectedly became his own.

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the personality of those who inhabit the space’, and that personality should be guided by design, not buried under it.

For her, texture is what links it all together, and her owndesign kilims and floor coverings, produced for the Viennese firm Oritop, add drama and richness to her home.

Along with carefully chosen antiques, contemporary art is a huge presence. The photographs in the main sitting room are by the Sicilian artist Loredana Longo, who has created explosion installations and photographed the remains. Monique Lovering’s paintings and drawings are framed identically, yet hung in unlikely groupings.

As someone who loves to cook, Mariella considers a kitchen ‘an open zone that communicates with living areas’.

The original one here, however, seemed sited in a location from another era, when servants prepared food and brought it to the table in a more formal room. The space has now

ABOVE Why hide lovely kitchen

utensils away in cupboards? A framed piece of fabric – Chinese silk with a calligraphy font – provides an exotic splashback; at floor level, a cleverly placed mirror extends this small space.

RIGHT Perfectly positioned for sea-gazing is this chaise longue in

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black-and-white fabric. On the wall are two works by New Zealand artist Monique Lovering.

OPPOSITE Floor coverings, often a decorative afterthought, can transform a space. On the floor here is a kilim woven to the owner’s own design in undyed New Zealand wool.

Š Ryland Peters & Small 2014

INTERIORS

Celebrate the timeless beauty of Italy with this lavish and evocative look at its regions, landscape, food, architecture and interiors.

La Vita è Bella offers a privileged glimpse inside 15 ravishing Italian homes, ranging from an ivy-covered tower at the edge of Lake Como to a stone farmhouse in Tuscany, a grand 18th-century merchants’ house on the Amalfi Coast and an elegant city apartment with a view of the harbour in Palermo, Sicily.

With more than 300 stunning photographs, La Vita è Bella captures the essence of Italy in features on its traditions, style and culture. Authentic recipes from four distinct regions and quotations from great writers will inspire anyone who’s ever visited Italy – and dreamed of going back.

Jill Foulston is a writer, translator and editor. Her two anthologies The Joy of Eating and The Joy of Shopping have been praised as ‘sensual, funny and captivating’ with ‘plenty to beguile and astonish’. She lives in London and Umbria.

‘You may have the universe, if I may have Italy’ Giuseppe Verdi

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