Renzo Mongiardino Author

Renzo Mongiardino, born in Genoa in 1916, was one of the world’s most renowned designers of the 60s, 70s and 80s, and remains highly influential. Although trained as an architect, and at a time when modernism ruled design, Mongiardino found inspiration in the likes of Bernini, Piranesi, Palladio, and the theater. He counted among his clients Gianni Agnelli, Lee Radizwill, Gianni Versace, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, Rudolf Nuryev, Valentino, and Baron Guy de Rothschild. Equally at home in the world of performance, he collaborated with Franco Zeffirelli on many films, including The Taming of the Shrew with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; and designed the set for Maria Callas’s triumphant return to opera in Tosca at Covent Garden. He died in 1998 at the age of 82.