Princess Topazia Alliata, who has died aged 102, was a Sicilian gallerist, vintner and painter, and the wife of the renowned anthropologist Fosco Maraini, with whom she survived incarceration in a Japanese concentration camp.
Strikingly beautiful and with a regal bearing, Topazia Alliata married Maraini in the mid-1930s when she was a little-known painter and he was a young scholar and aspiring mountaineer. In their early years together the couple participated in many climbs in the Dolomites and the Alps, sometimes in the company of Albert I, King of Belgium, a keen amateur climber.
Their careers briefly flourished in the pre-war years: Topazia Alliata refined her painting style – bold and expressionistic – and completed striking portraits of her husband and herself as alpinists. Meanwhile her husband began to specialise in orientalism following a journey to the Tibetan Himalayas in 1937.
As ardent anti-fascists, the couple found living under Mussolini intolerable and in 1938, with their infant daughter Dacia, moved from Florence to Japan, where Maraini took up a research post at Hokkaido, an island off the north coast. There he studied the region’s endangered Ainu people. In Japan they had two more daughters, Yuki and Toni, and Maraini went on to teach Italian literature at Kyoto University.
In 1943, however, having refused to swear allegiance to Mussolini’s Republic of Salo (as demanded by the Japanese government), the couple were interned with their children in a Japanese concentration camp at Nagoya, where they remained for two years. The family were part of a group of 15 Italian prisoners who were kept on starvation rations, beaten and humiliated. “I have never seen so much hatred and stupidity,” Topazia Alliata remembered. Each day she would watch the sun rise and wonder if it would be her last dawn.
Things grew so desperate that when one of their captors claimed that Italians were cowards, Fosco Maraini picked up an axe, chopped off one of his own little fingers and threw it at the guard in protest. This extreme gesture – adopting the Japanese insult known as “Yubikiri” – made the Japanese treat them only slightly better. They were freed by American forces in August 1945.
The couple separated in the mid-1950s and Topazia Alliata subsequently settled in Rome where she opened a contemporary art gallery in Trastevere. There she curated exhibitions of emerging post-war artists and was a prominent figure among the Roman avant-garde.
Topazia Alliata di Villafranca was born on September 5 1913 in Palermo, the daughter of Prince Enrico Alliata di Villafranca, Duke of Salaparuta, and Amelia Ortuzar Olivares, an opera singer.
On a trip to Paris as a teenager Topazia was introduced to the work of Picasso, and after being educated mostly at home she enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Palermo. One of her fellow students was Renato Guttuso – later much praised for his illustrations for Elizabeth David’s cook-books. He painted several portraits of her and fell in love with her, but apart from one kiss their relationship remained platonic.
In 1932 she met Maraini, a Florentine student and the son of Antonio Maraini, a curator and director of the Venice Biennale. The couple married in Florence in 1935.
After their release from the Japanese camp, they returned to Sicily in 1946 and settled at Villa Valguarnera, Topazia Alliata’s family home in Bagheria. After her father’s death that year, she took over the family’s wine business, managing vineyards in Casteldaccia. Resolutely anti-Mafia she befriended the non-violent campaigner Danilo Dolci, the “Gandhi of Sicily”.
Having divorced and moved to Rome by the 1960s, Topazia Alliata found life as an art dealer placed her in the centre of the city’s cultural circles. She socialised with Peggy Guggenheim and at her gallery exhibited both Italian and international artists, including Piero Manzoni and Jannis Kounellis. She was particularly fond of experimental work.
In 1962 she hosted Brion Gysin, a British painter and acolyte of William Burroughs, who turned her rooms into a “Chapel of Extreme Experience”, filling them with brilliantly coloured canvases, a light show and recordings of his sound poetry. In the 1970s she helped to found the Guttuso Museum in Bagheria, dedicated to her old friend from Palermo.
In later life she published her war diaries and Love holidays: Quaderni d’amore e di viaggi (2014), which combined her and Fosco’s travel diaries with photographs of the couple from the 1930s.
Fosco Maraini died in 2004. Topazia Alliata is survived by their daughters, Dacia, a celebrated Italian author (Bagheria, her account of her parents return to Sicily was a New York Times bestseller), and Toni, an art historian. Their other daughter, Yuki, predeceased her.
Mujah Maraini-Melehi, one of her grandchildren, is producing Haiku on a Plum Tree, a documentary about her family’s wartime imprisonment. She asked her grandmother, shortly before her death, what life had taught her. “Freedom,” replied Topazia Alliata. “Freedom of thought. Nothing is more important.”
Princess Topazia Alliata, born September 5 1913, died November 23 2015
