Count Manfredi della Gherardesca’s name would often appear high on the guestlist when a “haute société” party was thrown in London, Paris or Rome. This was not especially because of his talent as an art dealer, his former role as chairman of Sotheby’s Italy or his time latterly as an interior designer, but rather an ability to enliven any gathering with his waspish comments about the behaviour of the world’s idle rich....On one occasion, all of the men in the hamlet surrounding the family castle in Tuscany were wearing T-shirts from places as diverse as Honolulu to the Himalayas, as he had tired of his vast collection and simply donated them to the local population.
Manfredi della Gherardesca was born in Florence in 1961, the youngest of three children of an aristocratic Florentine family. (Count Ugolino della Gherardesca featured prominently in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Accused of treason, he was imprisoned in Pisa with his three sons, whose corpses he ate in a vain attempt to survive.) In 1998, he married the society heiress Dora Loewenstein, an events organiser and daughter of Prince Rupert Loewenstein, the business manager of the Rolling Stones. Although many of his friends and contemporaries could hardly imagine he was of the marrying kind, it lasted nearly 20 years and produced a son...and a daughter...In the past two years, he met and formed a close relationship with Paolo Gavazzeni, an opera director...Although he had a temper and could be sharp-tongued to those he considered vulgar or boorish, he had adventurous tastes for someone who lived such a rarefied existence....He added that entertaining friends was what gave him the most pleasure: “It is an indulgence because entertaining means spending money, and I keep certain standards — but I like to make people’s lives pleasant, when I can, to create little nuggets of joy.” He died of a heart attack on May 31, 2022, aged 60.