Page 26 - Damianos Sotheby's International Realty Magazine Vol. 3

PROFILE BRUNELLO CUCINELLI
at the end of my life, I want to leave it in better condition than I found it. That would make me extremely happy. Alexander the Great said the only thing he really owned was the square metre of land on which he was standing right then—that is what he had to tend to, and I find that a beautiful idea.”
A skeptic might argue that Cucinelli’s emphasis on architecture over more immediately impactful ways of donating money sug- gests a man seeking to create monuments to himself. The philoso- pher Peter Singer has argued that the only rational form of charity is the one that is most effective in saving life per dollar spent, often the last glamorous—mosquito bed nets in malaria-ridden regions, for example.
Cucinelli offers a suitably philosophical counter. “Of course, everyone feels better after doing something good,” the 60-year-old concedes. “And yes, it makes me feel good to do all this, though there’s no real correlation between the feeling and the size of the donation. A compliment is a form of donation—we forget that in this over-connected, digitally noisy world in which we live. But while I respect, say, Bill Gates’ work in fighting disease, for me it’s about saving the arts. That, so to speak, is a donation to mankind. It’s a different way of thinking.”
As abstract as that may be, there is, Cucinelli suggests, an ap- pealing scale to protecting something that might consequently survive another millennium. “When you restore a piece of art, you feel like you’re doing something almost immortal,” he laughs. But his choice of philanthropic emphasis also speaks deeply to who Cucinelli is and where he has come from. “It’s clear that to be Ital- ian is to be in love with the land I was born on.”
Cucinelli is perhaps more attached to the land than many. He was raised in a dirt-poor peasant farming family, and his insistence on ironing his one pair of good trousers won him the nickname
“ When you restore a piece
of art, you feel like you’re doing something almost immortal.”
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Photos: (top le ) © School of Arts