In the early 1970s the Mostyn-Owen family, all of them blond, with wideset cerulean eyes and a feral allure, would occasionally appear at our family home in southern Tuscany with the electrifying energy of a summer storm. Those visits, always at short notice, would set the house ablaze: while the two children, Owen and Allegra (Orlando, the youngest, was yet to make his appearance), climbed trees and brought live spiders into the house for all to admire, their extraordinarily tall and lanky father, William, a Shropshire landowner turned art historian who had worked as bibliographer for Bernard Berenson at Villa I Tatti, in Florence, charmed everyone with his erudite humour. But it was Gaia Servadio, his Italian wife, who left the greatest impression on my childhood mind. Her inquisitive eyes and striking features, framed by an unruly mane of golden hair, were magnetic.
She wore pink lipstick and lizard-green nail polish; she smoked long, thin cigarettes. Her boisterous laughter was contagious and there were no topics of conversation – Soviet Russia, the mafia, sex, archaeology – she shied away from. She was feisty and good natured. When Gaia died on 20 August 2021, at the age of 83, ten years after her former husband, Willy, she was hailed by newspapers as ‘the most famous Italian in Britain’. The sprawling house in Bloomfield Terrace, off London’s Pimlico Road, where she lived for 50 years and which now belongs to her youngest child, the artist Orlando Mostyn-Owen, was said to have contributed far more to Anglo-Italian cultural relations than the embassy itself. For Gaia, Bloomfieldia, as it is still known to family and friends, was more than that. It was her archive, her inspiration.
The place where she stacked memories, brought up her children, wrote her books (nearly 40 of them), organised opera festivals (her passion) and held court. Most of all, it was the stage on which she was the leading lady. Gaia Servadio was born in Padua on 13 September 1938, exactly five days before Mussolini announced the racial laws that were to bring chaos and despair into so many Jewish households, including hers. In one of several memoirs, she describes her family and her wartime childhood as ‘different’: her father, a chemist, belonged to a Sephardic family from Ancona, in the Marches. Her mother, a Catholic, came from Sicilian gentry.
In 1943, members of her paternal family, including her father’s cousin Primo Levi, the author of If This is a Man, were deported to Auschwitz where her paternal grandmother was murdered. Gaia, her older sister, Pucci, and their parents, survived the Holocaust thanks to an elderly marchesa who allowed them to hide for two years in the cellars of her villa in Osimo, near the Adriatic coast. Vivid memories of those years – the darkness and the cold, the terror of being caught – resurfaced again and again. ‘Her formidable thirst for life, her generous vitality,’ says Cecilia Valmarana, Gaia’s niece, a film producer, ‘were formed in the dank rooms of those cellars.’ Bloomfield Terrace is a tribute to Gaia’s joie de vivre.
When she persuaded Willy to buy it, in 1959, it was a grim boarding house. The unpretentiousness of Pimlico, which at the time mixed Regency elegance with military barracks and greasy-spoon cafés, appealed to her. Her husband’s classical taste for antiques, traces of which can still be found in the John Soane-style dining room, curbed Gaia’s eclectic ebullience, but not for long. ‘She had discerning taste,’ says Orlando, ‘but her boundless energy was impossible to rein in.’ After their wedding in 1961, Gaia filled the house with family memorabilia, including marble sculptures by her maternal grandfather, Italian antiques and a collection of religious ex-votos that she nailed to the walls.
She brought home anything that caught her eye during her travels: textiles, bric-à-brac, chandeliers, furnishings. In her youth, before turning her talents to writing and journalism, Gaia had been a painter. Her house became her canvas: she covered the walls of Bloomfieldia with bright colours and enormous murals. One of them, created in 1964 on the well of the staircase, depicts three life-size blonde women, very much in her likeness, floating against a bright red backdrop. In the midst of them is one minuscule faceless man (‘Freud, move over!’, says Orlando). Views of Aberuchill in Scotland, the castle Willy inherited from his father in 1947, merge poetically with the silhouette of Tellaro, a coastal town in Liguria where the Servadios spent their summers. Her younger children also made contributions to Bloomfieldia.
Allegra MostynOwen, a ceramicist, created a mosaic of an octopus in one of the bathrooms. Orlando, who studied at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris (and whose work Philip Roth described as ‘savage in its own quiet way. Or quiet in its own savage way’) made several of the paintings in the house, including a self-portrait that Gaia hung in her bedroom. Other works – ceramics by Roberto Matta, the Chilean Surrealist, and paintings by the Italian Expressionist Renato Guttuso – were gifts to her from the artists. What Gaia loved most, both during her marriage to William and later with her second husband, Hugh Myddelton Biddulph, was to fill her home with family and friends. She took pleasure in feeding the people she loved.
In the prologue to her last book, La Cucina in Valigia (‘The Kitchen in the Suitcase’) – part memoir and part cookbook (published in Italy by Neri Pozza) – Orlando notes that his mother’s ‘was the pleasure of someone who had known starvation’. Three or four times a week, he continues, ‘the percussion of pans (she cooked with tempestuous fervour) and the ripples of requiems and arias (she would always cook with music at full blast)’ marked the moment when ‘a kaleidoscope of humanity’ (novelists, film-makers, tenors, ministers, philologists, politicians, archaeologists, members of the aristocracy, Fleet Street hacks, philosophers and iconoclasts, to name but a few) came for dinner.
Italo Calvino and Salman Rushdie were introduced at her table and so were Philip Roth and Primo Levi. Francis Bacon and Bernardo Bertolucci were frequent guests. Dinner parties lasted into the wee hours. Never mind that the next day, as Orlando recalls, you might find the poet Pablo Neruda sleeping in the au pair’s bedroom upstairs or the theatre director Patrice Chéreau nursing a hangover. Visits by various Russian dissidents, who overstayed their welcome for months on end, were another feature of life in Bloomfield Terrace. ‘They all flocked to her,’ Orlando explains, ‘because hers was a marvellous formula: always interesting people, always plenty of food and drink, and never fussy.’
Anyone who had the chance to frequent Gaia’s home, even briefly as I did, will never forget the triumphantly Italian smells and noises that dominated this quintessentially English home. ‘And yet,’ Orlando concludes, ‘there hovered a bohemian atmosphere which rejected the conventionalism of Italy. In a class-ridden society like Britain’s, my mother had found a way of transcending class differences.’ Bloomfieldia was Gaia’s idiosyncratic experiment, one that marked a thriving chapter in English and Italian cultural relations. A rare flowering, deeply missed.
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A version of this article appears in the March 2024 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
