Paola Marzotto she is an Italian of character who lived several lives in one. She was born in Venice and began her multifaceted professional career in the art world at the age of 18. She studied anthropology, psychology, and acting at the Lee Strasberg school. She was a journalist for various Italian media, including Rai, an author and television producer, and a photojournalist. She took photos while filming Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” in the Philippines. She was a fashion designer, worked in politics and was a candidate for the European Parliament.
She is the daughter of the countess Marta Marzotto and granddaughter of Gaetano Marzotto, founder of one of the most powerful companies in Italy. The Marzotto textile group was the owner of Hugo Boss and Valentino and a manufacturer for Gianfranco Ferré, among others.
Paola intensely experienced the cultural atmosphere of Rome in the seventies and her curiosity led her down different paths. She is currently an artistic photographer, environmentalist and owner of the Eye-V Gallery.
These days he presents his sample “Antarctica, Melting Beauty”, in the Gallery of the Atlanteans of the Palace of the Legislature of Buenos Aires. The exhibition brings together a series of photographs that he took in Argentine Antarctica in early 2020.
He lives between his farm near Punta del Este, his apartment in Buenos Aires and Europe, where his children and grandchildren live. of her marriage to Carlo Borromeo he had his daughter Beatrice -married to Pierre Casiraghi, son of Caroline of Monaco— and his son Carlo.
News: Reviewing her biography gives the impression that she is a curious, intense and free person.
Paola Marzotto: Absolutely. I am very curious and restless, I like to learn. And I am very free. I don’t know if it’s luck or a sentence.
News: Was it hard for you to be a free person? Did you pay any price?
Marzotto: It is my character, it is in my nature. I can’t think of having made any other kind of choice.
News: You recognize yourself as an artist. What is it to be an artist?
Marzotto: It is a state of the soul. A state of torment too. I know artists who go crazy at night and during the day thinking about something. I don’t see him much today. I see a lot of very smart people who find a formula and go there.
News: What creative moment are you in?
Marzotto: I am in a second stage. I came from analog and developed an impressive eye. I had to learn to handle digital, it’s complicated, the technological part has cost me a lot, but I learned to handle it and I’m very happy. My camera —Canon R5— allows me infinite possibilities. I play with this and I love what I do, but I don’t fake nature to impress. If I could paint I would, but I don’t have time. Photography is the closest thing to painting. Now I am working on two projects: My Giverny and Il Giardino del Edén, where I photograph parks, trees, fountains, landscapes.
News: What matters in photography: the technique, the eye or both?
Marzotto: I use my eye and good taste, the aesthetic sense, which now is almost a dirty word. The sense of harmony, of composition, of beauty. Also, I couldn’t do what I do if I wasn’t an athlete—I swim and walk and was a skier—because this is rough. The whole body works when you are in search of something. I already fell a couple of times and hurt a rib. Then you have to have a lot of character, when things don’t work out for you, you have to stick with it and insist.
News: You said that your trip to Antarctica in 2020, which led to the photo show, was a trip to the abyss. Why?
Marzotto: I went on the National Geographic Explorer ship and what I found was very shocking. I was very impressed by the lack of life, of animals, the desolate landscape. I knew Magallanes well, I had been in the ’70s and ’90s. And everything I saw did not correspond to what my son, who had been to Antarctica seven years before, had told me. I thought to see the Disney movie, with the whales floating, I didn’t find anything like that. After this and with the pandemic I became aware. Now I have a mystical view of nature, which has amazing secrets and miracles. Each yuyo has a miracle. I don’t cut the grass anymore. Before, nature was something ornamental for me.
News: As part of his awareness he created the Eye-V Gallery in 2021.
Marzotto: Yes, it is very high-level artistic photography, with a deep search focused on nature. At this moment we are 15 international photographers. I organize exhibitions in galleries, museums, biennials, fairs. I also presented my exhibition on Antarctica at the Venice Biennale 2021 and at the Madrid School of Mines and Energy.
News: Did belonging to an aristocratic family make things easier for you, did it open doors for you, did it work in your favour?
Marzotto: More than aristocratic, ours was always an old, solid, serious business family. Marzotta was one of the four big groups in Italy. My grandfather was also a patron, he made the city of harmony in Valdagno. My paternal grandmother was aristocratic. On the other hand, I had peasant grandparents, my mother was a peasant who became a model because she was very pretty. Coming from an important family brought me problems in my journalistic work and in fashion a little less. People thought I was super privileged, but I made my way with my own effort and for various reasons it was very difficult for me. I didn’t do it with the family, I earned everything.
News: You have two children. What kind of mother has she been?
Marzotto: Severe. Very strict with values, with studies, the responsibility of each one. My mother has been the same with me and she has worked a lot. My children have gone to public school, they have been super independent and zero spoiled. They have had very few toys, we lived in the country, they would run there until nightfall. I believe a lot in making fantasy work and not filling children with activities that do not develop their heads. And it has worked perfectly. Both have graduated and are very good professionals. Beatrice is a documentary filmmaker and Carlo, an industrial designer, and in terms of ethical vision we share the same values.
News: What was your mother like? What memories do you have of her?
Marzotto: He passed away recently and I have millions of memories. My mother was a very interesting person, very talented, but very angry because she had a narcissistic profile. I have been very in tune with her, we had the same mind, but in some things we did not share the same values. I was born protected, in a good family, in a family clan. My mother was the daughter of a single mother, her father was an alcoholic, they lived in the country. She was very ambitious, I am not. She was a very lively, restless, intelligent woman. She achieved an important marriage and had five children, but she was in a bad way, it affected life in the province of Veneto. At one point she got sick and started going to Rome to do psychotherapy. There she met Renato Gutusso, a great Italian painter twenty years older than her, and began a relationship with him, which was a great love, while she was still married to my father. At that time I was introduced to the world of 1970s Rome.
News: What was that world like?
Marzotto: I began to have all that barrage of artists, of politicians, there were the young painters, the people who surrounded Gutusso, more importantly, many people from the cinema. Lina Wertmüller was a great friend of my mother, Passolini ate with Gutusso almost every night, I met Melina Mercuri, Alberto Moravia, Gualterio Jacopetti, director of the film Mondo Cane, and the Russian poet Yevtushenko. In Rome we had a small house all shocking pink and we lived together. I was studying and she, with the excuse of taking care of me, came and went from Veneto. We were very complicit, we had a lot of fun. High-end bohemian living.
News: Did you have great loves?
Marzotto: For me they are all great loves, otherwise I won’t waste my time trying. I have had very important pages, each one has had its weight. And I have almost no break in relationships with the men in my life. I’m still super friends with everyone. For me all these people have become family. If I can, I don’t lose a single piece, and I still have very good relationships with my girl friends. I don’t think one’s heart is limited. I love you all.
News: How is your relationship with Carolina de Monaco?
Marzotto: I prefer not to talk about my current personal relationships. For my privacy and that of others.
News: I then ask her what the Carolina you know is like.
Marzotto: A great woman, a fantastic woman who does much more than she knows. I have a lot of respect for the social work he does.
