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 This article was written by John Hooper in Rome, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 27th July 2010 20.11 UTC
“Leonard Bernstein, Laurence Olivier, Maria Callas, Elizabeth Taylor – it sounds like a legend, doesn’t it?” mused Italy’s most celebrated opera and film director, Franco Zeffirelli, as he recalled the guests who had passed through his retreat on the Amalfi coast.
For 35 years, until he sold it in 2007, Villa Tre Ville was a place that gave him “the opportunity to put together my mind with those of creative geniuses”, he told the Guardian. “But I cannot enjoy it any more, and so it is right that other people should be able to enjoy it.”
This month, Zeffirelli’s house started a new life as a hotel, offering guests the chance to brush shoulders with the ghosts of celebrities past and present. The three-villa estate’s links with the arts go back to the 1920s, when it was a meeting place for Russian cultural exiles. Sergei Diaghilev was a guest. More recent visitors to Villa Tre Ville have included Liza Minnelli and Elton John.
When Zeffirelli’s biographer, the late David Sweetman, travelled out to meet him, he later recounted how: “Eventually, some ancient servant let me in, and I was shown on to this opera set. I’ve never seen anything like it. It seemed, just possibly, the most beautiful place on Earth.”
Built on the rocky coastline near Positano, Villa Tre Ville offers sublime views over the Mediterranean. But its originality as a hotel, which will go at least some way towards justifying prices of up to ¤5,000 (£4,171) a night, is that its new owners have left it as untouched as possible. The biggest suite, named after Zeffirelli himself, is much as it was when he moved out. The bedroom furniture, inlaid with mother of pearl, was brought by the director from Syria. Guests will even be able to browse through the books he left behind.
Villa Tre Ville was bought by a local hotel owner, Giovanni Russo, who has two establishments in Sorrento. “The thinking was to alter it as little as possible”, he said. “And we have made really very few changes.”
The old bread oven had been turned into a shower cabin, he said. But even an eccentric greenhouse, made from part of the set for one of Zeffirelli’s productions of La Traviata, had been kept and adapted for use as accommodation.
The cheapest of the 12 suites and rooms is available for a mere €1,100, including breakfast, but not VAT.
Zeffirelli said the years in which he owned the estate “were the very best years of my life, when I was climbing the steps of my career. But it could not go on forever. The time of climbing the steps of Positano is over. And I have a beautiful house in Rome where I can read and entertain my friends.”
For a man of 87, he remains extraordinarily active, having just completed a cycle of operas staged at the Arena in Verona. But his work schedule has gradually diminished, and next year, he said, he was booked to direct “only three operas”.
Zeffirelli’s biographer recalled that getting to Villa Tre Ville was a rather less than luxurious experience. “It took hours. The taxi bill was unreal, but eventually we arrived at the top of this little winding road. And there was just a gate, and I had to go down all these bloody stairs to the villa.”
So that the estate’s well-heeled visitors do not face the same difficulties, the new owner of Villa Tre Ville has installed a lift to carry guests down from the road. “This was the real change we made”, he said. “And it was a major work of engineering.”
 guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
My personal favourite posts this week from the bloggers in Italy, in alphabetical order:
- All Roads lead to Pecetto: Photo story: Taking it to the Streets
Turin’s street performers
- At Home in Tuscany: Feeling at Home – Guest post by Letizia
At home in the kitchen
- Bella Vita in Liguria: Borgo Life Blues
Living with summertime neighbours
- Ciao Amalfi: Sea of Blue Umbrellas in Atrani
Blue against black
- Daily Rome: Parking
Solving the problem of parking in Rome
- Juls’ Kitchen: Watermelon aguas frescas with lime, mint and basil syrup
A cool drink for a hot day
- Parla Food: Guide to responsible food tourism in Rome
Equally valid for other Italian cities
 Stile Mediterraneo: How to order a meal in Puglia and Southern Italy
Avoid being disappointed- Tuscan Traveler: It’s a Sunflower Year in Tuscany
What makes a sunflower year?
- Wandering Italy: Cinta Senese Pigs in Chianti
There is more to Tuscany than wine.
 Wikio’s e-blog or European Review of Blogs, currently in beta version, selects blog posts from the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain and translates them into five languages.
Here is the latest Italian post translated into English from Vita di un IO, a blogger from Turin, who writes about the cinema. It is all about the sale of James Bond’s Aston Martin, which makes for interesting reading.
By the way, if you have a blog written in French, German, Italian or Spanish or are UK based, you might want to consider registering it with e-blogs.
As usual, some great posts from the bloggers in Italy, who are all looking for ways to keep cool! In alphabetical order:
- 3 in Giro: Malga Venegia
A day at the malga in the Dolomites
- Aglio, Olio & Peperoncino: Panelle!
Don’t you love street food
- arttrav.com: Going to an Italian rock concert and knowing all the words
Measuring your integration into Italian society
- Aurelio Brattini: My wedding day in Rome, July 10, 2010
A wedding feast fit for a Tuscan chef
- Baroque Sicily: Sweeping, Weeping in Sicily
How long before the twig brooms disappear?
- Brigolante: This vegetarian loves easting hearts – artichoke hearts that is!
It’s great to enjoy grown-up good
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 Photo courtesy of Umbria Lovers
Accommodating a tree
- Marc Delessio: Castello di Reschio Paintings
Plein air paintings from the Tuscan/Umbrian border
- Umbria Lovers: Orlando and his reeds
Working with the reeds of Lake Trasimeno
- Verona Daily Photo: Sultry Evening
The cool of the evening fails to arrive.
This article was written by John Hooper in Rome, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 16th July 2010 09.10 UTC
There have been tumultuous scenes at the Milan courthouse as George Clooney arrived to testify in a case that centres on the use of his name on a line of clothing. The Hollywood actor, accompanied by his lawyer and two bodyguards, emerged from a lift to find the corridor leading to court 4 packed with fans, photographers, TV crews and some courthouse employees who were bent on capturing the moment on their mobile telephones.
Wearing a dark blue suit, white shirt and birds-eye pattern tie, the actor shook hands with some of his fans before disappearing into the hearing. But his only reported comment was a practical – and very necessary – “Please let my lawyer through.”
The judge, Pietro Caccialanza, had ordered additional security inside and outside the courthouse, in anticipation of large numbers of admirers. On grounds that the presence of the actor in court was not a matter of “social relevance”, the judge banned the filming and photographing of his testimony.
Caccialanza had the trial moved temporarily to a bigger courtroom with more space for the press and public. Soon after taking his place at the bench he threw out a woman caught trying to take photographs of the scene with her mobile phone.
He repeatedly asked for silence from the public, which was predominantly and predictably female. “This trial has the right to tranquil dignity,” the news agency Ansa quoted the judge as saying.
Three people are accused of exploiting Clooney’s fame to promote a line of clothing, GC Exclusive by George Clooney. The case goes back to April 2008 when the defendants marketed a line of suits bearing his initials.
They are said to have claimed the actor would be present at the launch in Milan. Instead the only newsworthy arrival was that of a detachment of officers from Italy’s semi-militarised revenue guard.
Among other things they took away documents the prosecution says bear a forged copy of the Hollywood star’s signature. The launch was allegedly staged by Vania Goffi, from Senigallia on the east coast of Italy. She has been on trial in another case involving a website that the prosecution maintains offered Rolex watches for sale and delivered boxes of salt.
The actor is both a witness in the case and a party to it. Under Italian law victims of an offence can join themselves to a criminal trial to obtain compensation.
An interpreter was requested by the judge so that Clooney could testify in English. His agent, Stan Rosenfield, was expected to give evidence to the court.
Clooney, who has a villa near lake Como, is rarely out of the news in Italy because of his relationship with Italian model and actor Elisabetta Canalis. He has lent his name to the advertising of legitimate Italian products, including a brand of coffee and an aperitif.
 guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
This article was written by Ian Sansom, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 16th July 2010 23.05 UTC
The most notorious family in Italian history was Spanish. Rodrigo Borgia – who went on to become one of the baddest of the bad popes – was born in Valencia, Spain, in 1431. In his classic book, The Bad Popes (1969), ER Chamberlin calls Rodrigo the “Spanish Bull”. Giovanni di Lorenzo de Medici, Pope Leo X, and no shrinking violet himself, famously compared Rodrigo to a wolf. “Now we are in the power of a wolf, the most rapacious perhaps that this world has ever seen. And if we do not flee, he will inevitably devour us all.”
Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather (1969), spent 20 years working on a novel about the Borgias, The Family (2002), and describes Rodrigo in fine purple prose as “a mountainous man, tall enough to carry his weight”. He is, to all intents and purposes, Don Corleone, the Godfather.
Rodrigo Borgia’s uncle, Alfonso de Borja, was Pope Callixtus III. Through family preferment, Rodrigo became first a bishop, then a cardinal, then vice-chancellor of the Holy See. His position in the church allowed him to become fabulously wealthy and to take numerous mistresses, with whom he fathered a number of children. With his favourite, Vannozza dei Cattanei, he fathered a son, Cesare, born in 1475, and a daughter, Lucrezia, in 1480. These two became their father’s helpmeets. Lucrezia was just 12 when her father bribed his way to becoming pope – reputedly with four mules carrying sacks of silver – and by the time she was 13 he’d married her off to Giovanni Sforza, a member of a powerful family who Rodrigo regarded as useful allies. When the Sforzas proved not to be useful allies, Rodrigo simply announced that Giovanni was impotent and had the marriage annulled. Historians agree that it was Giovanni who then began to spread rumours of the Borgias’ incest and orgies, for which they became renowned.
Lucrezia’s second husband, Alfonso of Aragon, Duke of Bisceglie, fared even worse than the hapless Giovanni. When Alfonso was found to be dispensable, Cesare had him strangled by a henchman. Lucrezia, apparently, was heartbroken.
Unsentimental and undeterred, her father and brother then managed to get Lucrezia married off to Alfonso d’Este, eldest son of the Duke of Ferrara – again, a marriage of political and papal convenience. The writer Kathryn Hughes has described Lucrezia as “handed round like a parcel to suit her father’s political game”. The Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it rather more nicely: “Though legend has associated her with her father and her brother Cesare in extremes of iniquity, she can in fact hardly be accused of more than resignation to their will.”
Sarah Bradford, in Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (2004), debunks many of the myths surrounding Lucrezia – there probably was no poison ring, though it does seem likely that her brother Cesare did indeed stage the infamous chestnut banquet in 1501, in which naked courtesans scrambled around for chestnuts, to the delight of onlooking prelates, a scene vividly brought to life in the 2006 Spanish film, Los Borgia.
The Borgias have become a byword for badness: they are the great dynasty of the debauched and the depraved. Lucrezia in particular remains an icon of transgressive womanhood. Lord Byron was obsessed with her – he stole a lock of her hair. In 2008, researchers at the National Gallery of Victoria, in Australia, discovered that an overlooked painting by Dosso Dossi, Portrait of a Youth, is, in fact, a portrait of Lucrezia. She is holding a knife.
 guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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