Luigi d’Urso, the out of time dandy, told by his daughter

Paris. Luigi was different from the other dads who waited for their children outside of school dressed in jeans and sneakers: he was always impeccable in his tailored suit, with his chic accent and white Charvet shirts. But behind that elegance and sprezzatura of an Italian gentleman of other times, there was a deep melancholy. Luigi was Luigi d’Urso, the father who Urso violets he lost when he was just six years old, which he looked for everywhere during his life and to which he dedicated his first novel Même le bruit de la nuit a changé (Flammarion), “Even the noise of the night has changed”.

“I’ve always wanted to write about my father, but at one point I sensed a feeling of urgency. And when you perceive this feeling you have to write. This novel imposed itself as a necessity”, Violette d’Urso tells Il Foglio, before adding: “Searching through the archive photos in my room, I found a letter I wrote to my mother, ‘Papa n’est pas mort’, and a drawing: the cover of a book, ‘Le livre de Violette d’Urso’”. Art dealer, businessman and elegant arbiter, Luigi d’Urso, born in Rome but of Neapolitan origins, married Inès de la Fressange, Chanel egeria and icon of Parisian chic, in 1990. With her he had two daughters, Nina, now twenty-nine, and Violette, in fact, who is twenty-three. Dandy, eccentric, lover of excesses, Luigi d’Urso launched in France the fashion of “mocassins à picots”, moccasins with rubber pads.

“There are people who have a knack for living. They beautify the world and beings only with their presence. Luigi was this kind of person,” wrote Frédéric Beigbeder, writer and socialite companion of Violette’s father in the 1990s. Luigi d’Urso’s heart stopped beating on a night in March 2006 on the stairs of the building where he lived, in rue Montalivet, in the eighth arrondissement. Perhaps his body could no longer bear the evil that was destroying it: heroin. “The discovery of my father’s drug addiction was a violent shock”, Violette d’Urso tells Il Foglio. A secret that the mother has tried to keep as long as possible. “In her way, by doing so, she preserved my sister and me, and allowed us to have happy lives. You have perpetuated something very Neapolitan, ‘dancing on the volcano’: there has been a tragedy, but we must try to be happy anyway ”.

Like Anne, the protagonist of the novel, Violette multiplied her trips to Italy in search of her father, to talk to those who had had the privilege of meeting him: she went to Bologna where she discovered her proximity to extreme left movements, in Rome , in her hometown, in Naples, among the tailors who designed her clothes, and in Palermo, “the only city where beggars can live in palaces”, as someone told her one day, the city of a southern aristocracy in decline, a world of elegance and refinement of which his father was one of the last representatives. “At the beginning of my research he turned out to be the opposite of the one I thought I knew. Then, little by little, I regained possession of the image I had of him: it matched the image of the person I had in my head. The book is a set of proofs that confirms that what I knew about him was true”, says Violette, remembering that lady she met in Palermo and told her: “Trust what you hear and not what others say about him . He is your father and nobody else’s”.

Anne/Violette writes: “My father was Italian and Catholic culture had always been important to us, even if little practised. I loved the Christian aesthetics, the stained glass windows, the liturgy, the statues of Mary, the candles, the songs, the stories about the saints. Even today, when the light passes through the windows behind the altar, I have the impression that it has been penetrated by my father’s spirit and I close my eyes as a sign of gratitude”.