RACONTEUR - Moda e Modi

OVADA - on the stage

Anyone who had the privilege of knowing Giorgio Quintini will remember that he was a master raconteur; from long jokes when the party was flagging, which never turned into shaggy dog stories, to memories of left bank Paris or the Roman Dolce Vita, he was never lost for words and always had a captive audience.

In Ovada he put this to good use and took to the stage.

He had already had some experience on stage; in Rome he had appeared in drag in a chat show on a minor TV programme broadcast from a theatre-cum-restaurant called Fantasie di Trastevere, which then belonged to friends of his. There, in his own high-pitched voice but with an assumed Russian accent, he played "Madame Olga", an elderly refugee Russian Princess down on her luck. Building on years of reading and memorising the most obscure social memoires, and drawing on his own experience, he was so credible that the TV station got telephone calls inviting this strange old lady for dinner. One of his best lines was, in a heavy Russian accent, "Io sono donna povera, ma lei, lei è solo una povera donna!" The few recordings taken of this need to be transferred to DVD and put onto Youtube.

In this Ovada evening Giorgio told of his life in the fashion business, for he was also a good draftsman and had worked for some well-known fashion houses. He had no script but had a large basket full of photographs which would be extracted at random to lead to amusing and anecdotal reminiscences. Here he is photographed in Paris in 1957, aged 24, with the model (now singer and film maker) Ivy Nicholson, who was for years a close friend and was also an artist who did two portraits of Giorgio which are still extant and will be published here in another post.