1Early Influences
Nothing comes from nothing. Our characters emerge from the accretion of experience (good and bad, of winning and losing) and the assimilation of influence. I don’t believe in the myth of the self-made man; we are influenced from the moment we’re born, by our parents and grandparents, by our friends, by education, geography and politics, by everything we see. It’s not a question of whether or not you are influenced, but of understanding the influences that your mind absorbs from the world around you as you grow, and of deciding how you will adopt and adapt them as the foundation stones of your thought and work. Influences are not destiny. But I was fortunate to first open my eyes in an elegant Florence apartment, flooded with light, filled with beautiful modernist furniture designed by my cousin Ernesto Rogers, and looking out towards the magnificent Duomo, an early fifteenth-century masterpiece by Brunelleschi, who was not just the first Renaissance architect, but also an engineer, a planner, a sculptor and a thinker. The unornamented expressive Duomo is, to me, the pinnacle of Renaissance architecture, better even than the masterworks of Michelangelo. I have always preferred the simpler expression and stripped-down energy of early Renaissance, early Gothic, early modern architecture, to the richer more decorative forms that appear as movements mature. And I always say that I chose my parents well. My father was a doctor with a rigorously enquiring scientific mind, while my mother was an art lover (and in later life a skilled potter), with a love of colour and form. These powerful influences blended with many others over the years. My parents, Dada Nino. Our Florence apartment was furnished with elegant modern pieces designed by my cousin Ernesto Rogers.
Florence
Florence is the city I know best. It is the birthplace and pinnacle of the European Renaissance, a city-state that created some of the great masterpieces of art and architecture, against a backdrop of turbulent and sometimes bloody power struggles, the home of Brunelleschi, Alberti, Donatello, Massaccio, Dante and Michelangelo. I left the city when I was five, so my early memories – of hills, domes, towers, rooftops, churches and streets – may not be entirely reliable. But Florence entered into my bloodstream, and has stayed with me as a template, an ideal, for what a city can be; the River Arno and the Ponte Vecchio, its beautiful inhabited bridge; the dialogue between medieval and Renaissance buildings in the Piazza della Signoria. I am constantly revisiting and deepening my relationship with the city of my birth, and with the friends and relatives who still live there. I still love showing Florence to visitors, as my father did in his time. My father, Nino, had been living in Florence since 1926, where he studied to become a doctor. Nino’s grandfather was English, but had trained as a dentist in Paris before settling in Venice – we still have a tin of his patented ‘fragrant tooth powder’. Dada, my mother, was the daughter of an architect and engineer, from a notable Trieste family. Nino and Dada had been friends since they were children and married in 1932. I was born a year later. My parents were products of the early twentieth century, of the great flowering of civic and cultural life that followed the unification of Italy. My father was a rationalist to the core, with a strong belief in the strength of the human spirit, and a determination to succeed; echoing Nietzsche, he wrote ‘My will is my god’ on the flyleaves of books. Nino was deeply interested in politics too, in democracy and in Florence’s history as a city-state – as a new Athens. I remember him talking me through an essay he had written on the guild system and how this had formed part of Florence’s early Renaissance period of citizen government. Reflecting his deep interest in his adopted city, Nino was perhaps more Florentine than Italian, just as I would still say that I come from Florence rather than from Italy. As Mussolini’s fascists tightened their grip in the late 1920s and early 1930s, there was good reason to question the value of allegiance to the Italian state. Nino had always been drawn to England, visiting the year before I was born to investigate working there as a doctor. The rise of the fascists forced my parents’ hand. Nino loved England as only a foreigner can. He prized classic English brands – Burberry raincoats, Dents gloves and Lotus shoes – and dressed as the epitome of the saying, ‘To be truly English, you have to be a foreigner.’ For him, it seemed an oasis of democracy and liberal values in an unstable world. English newspapers, Dickens and G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories were his favoured reading, and my name was emphatically the English ‘Richard’, not the Italian ‘Riccardo’. Dada was more sceptical about the prospect of moving, more attached to Trieste, the town of her birth; although Trieste had only been part of Italy since the First World War, her family was comfortably established there. It had always been a cosmopolitan place, set on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for which it provided the only port, at that time, and looking more to Vienna than to Rome. Like many port cities, Trieste had its roots in commerce, not religion or military strength, so had a marginal and transitional character, filled with a minestrone of mysterious businessmen, writers and artists – including James Joyce, who taught my mother English. Though she was more modern in outlook, Dada’s family was more traditional than Nino’s, and more passionately Italian. Her parents lived in the neo-medieval castle Villa Geiringer built by her architect grandfather Eugenio together with a funicular railway that stopped at the Villa on its way uphill. Dada was passionate about art, with a brilliant eye for beauty. I remember her delight in taking me to see the Festival of Britain in 1951, and throughout her life she retained her enthusiasm for modern art, design, writing. I only discovered years later that both sides of the family were Jewish though Dada’s grandfather had converted to Christianity, and both she and Nino were atheists. When I asked my mother whether this was true, she replied, ‘Of course your roots are Jewish, but I’ve spent all my life getting away from religion.’ I accepted the answer at the time, but looking back there was clearly an element of reticence, and a reluctance to acknowledge that being Jewish is as much about culture as it is about religion.
Choosing London
By 1938, it had become clear that war was coming, and that my father would finally have to choose between his Italian home and the risk of internment or worse and his English passport (a legacy of his English grandfather). My parents chose England, and my privileged existence as a moderately spoilt firstborn Italian child in a comfortably bourgeois family came to an abrupt end. My father came over in late 1938, and my mother and I landed in England in October 1939, accompanied by my father’s brother Giorgio, a concert pianist, and a man as romantic as my father was rational. I remember him rehearsing Schubert and Chopin on a concert grand piano during the Blitz while I sat underneath hugging the legs.
We swapped the elegantly furnished flat with a view over Florentine rooftops for a single room in a boarding house in Bayswater, with a coin meter for the heating and a bath in a cupboard that we used to fill with hot water to take the edge off the flat’s chill. Nino had only been able to smuggle a few hundred pounds out of Italy and though we weren’t living in poverty, life was a lot tougher than it had been in Florence. The first Christmas was dark and cold, and my only present was a grey lead toy submarine. I felt my parents had let me down. Life had switched from colour to black-and-white. London was occasionally enveloped by smog from thousands of coal fires, which in later years filled the city so thickly that all sense of direction was lost within a few steps of your front door, like being submerged in thick black oil. My mother had to learn to cook more or less from scratch, and missed Florence’s rolling cityscape so much that in her first few months she took to walking the streets of London looking for hills to climb, to get a better view of her new city. Nino urgently
