‘What they missed most of all was not the country as a whole,’ writes Carolina Vincenti in her latest book, Fantasmi Romeni (Romanian Ghosts), which consists of ten portraits of extraordinary exiles, ‘but a street, a home, a blossoming.’
Born in Bucharest and raised in Beirut, Carolina was a child when she moved to Rome with her mother after the onset of the Lebanese Civil War (1975). They rented a flat in an old palazzo and filled it with rugs, textiles, books and whatever else they’d salvaged from home. ‘We didn’t have a TV, and I hardly spoke Italian, so I spent my days reading and rereading the Arab and Romanian children’s books I had managed to squeeze into my suitcase.’ The descendant of a family with roots in Beirut, Haifa, Bucharest and northern Tuscany, and the heir to a syncretic religious heritage, art historian Carolina embodies some of the traits that have characterised exiles through time. These include an ability to adapt to new surroundings (she speaks five languages fluently) and a yearning to rekindle her forebears’ cultural heritage. ‘Every displacement is uniquely traumatic,’ she says, ‘but the sense of loss is the same.’ As is the impulse to preserve the vestiges of lost stories and vanished atmospheres in whatever place one ends up calling home.
For the last couple of years ‘home’ for Carolina (who has moved half a dozen times since first arriving in Rome roughly 50 years ago) is the lion’s share of a Renaissance palazzo smack in the centre of the city, a stone’s throw from the Pantheon. Despite its stellar location, the palace had withered away, abandoned, for decades. By the time Carolina and her longtime partner, the food and wine critic Paolo Scotto, saw the piano nobile, its windows were long gone and myriad birds had roosted in its rooms. But the couple revelled in the interior’s ornate details. What ultimately won their hearts, however, was its vastness: 600 square metres spread out over two floors and a terrace. ‘Space for us is not an option but a necessity,’ says Carolina as she shows me room after room filled with hundreds of furnishings and artefacts that cross continents and a wealth of historic eras. ‘Every home embodies the history of those who inhabit it,’ she adds. ‘And if those histories are forged by exile and loss, home will inevitably become a work-in-progress scenario in which to rebuild one’s identity.’
Several identities are at play here. Though her paternal ancestry is mostly Italian, this home is imbued with the Romanian culture she inherited from her maternal side, ‘one suspended between Eastern and Western traditions’. It took a couple of years to restore the apartment’s 17th-century murals and painted doors, to replace the rotten floors with fine Umbrian cotto tiles and mount the 36 handmade wooden window frames and glass panes to replace the gaping holes. Once the apartment’s delicate shell was restored, Carolina swept in like a rogue wave with all sorts of stranded treasures from the East. These include a fine collection of icons, an abundance of ancient textiles as well as rugs and furnishings that hark back to Romania’s thriving Belle Epoque years.
Sofas abound in this home where every single room has several welcoming sitting areas. ‘This is the Lebanese influence,’ says Carolina, referring to the convivial atmosphere that traditionally reigns in Middle Eastern homes like the one she grew up in Beirut. Carolina’s erudition about, an passion for, Italian art, which she shares with Paolo, have flowered in a collection of old masters that inspired them to cover the walls with a blend of earthy pigments and fresh limewash typical of Renaissance palaces. And if Paolo’s exquisite collection of blue-and-white 18th-century Genoese porcelain pays tribute to his own family history, one rooted in the powerful past of that great port city, there is enough space here for 20th-century artistic accumulations too. These include Paolo’s clutch of Futurist paintings and drawings, which he has concentrated in one of the reading rooms, and the omnipresence of artworks by Isabella Ducrot (WoI Nov 2022). ‘Our friendship was jump-started by our shared passion for textiles,’ says Carolina, who in the 1980s helped Isabella archive her own holdings of rare fabrics.
When Carolina married her first husband, in 1989, and moved to her first adult apartment, where she raised her two children, her grandmother wanted to present her with a gift of something from her own home in Bucharest. Carolina chose a nondescript sofa she used to sleep on as a child and which has been following her around ever since. It is now plonked in the living room beneath a frescoed ceiling depicting the arrival of Spring, in the form of flower-clad young beauties, who chase away the elderly and bearded Winter. An early 20th-century bronze copy of a Roman Minerva, the goddess of reason and intellectual power (as opposed to brute force), stands next to a window. The scent of cut flowers from the couple’s garden in Umbria blends with the sweetness of the fresh verbena oozing from the teapot. A plethora of books and musical instruments underlines the general atmosphere of high culture. Paolo and Carolina love cooking and entertaining. If one gathering revolves around a feast of music and food inspired by Carolina’s Romanian ancestry, another may focus on readings of obscure Futurist poems complete with experimental Modernist piano sonatas on Paolo’s Steinway.
‘Experience has taught me that individuals are helpless when confronted by the tragedies of history,’ says Carolina. This sense of impermanence, she concludes, is what has led her, and many other exiles, to live in the moment. ‘To paraphrase Lorenzo the Magnificent: be merry while you can, of tomorrow there’s no knowing’
Carolina Vincenti is the author of ‘Soul of Rome: A Guide to 30 Exceptional Experiences’, published by Jonglez
A version of this article appears in the June 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
