It was undoubtedly Elsa Peretti’s time in New York that thrust her into the public eye: not only for mesmerizing the world with her undulating sterling silver designs for Tiffany & Co., but also for her role as a frequent gossip page fixture, a Halston associate, and a Studio 54 patron. A photo of Peretti, snapped by her then-lover Helmut Newton in 1975—dressed as a Halston bunny on a Manhattan terrace, her long legs give the skyscrapers a run for their money—is about as “New York” as it gets.
But the places where Peretti felt truly in her element lay far beyond the Big Apple. She famously found refuge in Spain, rehabilitating the 17th-century village of Sant Martí Vell, where she spent much of her life. But then there were her Italian outposts—after all, being born in Florence in 1940 to an aristocratic mother and an oil magnate Peretti was Italian through and through.
A new book from Apartamento magazine, photographed by Estelle Hanania, The Italian Interiors of Elsa Peretti, offers an unprecedented window into her life in Italy, which was split between two homes: one terrace-wrapped penthouse apartment hovering over the city of Rome and overlooking the gardens of the Villa Borghese; another, a 16th-century watchtower, once part of the Stato dei Presidi, overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea in Porto Ercole.