Inside the new Fendi cultural centre in Rome, where you can stay overnight with art
Alda Fendi doesn’t seem afraid of attention. Her personal style is one of brightly coloured Pleats Please Issey Miyake clothing and statement black sunglasses. And since this October, a huge portrait of this seventy-something member of Rome’s most famous fashion family has been projected onto the the side of a building.
In the heart of the city’s most historic quarter, Velabro, this is the new home of her cultural foundation, Fondazione Alda Fendi - Esperimenti. She commissioned the portrait herself from the flamboyant French collagistes Pierre et Gilles and they have shown her complete with sunglasses and surrounded by bees.
“Bees are important,” she says when we meet on a gloriously sunny autumn day in Rome. “The world cannot survive without them.”
If the world needs bees, then Rome, a city caught in the trap of its own incredible history, can do with free spirits like Alda Fendi, whose own cultural remit is rather more contemporary.
She established her foundation after the Fendi family sold its business in 2001.
“Fashion was a great place to be for a while,” she says. “And I was working with Karl Lagerfeld – a genius! – so I learnt a lot. But art has more lasting power.” For a number of years, she has delivered a series of unexpected happenings all over the city – multimedia events involving music and performance, in venues as unlikely as the fish market.
At the opening party of this new site in October - known as Rhinoceros, after the huge resin sculpture by Urs Fischer that guards its entrance, and referring to the great beasts brought from Africa for display in ancient Rome – the celebrations included a star turn by Vincent Gallo, who stood at the bottom of four-storey stairwell, passionately declaiming a monologue from Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar.
“I always want to do something completely new,” she says. “There are lots of art spaces in Rome, but it’s all very rigid, and about money. We wanted to make an art that is something you can’t buy, that happens outside the established rules.”
Indeed, if anyone is in a position to break them, then she is. A woman of means, with homes in Rome’s Palazzo Panfilo, on the islands of Palmerolo and Capri, and two in Paris (one used to belong to Jean Paul Sartre), Fendi is in a position to run her foundation as she wishes, and for all exhibitions to be free.
These currently include an homage to the beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, curated by its director Raffaele Curri, and a display of drawings by Michelangelo.
The historic building it now occupies was constructed in three stages between the 17th and 19th centuries, as a trading post, but more recently squatted by 32 families. Fendi says it was falling apart and dangerous to live in when she acquired it, and has relocated its occupants to homes in the suburbs.
No doubt they have better living conditions, though they no longer have the pleasure of being mere metres away from the Palatine Hill on one side and the Temple of Hercules on the other. She then hired the French architect Jean Nouvel to restore its exterior and transform the 3500-square metre interior into 800 square metres of gallery space. In the same building, also designed by Nouvel, is the Rooms of Rome hotel: 24 individual apartments that are available to rent on a nightly, weekly or longer term basis.
“He was without doubt the best person for the job,” says Fendi of Nouvel. “He’s not just an architect, but a poet and a philosopher. He’s incapable of doing anything banal.”
Indeed Nouvel has gone for function over finesse, leaving much of the building’s history on show, while adding essential elevators and structural elements in a tough palette of blackened and stainless steel, glass and wood.
Old brick walls have been made secure with an overlaid lattice of shiny steel strips; sections of beautiful old tiles have been left on floors, and patched up with plain concrete.
The Rooms for Rome are scattered throughout, so guests will come across galleries and visitors as they enter and leave their apartments. It should, according to Fendi, feel more like being in a village than a museum. (On the roof is a restaurant, Caviar Kaspia, whose terrace offers an astounding 360 degree view of the city.)
Each apartment, to be serviced by an outside company (where presumable a commercial imperative does apply), is different, but kitchens and bathrooms are often created in freestanding steel blocks, where everything including all fittings (toilet, basin, everything) are in metal.
Full-steel prison-style bathrooms were a fleeting feature of 1990s loft living and, though sleek and satisfying, are so out of time that one can’t help wondering if they’ve been excavated from a decade’s old project buried in Nouvel’s studio.
Elsewhere Italian icons – including Castiglioni lights – remind us we are in Rome. Super minimal dining tables are part of the Less series Nouvel designed for Unifor in the 1990s.
At night, guests are invited to move screens, decorated with images of how the exact space they are in had looked before renovation, across the windows; from the outside the building’s past can be seen illuminated from within.
In December, new exhibitions will be installed in the galleries. One will play on the Rhinoceros theme with works from contemporary artists. Another continues the Michelangelo story, with the arrival of the artist’s famous L’Adolescente, on loan to the foundation for 3 months from the Hermitage in St Petersburg.
"The Hermitage doesn’t normally lend to private foundations,” says Fendi. “But they were looking for an important place to show some of their works and they finally decided that this could be the right place for them. They liked the fact that this space is free and for everyone.”
There goes Alda Fendi, on this occasion getting someone else to break the rules.
Michelangelo's L'Adolescente opens at Fondazione Alda Fendi - Esperimenti on 14 December; theroomsofrome.com
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