My Father’s Camelot, cover
Portrait of Alan Piazzi
Alan Piazzi

My Father’s Camelot

A Memoir of Milan, Maryland, and a Caribbean Beach

In the spring of 1970 an eight-year-old boy was driven to Linate airport to fly home to his mother in London. His grandmother wept at the gate. His father made a decision. He did not see England again until he was a grown man.

These are the photographs behind the book — the family, the agency, the estate, the restaurant, and the wall that Irma took in a single night.

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1My Family and Good Friends

Four generations, 1949 to 2025

Nonna Maria and Nonno Evaristo with my father and his brothers Mauro and Giovanni, outside the Cristo Re church in Bologna.

My father and me at Trattoria, June 2014, soon after I brought him to Anguilla. He died at our home there that August.

From the chapter’s captions
My parents after their Town Hall wedding, with me still in my mother’s tummy. Look closely and you can see she is still showing.
The telegram my father sent to my grandmother Diana in London.
My mother, my uncle Giuseppe and me in Bologna, probably 1962.
My mother with Robin and me, during her black period, London.
Nonna Maria with her four sons, Mauro, my father, Giovanni and Giuseppe, in the square in front of the church in Fiesso, a few years before my father died.
Chantal and me on our wedding day, Anguilla, August 1991.
My father and me at Trattoria, June 2014, soon after I brought him to Anguilla. He died at our home there that August.
My mother with Marco, me, Johnny and Alessandro, Anguilla, June 2017.

93 more photographs from My Family and Good Friends

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2Fashion Model

My father’s agency, and the years that built it

My father modelling with Veruschka, photographed by Alfa Castaldi in 1962. The pictures ran in a magazine and are still in Castaldi’s archive.

Giorgio at Nepentha, where the whole city seemed to pass through.

From the chapter’s captions
My father and Veruschka among the classical busts, 1962.
My parents and me in an advertisement for Acrilan blankets. I don’t know which magazine it ran in.
The cover: Giorgio Piazzi, Fashion Model, Via Seprio 2, Milano.
Giorgio at Nepentha, where the whole city seemed to pass through.
My father at Nepentha, with Jerry Ford at far left.
My father at one of the weekend parties at Umberto Caproni’s house in Venegono, being mock-strangled by the model George Rosenberg.
The van in Via Moscova, Milan, loaded for a trip to Hinchingham.

13 more photographs from Fashion Model

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3Eye For I

The Milan agency my uncle Giuseppe and aunt Patti started in 1991, where I worked

The cover of one of our Eye For I model books.

Kate Moss. The agency represented her too, though I never met her.

From the chapter’s captions
Aya Thorgren, photographed by Avedon.
Kate Moss. The agency represented her too, though I never met her.
Valentina Piccini on the cover of Vogue Bambini, photographed by Aldo Fallai.
The cover of Seventeen, September 1992, photographed by Antoine Verglais.
Gioia. Shot in Milan, while we were living there.
Giorgio Repossi, around 1996. He ran Studio Repossi, the photographers’ agency with the best reputation in Milan, had been my father’s friend since the Fashion Model days, and gave Chantal her job there.
With Clelia, from Eye For I, in Milan in July 2019. She and I were bookers together.
Sandrine Holt and her daughter Nicolette with us at Bankie’s in Anguilla, June 2024. In Milan, Sandrine was part of the Eye For I crowd who ate together, went out together and spent whole weekends together.

22 more photographs from Eye For I

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4Hinchingham

Three hundred and fourteen acres on the Chesapeake, and the pictures made there

Hinchingham from the air.

A helicopter on the front lawn. This was normal.

From the chapter’s captions
Hinchingham, around 1984. From left: me, Lisa, someone I can’t name, Kim Charlton, Joey Hunter, Kire with baby Tara, my father, James Kravitz, Robin Rock, two more I can’t name, and my brother Robin. The helicopter’s blades are just visible above my father’s head.
A helicopter on the front lawn. This was normal.
My father and Kire asleep on the sofa at Hinchingham, with the wooden mannequin for company and Jan Francis’s painting above them.
My father on the driveway.
Nadir at work at the Model Workshop. My father’s reputation let him bring in photographers whose work normally belonged in major magazines and international campaigns, Nadir among them.
Kire, far left, doing makeup at the Model Workshop. She had come through the Workshop herself as an aspiring Ford model, and stayed on.
Kim Charlton’s composite card. Kim was a Ford model, then married to Joey Hunter; they are both in the group photograph from about 1984.
Contact strips of Jackie, my high-school friend from Sandy Spring Friends School, who came to stay at Hinchingham. She was offered a contract to model in Milan and politely declined.

55 more photographs from Hinchingham

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5In Print: The Model Workshop

What the magazines made of it, 1981–1985

People, 30 May 1983. “An Unlikely Henry Higgins, Giorgio Piazzi, Teaches Model Behavior on a Maryland Farm,” by Harriet Shapiro. The piece describes girls arriving by limousine from the Wilmington train station, a mile-long dirt driveway, and a white brick house built in 1774 where George Washington is said to have slept.

People. My father on the land at Hinchingham.

From the chapter’s captions
People. My father on the land at Hinchingham.
Baltimore Magazine, August 1983. “Beauty Boot Camp”, by Catherine Cook, photography by Helen Norman: “Can young Genie Vincent from Roland Park make it to Milan as a high-fashion model? Her quest begins in a grueling week of training at an Eastern Shore farm for models.”
In Print, “the magazine for professional photographers”, volume 1 number 8, November/December 1982: “The Leaning Tower of Piazzi”. “Something is happening on the Eastern Shore. Just outside of the quiet little town of Rockhall, Maryland, Giorgio Piazzi is creating tomorrow’s cover girls.”
My father and Kire, with a painting by Jan Francis.
A newspaper feature, continued from page 10: “…of his crop will flourish in fashion”. Tammy Gragg photographed by Paul Diener in front of the house, in a UPI picture; Nancy Farley, Julie Peterson and Barbara Giacomone from Bologna; and dinner at the long table, where “the wine flows and the food, all of it, comes straight from the farm”.
Dallas Times Herald.
Delaware Sunday News Journal.

17 more photographs from In Print

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6Mullet Bay

St Maarten, 1988 and 1989 — the letters that came back

The most battered of them.

Hervé Villechaize gave me this photograph after a night out. He signed it “Tattoo”, his character in Fantasy Island.

From the chapter’s captions
Hervé Villechaize gave me this photograph after a night out. He signed it “Tattoo”, his character in Fantasy Island.
The newspaper on the Conference Centre opening.
On Mullet Bay Resort & Casino letterhead, 23 March 1988.
A telefax about MasterCard, 8 April 1988.
A handwritten note.
Excursions Unlimited, 23 March 1989.
A site inspection, 8 November 1988.

19 more photographs from Mullet Bay

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7Venezuela

Caracas, and a trip into the Amazon

Caracas, seen from my father’s house in Alto Hatillo.

In the bow of our dugout, pointing towards the table mountains in the clouds.

From the chapter’s captions
In the bow of our dugout, pointing towards the table mountains in the clouds.
Our dugout, with its thatched roof and the fuel drums for the journey upriver. Uncle Vanni is up front.
In the bow, on the open river.
Gianna, Vanni and Maria Alessandra under the canopy of the dugout.
A table mountain across the river, with a dugout pulled up on the sand.
Climbing one of the great rock domes.
Watching the rapids.
A cone-shaped thatched house in a village by the river.
Chickens roasting on a spit at camp.

8Trattoria Tramonto

Anguilla, 1997 to 2025

The dining room.

Lunch at Trattoria on 17 March 2020, three days before Anguilla closed the island because of Covid.

From the chapter’s captions
Valter at the kitchen window at Trattoria, April 2003. Chantal found him through Luciano — a young chef from Villa Minozzo, Modena who had never heard of Anguilla.
The boys eating pesto at Trattoria, April 2003.
My brother Stefano and Alex at their wedding at Trattoria, August 2004.
Johnny’s beach bar, 2015–2017.
Lunch at Trattoria on 17 March 2020, three days before Anguilla closed the island because of Covid.
Chantal and me at Trattoria at sunset, 2022.
Chantal’s mother, Carolyn, and me on Trattoria’s last day, 20 July 2025. She lives right next door and manages Blue Waters, the family apartment hotel next to her house. Her sister Jillian and Jillian’s husband, Tony, live above her.
Me at my table at the old Trattoria, now Karaya, November 2025.

29 more photographs from Trattoria Tramonto

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9The Wall

Twenty years of photographs, lost to Irma in a single night

Robert De Niro with my uncle, Don Mauro. They are standing in front of the original wall, by the first entrance near the kitchen, before hurricane damage moved it to the other side of the bar. The photograph ended up behind the counter of his parish bar in Italy, where nobody believed it.

Robert Plant — the first photograph on the wall.

From the chapter’s captions

Tap a print to lift it off the wall; the note beneath it says who is in it. The buttons below the prints show the night Irma came, and what was built afterwards.

10The Hurricanes

Lenny, and then Irma

After Irma, September 2017: the dining room with its roof torn open and the beach come inside.

Rebuilt.

From the chapter’s captions

See what Irma did to the wall

What the sea left under the terrace: sand and seaweed up to the pillars.
Rebuilding begins: new block walls going up on the old slab.
The new roof already on, the crew at work on the forms in front.
Rebar and forms for the new foundation.
The new slab poured, the walls still to come.
Inside the new walls, props holding the roof deck while the concrete cures.
The block walls almost up, with the villas of Shoal Bay West behind.
The shingles going onto the roof, the beach and the bar below.
The roof from above, the fresh slab, and the palms stripped bare by the storm.
Rebuilt.
Rebuilt.
Rebuilt.
Rebuilt.
Rebuilt.

11My Ancestors

My mother’s families, the Richardsons and the Johnsons

The fuller chart. The line runs back to John Barker, born in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1690, and his wife Sarah Gage, and to Barnabas Barker and Mary Green of Marshfield, Plymouth Colony. Forward it runs through Anna S. Barker and Sgt John Wesley Ogden to their daughter Marion, who married Harold Ashton Richardson in Calcutta on 1 February 1904. Their son Harold Banning Richardson was my grandfather. The chart gives his birthplace as London, Ontario; his birth certificate says Windsor, England, 24 September 1910.

Many years ago my grandmother Diana wrote down our family’s history for me. Her letters, her notes on the old photographs, and the photographs themselves, restored, now have a page of their own.

Read the family history

12Chantal’s Family and Our Anguilla Friends

Chantal’s grandparents, Rupert and Thelma Carty, with their five daughters, Carolyn, Marjorie, Alison, Jillian and Helen, and with Randall and Richard. Carolyn is Chantal’s mother. Undated.

Peter Tromp and Lucy with Alessandro and Johnny at our home, December 2025. Peter was one of our very first island friends.

From the chapter’s captions
Anguilla, around 1988, at Alan Permuy’s Oasis. From left: Chantal; me, holding Juliet; Peter Tromp; Kire, holding a baby whose name we don’t know, with Luca behind her; Tara; and my father, Giorgio Piazzi.
Chantal and her cousin Stacey at Sandy Ground, around 1980.
A Pappagallo T-shirt: “Italian Restaurant at Cul de Sac, Anguilla, British West Indies”. My father opened Pappagallo in 1987 and named it after Al Pappagallo in Bologna.
Juliet’s baptism at St Gerard’s, Anguilla, 1989. From left: Chantal’s brother Gregory, Chantal, her brother Michael, her mother Carolyn holding Juliet, and her father, Alan Permuy. Two years later Chantal and I were married in the same church.
Vogue Bambini, January–February 2005. The whole shoot was done in Anguilla, photographed by Luciano Pergreffi, with the casting organised by Chantal.
Anguilla, 2017. Standing: David and Lenny Carty, Tony Sheehy, Brenda Carty, Alison Carty, Helen Carty Peabody, Laurie Gumbs and Jillian Carty Sheehy. Sitting: Emile and Josephine Gumbs, Catherine Gumbs Orchard, Deborah Vos and Garrath Orchard.
Anguillian cousins, July 2021. From left: Joshua, Johnny, Jordan, Vidal, Markus, Damien, Gregory, Robert, Marco and Sam, with Matthew in front.
Peter Tromp and Lucy with Alessandro and Johnny at our home, December 2025. Peter was one of our very first island friends.

29 more photographs from Chantal’s Family and Our Anguilla Friends

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CodaThe Camelot song

Anguilla, New Year’s Day 2012

New Year’s Day, 2012. A week earlier Liam Neeson had telephoned to ask whether I would sing that song for Vanessa again. My three sons stood behind me. Natasha had died three years before. Liam is the one keeping time with one finger. Chantal is behind the camera, and if you listen you can hear her laughing — of everything caught on that recording, it might be my favourite sound.

Watch it on YouTube ›