Alessandro Michele looks for a home in every city he visits, entertaining romantic visions for himself, and often following up on them. He has a particular love for faded beauties, run-down places brimming with history and lost grandeurβand this is why he has embarked on the quixotic endeavor of renovating one of the most iconic and mysterious buildings in Rome: Palazzo Scapucci.
Bright green hair held up in a mohawk, he was the only punk kid in his neighborhood. Merely standing at the bus stop was an adventure. He attended a conservative high school in the bourgeois and old-fashioned Quartiere Triesteβand nevertheless fell in with a group of anarchist friends before moving on.
Rome has always been the backdrop for his adventures, for walks to the center, to Babylonia and Dakota, two long-lost avant-garde warehouses that blasted deafening techno and sold refurbished or painted Converse All Stars, Palladium sneakers, as well as Indian silk scarves, heavy-metal jewelry, fishnets, and industrial punk clothing. Outsiders from all parts of Rome flocked to these safe havens, gathering to shop, listen to music, and share ideas.
He also spent hours in the Villa Giulia, the Renaissance palace that houses the National Etruscan Museum, immersing himself in its gardens, exploring pre-Roman antiquity and terra-cotta funerary monuments.
While his peers were out late at raves, and gathering in the central piazzas for the infamous aperitivo tradition, Alessandro was looking up at roofs and domes, waiting for buildings to speak to him. It welcomes everyone in a disheveled way. So much of the way in which he revolutionized Gucci over his nearly eight-year run as creative director had to do with a guileless disposition toward untold stories, incursions into the past lives of ancient artifacts, monuments, and people. Some eight months after his exit from Gucci he has the calm, collected expression of someone who had seen it all and done it all and is happy to take a breatherβthough I am not sure working with a restoration team on an year-old home counts as a break.
