Marta Marzotto: fashion and jewellery designer

Marta Marzotto, a fashion and jewellery designer, former model, countess and hostess to the famous, has died aged 85.

Marzotto, a buoyant personality in Italy, both designed and wore sumptuous, boldly colourful garments and eye-catching accessories and costume jewellery. In the 1990s she designed a clothing line for the Standa department store.

But she was probably best known for the glittering parties that she and her husband, Count Umberto Marzotto, the heir to a textile fortune, hosted, initially at their sprawling palazzo in Portogruaro, in northeast Italy. (She also had homes over the years in Cortina d’Ampezzo, in the Italian Alps, as well as in Rome, Milan, Sardinia and Marrakesh, Morocco.)

Dinner and party guests variously included Italian nobility and political leaders from around the world, including Richard M Nixon and the Kennedys. The designers Giorgio Armani and Roberto Cavalli were friends. So was Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, with whom the Marzottos went hunting. Marzotto later attended the lavish wedding of Aisha Gadhafi, the daughter of Muammar Gadafy.

In the 1960s, having begun to spend more time in Rome, she became friends with intellectuals, scientists, entrepreneurs and even presidents of the republic.

“My mother had projects, always and everywhere,” her youngest son, Matteo Marzotto, told the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera. “She was hungry for experiences.”

She was notably regarded as a muse for neorealist painter Renato Guttuso. In 1987, after his death, their relationship became grist for scandal when 11 love letters that the painter had sent her ended up in an Italian gossip magazine. Her husband decided to divorce her.

Marzotto felt “covered in mud, abandoned by everyone,” she recalled in a recent memoir.

Marta Vacondio was born into a struggling family in Reggio Emilia, in northern Italy, in 1931. Her mother was a signalwoman on a toll road and worked in the textile industry. Her father was a railway worker. As a girl Marta worked in the region’s rice fields. Determined to seek a better future, she learned the seamstress’s craft in the city of Pavia, south of Milan, and became a model.

It was beside a catwalk in Venice that she met Umberto Marzotto. They married in 1954 and had five children. A daughter, Annalisa, died of cystic fibrosis in her 30s. Marzotto helped found a charitable foundation to fight the disease.

Recounting her life, Marzotto wrote, “It is to the war and the bombs that I owe my thirst for life and cheerfulness, my courage, the desire to fulfil my dreams, to look for them everywhere, to chase them even afar, to travel the world, to possess it.”

She is survived by four of her children, Paola, Vittorio, Maria Diamante and Matteo, who is a former chairman of the Valentino label and now the president of the trade fair organisation Fiera di Vicenza.

– New York Times News Service