Claudia Botta

The world of fashion, between the end of the Sixties and the beginning of the Noughties, had a key character that embodied its spirit and told the tale: journalist Anna Piaggi, living witness of that contamination between art, society and culture that changed fashion and sanctioned its success on a global scale. The daughter of a manager for La Rinascente (Milan's iconic high-end shopping mall whose foundation goes back to 1865), Karl Lagerfeld's muse, "a poet with her clothes" in the words of Bill Cunningham, her life is retraced through interviews with designers (Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Stephen Jones, Manolo Blahnik, and more) together with archival images from four decades of fashion history.

The film richly illustrates the history of one of the most famous and lavish Italian pleasure villas, located in the town of Lainate in Lombardy, not far from Milan. Using onsite documentation, costumed reenactments, interviews with prominent curators and historians, architectural models, and computer graphics, Villa Visconti Borromeo Litta portrays centuries of Italian art and architectural history in terms of stylistic expression. The film also explores the social, familial, and political milieux—not least of which is the chronicle of Pirro I Visconti Borromeo, count of Brebbia, the creator of this place of art and delights, a romantic, a patron, and a sophisticated man of culture in Milan during the late sixteenth century. The villa’s wonders are many—its famous Nymphaeum, greenhouses, palaces, sculptures, frescoes, fountains, and water features among them.