Writer was notable London literary host
GAIA SERVADIO 1938-2021
Gaia Servadio, who has died in Rome aged 82, was an irrepressible Italian-born journalist and writer, the author of some 40 books, who spent most of her life in Britain and who for decades hosted one of the last notable literary salons; she was also formerly the mother-in-law of Boris Johnson.
Encouraged by an anglophile mother who had worked at the British Council in Rome, Gaia Servadio arrived in London in the mid-1950s, when she was 17. Originally, she hoped to be a painter, and enrolled at Chelsea School of Art before studying design at St Martin’s and in Camberwell.
By chance, she was asked by the BBC to help make a documentary about Danilo Dolci, the Sicilian social activist. This began her career as a journalist, initially as a correspondent for Italian newspapers, although later she wrote for British ones, including the Telegraph titles.
She made her mark most evidently with her work on the Mafia, which was little known beyond Sicily before the 1960s. Following the popular success of The Godfather, she published in 1974 a biography of the Mafia boss Angelo La Barbera, who was stabbed to death in prison the following year. She herself received threats and thereafter focused on other subjects.
In 1961, when still in her early twenties, she had married Willy Mostyn-owen, then working for Christie’s. A decade her senior, he knew Italy well, having previously been employed by the art historian Bernard Berenson at I Tatti, his home in Florence.
An Old Etonian — a school she thought overrated — and the owner of Aberuchill Castle, Perthshire, and Woodhouse, a Georgian mansion in Shropshire, Mostyn-owen provided an entree into English society for Gaia.
Although she in turn brought to it a decided glamour, like many an expatriate she could be scathing about her new home. “The English — well, some of them are awful fools,” she mused of the upper-class milieu in which she found herself, “but some are articulate and well read.”
She felt treated by her husband’s friends as an oddity (she never lost her throaty-voiced accent), perhaps not least because she was then a card-carrying member of the Italian Communist Party. She revealed later that Mostyn-owen had also been discomfited by the success in 1967 of her Candide-like novel Melinda, about the spirit of the age.
Although the couple had three children, and their marriage did not formally end until much later, there were infidelities on both sides. Her many admirers included Gianni Agnelli, who courted her aboard his yacht. When, in a fit of anger at her young son’s messiness, she threw all his toys out of the window, including a much-prized model of a Fiat 500 which Agnelli had given him, the tycoon replaced it with another — at full-scale.
Gaia Servadio believed Agnelli was attracted to her because he was used to women who were “princesses or prostitutes,” not ones who had views of their own; she was always mindful that in Italy it was hard to be taken seriously as a woman. She was cheerfully outspoken, her dislikes encompassing political correctness and psychoanalysis (“the penitence of the middle classes”).
Her house on the Chelsea-pimlico border, its chaotic kitchen reflective of a style of doing things she admitted was “precipitosa” or slapdash, became a meeting point for many another Italians passing through London.
Visitors included Primo Levi, a friend of her father’s, a fellow industrial chemist, Inge Feltrinelli, widow of the publisher of Doctor Zhivago, and the director Bernardo Bertolucci and his wife Clare Peploe.
There they might meet historians and writers such as Eric Hobsbawm, Denis Mack Smith, Al Alvarez and Lady Antonia Fraser. Gaia Servadio’s address book ran from Harold Acton to Evelyn Waugh, taking in Maria Callas, Pierre Cardin, EM Forster, Mary Mccarthy, Nancy Mitford and Philip Roth along the way.
Her own books, mostly written in Italian, included biographies of the director Luchino Visconti (1980) and of the composer Gioachino Rossini (2015), a life of the inspiration for La Traviata, Giuseppina Strepponi (1994) and a study of Renaissance women (1986).
Among myriad other projects with which she was involved were a festival of Gustav Mahler’s music in London in 1985, curated with Claudio Abbado, the conductor, and a Verdi Week in 2011 for the Italian embassy to mark the 150th anniversary of Unification.
On several occasions in the Eighties, Gaia Servadio hosted After Dark, the Channel 4 discussion program. She also researched the archeology of Sicily (for which she learned to read Phoenician), and in 2008 was asked by Asma Assad, the wife of Syria’s ruler, to set up an arts festival in Damascus, though events meant this came to naught.
Travel was another passion, not just in the Middle East, but also to India, France and Russia. She was proud of speaking some Russian and, in a characteristic episode, on a recent trip to Estonia haggled with a street trader over the price of a tin of caviar. When this was opened, it proved to contain dog food.
Such a thirst for life’s experiences, allied to undoubted charisma and a forceful ambition might also put one in mind of Boris Johnson. He and Gaia’s daughter, Allegra, met while at Oxford, although as Andrew Gimson’s biography of him revealed, he made a poor impression with her mother. A skiing holiday together was almost sabotaged when he forgot to bring his passport, while his suitcase turned out to be full of dirty sheets.
On the morning of his wedding to Allegra, at Woodhouse in 1987, Johnson revealed to his host of the previous night, the MP John Biffen, that he lacked much of the requisite morning dress. He was married in Biffen’s borrowed trousers and cufflinks, though in his own shoes (with holes in the soles) as his feet were larger than those of the MP.
Britain’s future prime minister then contrived to misplace his new wedding ring and to leave the marriage certificate behind in Biffen’s trousers. He and Allegra were divorced in 1993. While generous to those she liked, Gaia Servadio had rather less time for those she did not. “For him,” she said of Johnson, “the truth does not exist.”
Gaia Cecilia Metella Servadio was born in Padua on Sept. 13, 1938. Her father, Luxardo, was one of five sons all named for the properties of light or “luce”; had there been a sixth he would have been called Lucifer.
Trained in physics and chemistry by Enrico Fermi and Bruno Pontecorvo, Luxardo accepted the job of running a factory making tar just when the racial laws began to make life difficult for Jews in Italy. For his family were Sephardic Jews, although his wife, Bianca, who was part Sicilian, was a Roman Catholic.
Gaia and her older sister, Pucci, were surreptitiously baptized by the parish priest to keep them safer but were nonetheless forbidden from attending a state school, being educated at first by nuns. One night, soon after the Italian armistice, their nanny’s lover Ugo, a carabiniere, came to warn them that the Gestapo were about to round up the family.
Luxardo managed to obtain false papers and having buried their silver in the garden the family fled south. Until the Allies arrived, they hid out in towns around Ancona. Gaia’s grandmother, Gemma, and great-grandmother, Nina, who had refused to come, perished in Auschwitz. “I was a child of war,” wrote Gaia later, “and I am unable to forget it.”
When peace returned, she finished her schooling in Parma, and in her mid-teens had roles in several films. These came to an end when the producer invited her to his house to meet his mother, though in fact he had something else in mind.
Gaia Servadio was appointed a Commendatore in the Italian order of merit in 2013, and published a memoir, Raccogliamo le vele, the next year.
She is survived by her second husband, Hugh Myddelton Biddulph, and by the two sons and daughter of her first marriage.