Mariano assumed control of the family firm at a difficult time,
and for over half a century, he guided this Neapolitan house
through all sorts of trying times. Thanks to his infectious delight
for clothing and his genius for selling suits, seeing Mariano with
a customer is like seeing Roger Federer with a tennis racquet —
that is, a joy to experience. Working so hard every day, though —
Mariano gets nervous if he is not selling a suit, instructing a
tailor or embarking on a new project — he failed to appreciate, or
was simply too modest to mention, the accretion of expertise and
the commanding position as a guardian of a distinct sartorial style
and culture that his firm has achieved.
When I met Mariano, I knew at once that he and his business were
something special. And, as he introduced me to the arcana of
Neapolitan tailoring — that high armhole into which too much sleeve
is fed to create the puckered mappina sleevehead; the pignata or
cauldron-like curvilinear patch pocket; the similarly organic
barchetta (‘little boat’) outbreast pocket; the extended front
seam; the double stitching; and the overlapping cuff buttons — I
felt that it’s important that this sort of knowledge be preserved
for future generations.
So, I suggested to Mariano that he might like to think about
creating a museum dedicated to preserving the art of Neapolitan
tailoring that his family has done so much to protect at home and
promote abroad. Speaking personally, Mariano has helped me see
another Naples — to look beyond the stereotypes of organised crime
and rubbish piled high in the streets, and appreciate a city richer
in history and culture of all sorts than I could possibly have
imagined. With him as a guide, I have embraced everything from
porcelain to painting and pizza to palaces. There are the presepi,
the elaborate dioramas comprising sometimes hundreds of figures
that recreate the birth of Christ (complete with elephants and
marching bands — somehow I forgot that part of the Bible). And
there are the ossuaries: one morning, on the way to the airport, my
car suddenly lurched off the main road and down an alley so narrow
that the wing mirrors almost brushed the journals hanging outside a
newsstand.
The further we went, the more favela-like our surroundings
became, until we stopped outside a large, solid set of gates,
beyond which lay a huge cave, ‘furnished’ with tens of thousands of
human skulls. The poor of Naples had been placing their dead here
for centuries, and the sandy earth on which I was treading was but
a thin covering over millions more skeletons. A couple of hundred
years ago, a flood surged through the place and took the bones with
it into the centre of town. The aesthetically pleasing arrangements
dated from then: when a priest, clearly a decorator manqué, had the
bones collected and brought back to brighten the place up. He
created a very fetching altar of shin bones and skulls, and a truly
dramatic Golgotha of skulls.
This cave was viewed as a place of purgatory on earth, and
people would come and pray here for the dead to be released into
paradise. However, this being Naples, they wanted something in
return: lottery numbers, fecundity, matrimony or just good ol’
money. If a skull gave good results, they built a little house for
it — a sort of architecturally aware hutch, often in marble and
sometimes with a little cushion. If they wanted to compound the
effect, they would add more skulls, often putting locks on the
houses to stop others from filching a particularly effective skull.
Naples is a city where sophistication coexists with almost medieval
superstition — for instance, the failure, according to legend, of
the blood of St. Gennaro to liquefy is still regarded as a portent
of evil.
In short, it is a culturally rich and engrossing city where male
elegance is a strong component — one that, thanks to the efforts of
Mariano, will be immortalised in a museum. The earliest garments in
the collection date from the early years of the 19th century and
have the hallmarks of Neapolitan tailoring that are still seen
today. Of course, given that the Rubinacci business was not founded
until the 1930s, these items predate his enterprise, but he felt it
was important to reference the work of earlier generations; in
this, he was inspired by the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva, where
pre-Patek masterpieces are exhibited as well as the firm’s own
chefs d’oeuvre. And, just as Patek have made watches for royalty,
so has Rubinacci made clothes for crowned heads, and the museum
includes a particularly snazzy overcoat made for the last king of
Italy, who permitted Mariano’s father to use the royal cipher.
I was fortunate enough to accompany Mariano on some of the
sourcing trips, during which we met with historians, academics,
government officials, and more counts, dukes and princes than one
would have thought entirely feasible for a single city (including
one as old and as noble as Naples). However, most memorable was the
visit we made to the Countess Leonetti, in her spectacular villa in
the hills overlooking the Bay of Naples. Her father, Count
Leonetti, who died in 1975, was fastidious when it came to dress —
he used to send his sons away from the dining table if they were
not wearing a tie.
The late Count’s name was inscribed frequently in the Rubinacci
order books of the ’30s, as he was a friend of Mariano’s father.
Both men were collectors of porcelain, and the Count had been a
customer of Mariano’s father and then of Mariano, until his death.
“He was always very polite, very considerate with everybody,”
Mariano says. “It didn’t matter about class — he was always very
charming. Like a gentleman should be. He had an open-topped white
Mercedes. He was an impeccably dressed gentleman [who was] over 60
years old; I remember him particularly well, because he used to
have a palace just next to my shop.”
Only in Naples. Anyway, the Leonettis have since abandoned their
palace in town and moved to something more manageable and with a
better view. It was a museum of antiques, artworks and artefacts
that the Count had assembled over a lifetime of scholarship and
collecting. This was not the sort of collection assembled for
external show by a status-hungry nouveau riche; rather, it was a
collection of objects — whether ancient weapons or elaborate pieces
of porcelain — about which their owner would publish the occasional
monograph. The house spoke of an age when douceur de vivre was more
important than the frenzied and bulimic acquisition of today.
The Countess had already donated many of her father’s old suits
to Mariano, and from what I could gather as we sat in one of the
drawing rooms — underneath a portrait of the Count in a
double-breasted suit looking like a patrician version of Ronald
Colman, no less — sipping tea and nibbling on cake, this was a
purely social visit. Nevertheless, we went on a tour of the house
and wound up in a bedroom looking at some amusing caricatures of
her father and other Neapolitan dandies of the day. I slipped into
the bathroom, and just off it was a dressing room. Curiosity got
the better of my manners, and I opened one of the wardrobes; I was
rewarded with the sight of ancient suit bags. Yanking open another,
I saw yet more suit bags hanging on a rail under three decades of
dust. By now, any veneer of decorum had vanished — with excitement
mounting, I pulled open every door and drawer within reach to
reveal an entire wardrobe tailored to meet every conceivable need
of the cultivated Neapolitan man-about-town of the mid-20th
century. I had not been this excited about old clothes since the
day I spent at the Duke of Windsor’s house in Paris going through
his wardrobe (I subsequently described that moment as being one
when I knew how the archaeologist Howard Carter had felt when he
opened the tomb of Tutankhamen). And I confidently predict that
when, as I hope will be the case, the treasures of the Rubinacci
museum go on a world tour, the queues will match those that
attended the touring exhibition of the Egyptian boy king’s bits and
pieces in the 1970s.
Originally published in December 2013 in Issue 31 of The
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