Husband Guido Sommi
Picenardi
Queer Places:
Villa di Torre de' Picenardi, Via IV Novembre, 1, 26038 Torre De' Picenardi CR
Corso d'Italia, 11, 00198 Roma RM
Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice
Anna
Maria "Mananà" Pignatelli Aragona Cortés (May 11, 1894 – May 8, 1922) was the
wife of Marchese Girolamo Sommi Picenardi. In Venice, once married, Mananà stands out because she walks in Piazza San Marco with a cheetah on a leash.
In Parisian circles they had long called ger "the beautiful death". Mananà got married on 10 March 1917 in the chapel of the family villa in Rome, and the wedding became an event of such importance that even the Parisian “Le Figaro” talks about it. From the French newspaper we know that the function takes place in the Pignatelli "villa" in via Piemonte in the presence of all the Roman aristocracy and that Guido had been volunteered in the war. At the time Guido was about to turn twenty-five and Mananà was twenty-three. The couple
were already among the most extravagant protagonists of international social life, the last scions of two noble families.
Princess Anna Maria Mananà Pignatelli seemed not to care about the relationship
of her husband with the seductive and provocative Tamara de Lempicka. Perhaps she
was too intent on creating a very personal vampire mythology: she was famous for riding naked in the surroundings of Olgiate (where Villa Sommi Picenardi still stands immersed in the green of Brianza) with her face covered with a white, cadaverous make-up, perfectly matching the (real) coffin in which she loved to sleep. It
was the decadent era of absinthe and excesses, of theosophy and spiritualism, to which Mananà assiduously dedicates herself by organizing séances - right in the rooms of the villa - together with
her friend Marchesa Luisa Casati Stampa.
Mananà was the lover of Guido Parisini, a former cavalry officer. A few years earlier, in 1917, the same year of her marriage to the Marquis of Cremona, she too had herself portrayed by a painter of the Futurist school, distant relative of Boccioni, Adriana Bisi Fabbri, who would have died of
the Spaniard influence a year later, only 37 years old.
Maria Anna of the princes of Aragon Pignatelli di Terranova di Cortes also boasts noble birth. The Pignatelli Aragona Cortes family has its roots in the history of the kingdom of Aragon and Sicily, while the Cortes derives from a union, albeit indirect, with Stefania Cortes, the only descendant of the conquistador Hernan Cortes. The large family had several properties (and related sovereign rights) in Italy, Mexico and Spain. In
her genealogy there is also a disturbing character who can be traced back, in a certain sense, to Mananà's attraction for the world of darkness and the occult: Bartolomeo Pignatelli, archbishop of Messina, the pastor of Cosenza quoted in the Purgatory of Dante for having profaned Manfredi's tomb in 1266. He had unearthed his body from the mound of stones under which the French knights had buried him to honor his heroism, even though he had been an enemy; then, he had carried it with candles upside down and extinguished, as was done with the excommunicated and the heretics, and finally he had dispersed the remains outside the confines of the state of the Church. Mananà's father is Giuseppe Pignatelli di Terranova (1860-1938), known as Peppino, senator of the newborn Kingdom of Italy and his mother, Donna Rosa, was born Marquise de la Gàndara y Plazaola.
The newly married couple is among the most sought after in Rome, and also the most worldly. Tamara de Lempicka, to whom Mananà
was presented by Gabriele D'Annunzio, describes them as follows: "Mananà and Guido Sommi Picenardi, whose way of life would be defined today as a sort of "hippy", headed a club of brilliant young people, who took care every night between parties, opera, ballets, concerts and lunches in private homes with servants in livery. On such occasions, women were always beautifully dressed and covered with jewels; men always handsome and elegant. The conversation was supremely cultivated and witty."
Even Indro Montanelli, responding to a reader, Giovanbattista Brambilla, in his column La Stanza of 25 June 1997, talks about a stay in the villa of Torre de Picenardi, hosted by the strange couple: "Heir in direct line not only of the Pignatelli princes, but also of the great conquistador of Mexico, she belonged to the golden cosmopolitan jet - set of the beginning of the century, when she happened to participate in a big masked party in Paris, a meeting point of that society, gutter mop on the forehead and the face entirely covered with a patina of white lead. She was so successful that she never wanted to give up this cosmetics, not even when the years began to make her feel. I, who even for a while frequented her a lot, have never seen her other than with a gray mop on her plaster face, at all hours of the day and even at night, because she lived only at night. So, on the other hand, her husband, Guido Sommi Picenardi, another D'Annunzio doc, also wanted her, rich in talents (literature, theater, music) cultivated as a refined amateur, and therefore unfinished. Once they invited me to stay in their famous Tower, they put me to sleep in a bed lined with black silk sheets that looked like a coffin. Superstitious as I am, I threw away the sheets, but the mattress was black too, as was all the decor in that house that looked like something out of a funeral home's imagination." After her husband's death, Mananà chose her human antithesis as a companion: Guidone Parisini was a former cavalry officer who understood and spoke only of stables and horse competitions. They retired first to Capri, then to Venice, where she, always decorated by Pierrette, gave vent to her passion, sculpture.
In the 1930s Guido Sommi stands out on the pages of the “Fascist Regime” for his ferocious criticism of contemporary artistic production, especially towards Sironi, guilty of the “unrealistic deformations” of his pictorial language. Then he retired to the family castle in Torre dei Picenardi in the 1940s, after having suffered torture by the Nazis in 1945 as a probable opponent of the fascist regime, unlike his cousin Gianfrancesco, a loyalist of Mussolini. There he led the rest of a seemingly solitary life, dying "under unclear circumstances" on March 30, 1949.
Mananà, on the other hand, goes on in her usual life between parties, receptions, masked balls and gala dinners, in Rome
she makes friends with the Marquise Luisa Casati, who lived not far from her in via Piemonte 51, companion of her spiritualist raids.
She devoted herself to sculpture, first in a small apartment on the ground floor of Corso d'Italia
11, near Villa Borghese, then in a second atelier, probably in via Margutta. Then with Parisini
she moved to Capri. There is nothing of her sculptures. In order not to deny
her fame as a “maudite” artist, according to Federico Zeri they were loaded overnight on a raft and sunk off the lagoon.
Even the death of Mananà, which occurred in 1960, is shrouded in mystery. Legend has it that Princess Pignatelli died in Venice, where she had moved by now elderly, fell and drowned in the Grand Canal as she left Palazzo Mocenigo, her last home, to take part in yet another social evening. There are those who say that she was poisoned by the black dye of her hair, but in reality she died shortly after, in the hospital, following the complications of an illness, perhaps tuberculosis, which had tormented her for a long time and that the fall in the icy water would have significantly worsened.
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