‘I MISS HIM EVERY DAY’ Gianni Versace’s partner Antonio D’amico tells
More than 20 years after the shocking murder of Gianni Versace, his longtime partner, Antonio D’amico, opens up about that day
The morning of July 15, 1997, is seared in Antonio D’amico’s memory. After eating breakfast inside the 10-bedroom Miami Beach villa he shared with his partner of 15 years, famed Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace, he was getting ready for a game of tennis with a friend, when he heard two gunshots outside. “I heard ‘Bam! Bam!’” D’amico says. “My blood chilled right away.” Racing to the mansion’s wrought-iron front gate, he found Versace, 50, crumpled on the steps in a pool of his own blood. “From that moment, I completely blacked out,” says D’amico. “I tried to scream but no sound came out.”
Twenty-one years later, D’amico, 59, tells WHO about that horrific day and shares details of how he rebuilt his life to find his own path in the fashion world.“When Gianni died, I was cut in two,” D’amico says. “Half of myself was dead. I said to myself, ‘I am alive, so I have to go on.’”
Though he battled deep depression for eight years, he says he knew he had to drag himself out of “that black pit.” And fashion helped him do it: his new Antonio D’amico Golf line of men’s and women’s sportswear launched this year. “This collection is my new beginning,” D’amico says of his 1920s and ’30s-inspired designs. Still, the shadow of Versace remains. “Working at Versace’s side was like going to school and learning from the best teacher you can have,” he says. “I almost felt like I was a creation of his, too.”
Versace and D’amico met in 1982 at the La Scala opera house in Milan, where D’amico was a model and costume designer. Versace hired D’amico to assist on his theatre costumes, and their relationship soon turned from work friendship to romance. As Versace’s bold, sexy designs built a billiondollar brand worn by Princess Diana, Madonna and Elton John, the pair divided their time among the designer’s opulent homes in Milan, Lake Como, New York and Miami. Versace was “one of the most generous people I have ever met,” D’amico says. Gianni’s coming-out in 1995 was a milestone for the gay community, but the pair never aspired to marry or have kids of their own. “All we wanted,” he says,“was to live our relationship in the open.”
For all the glamour of their lives, Versace had a “down-toearth” side, says D’amico, favouring weekends spent gardening and dining at home with friends. Though the pair had much in common, they were complete opposites when it came to being neat. “I am a maniac of tidiness,” says D’amico. “If you went to the bathroom after Gianni, it looked like a war zone, every single towel thrown about and his shaven beard on all surfaces. You’d think that an army of men
“To this day, it’s always very hard to imagine my life without Gianni” — Antonio D’amico
had used the bathroom.”
Today, D’amico lives quietly in Milan with his partner of 13 years, Alberto Santinelli. He has no contact with the Versace family, with whom he settled a dispute over Gianni’s will in 1998. But memories of the murder still haunt him. When police identified the killer as Andrew Cunanan, a 27-year-old who had murdered at least four others in a three-month spree, D’amico was puzzled. “We did not know this guy,” he says. “I would often ask myself in the aftermath, ‘Could I have protected [ him]? Could I have saved him?’ But I have no answers.”
What he does have, he says, are dreams of their life in happier times. “It no longer feels like pain,” he says. “I say to him, ‘Gianni, help me do this.’ I ask him to give me strength to go on.”