For many, Italian history begins with the Romans and ends with the mid-20th century dolce vita period, which gave us Vespas, paparazzi, and many other fanciful, carefree identifiers of the good life, skipping everything in between. Nostalgia for that cinematic dream was likely behind the “Pucci summer” of 2025. Emilio Pucci: The Astonishing Odyssey of a Fashion Icon, written by the designer’s niece Idanna Pucci and the writer Terence Ward, tells a different story. The authors recount the harrowing World War II adventures of a patriot, soldier, and gentleman.
Emilio Pucci reads like a spy novel, but in this case the truth is stranger than fiction. The backbone of the book is a declassified OSS documentThe “Report of Marchese Emilio Pucci on His Role in Connection With the Ciano Diaries,” written by Pucci at the behest of American Intelligence, who did not respect the confidentiality they had promised its author.
Emilio Pucci was eight years old in 1922 when Benito Mussolini was appointed prime minister by King Victor Emmanuel III, making Italy a fascist state. When the aristocratic Florentine was 21 and training for the Olympics ski team, Pucci, who was set to inherit his uncle’s farm, received an opportunity to study agriculture in the United States. In 1935 he enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he started a ski team and designed its uniform. Struck by the difference in politics between his county and America, Pucci switched his major and wrote his thesis on fascism. After graduating he traveled around America working odd jobs. Returning to Italy in 1937 he experienced culture shock and, according to his niece, had a breakdown.
When Italy declared war against the Allies in 1940, Pucci joined the air force. He was drawn into a web of intrigue four years later when Mussolini’s daughter, Countess Edda Ciano, asked him to save her family and the diaries of her imprisoned husband, Gian Galeazzo Ciano, who had been the minister of foreign affairs from 1936 to 1943. The diaries, wanted by both sides, were important historical documents of the unequal relationship, between Italy and Germany, as well as the horrors of the Third Reich. Analyzing Pucci’s motivation, the authors wrote: “If the diaries could be placed in Allied hands, Emilio thought, the Americans would finally realize how Italians had been dragged into war. The diaries could help Italy redefine itself in the future.”
In the course of protecting Countess Ciano, her children, and the diaries—which at one point were used, unsuccessfully, as a bargaining chip for Count Ciano’s life—Pucci was captured and tortured by the Nazis, and was under watch of Swiss and American Intelligence communities.
Postwar, Pucci became part of the Made in Italy movement and a de facto diplomat for fashion whose name evoked color, sun-drenched Mediterranean days, and glamour. Not only did his designs break with the drab pre-war palette, the authors write, but “Emilio caught the zeitgeist, introducing allegria (gaiety and joy) to postwar Europe and America.”
Happiness, like freedom, came at a price. It was troubling to read this book in a moment when NATO is being challenged and post-war “givens” are being replaced with uncertainties. Pucci’s is a story of bravery, and a fight for something larger than oneself, something that’s playing out in real time in America today. Below, excerpts from a conversation with Idanna Pucci.
It was very interesting to read your book at this moment. I found it to be an important reminder of the cost of war—and lives—that lead to NATO’s founding. We must not forget history.
In the last two years of plunging into that period, it became more and more clear that so many young people have no idea about what happened not long ago. And we were reminded all the time, and we felt that everything was dangerous around us again. While we were writing, when we were researching, we tried to put ourselves in the shoes of the young men of the time, like my uncle, like my father, and the women also.
As you wrote in the book, this is not a “cradle to grave” biography, but one focused on an extraordinary period of time. Was the tipping point for this project the discovery of the OSS Report?
Well, about one or two years before, there was an opportunity to do a documentary and my aunt Cristina, Emilio’s widow, was very open to do [it]. She said to me and to Terry, ‘I’m so worried about this time of war because we don’t know….’ In fact, we knew so little about it because everywhere in Italy, just after the war, nobody talked about the war. [The country] was plunged into looking ahead and for Italy, it was a shameful piece of history. And so we said, ‘Look, don’t worry, we will do the research on the war. We take it upon us. It’s our responsibility.’ And so she said, ‘Fine.’ Then the documentary for many reasons did not go on and we had already started the research and so we continued because what we had already found was so interesting and so revealing.
Tell me a little bit about the report.
We started researching even further and it was almost by coincidence—but with my uncle, everything is almost by chance and coincidence—we came across this report from the OSS in the CIA. There were hundreds of declassified files; in this case nothing was in chronology and there were boxes and boxes at random of all that the OSS had investigated. These boxes are something like a labyrinth of information…I mean, and then suddenly we came across his name and that opened a whole world. I started reading and I started grieving also because he became like an example of the suffering of so many people.
And I said, ‘But how come we really had no idea?’ We had an idea, a very superficial idea. My father would say something, but we didn’t have the details and this was by his own hand, his own writing. And so that made us understand that there was something really important that we should…. Also because of the diversity of personality, how the same man who went through this whole thing, then suddenly he started creating all these fashions and these colors and all that. And it’s rather amazing, these two, that in the same person, in the same brain, in the same personality, these two facets that actually are many more faceted. And I’m sure that many people are like that. It’s just that they don’t know it. Or also they’re not faced with circumstances that make them emerge this [...] We are what we face and sometimes we face things that are so beyond us and we have to be at the level of what we have faced.
Your uncle wrote his thesis about fascism while at Reed College. Can you talk about his political stance?
Here we have to talk about the aristocracy; now the aristocracy all over Italy automatically followed the king. I mean, we all had relatives that were in the court. Once there was the March on Rome, the king chose Mussolini and nominated him prime minister. So automatically the aristocracy followed. And in fact, those young people in the aristocracy who were against Mussolini were very few. My uncle when he went to school, my father, all the signs in the school, everything in the curriculum was decided by the fascist minister of education, for instance. So there was very little discussion. And my grandfather was just appalled when suddenly he realized that his two boys had to fight on the side of the Germans. And we write, he couldn’t even go to the station and say goodbye to them, to die for the Germans in a war that frankly, very few believed in.
What’s interesting with my uncle is when he went to America he was coming as a young man from a fascist country, and all these other students were asking him all sorts of questions, and he couldn’t even answer. That’s why he suddenly changed his major from agrarian studies [to political science]. Then [there came an] awareness that things were not…I mean, he had a nervous breakdown when he came back. There is a character development there, but it’s not that overnight he changed.
The idea of the possibility for change and discovery is heartening.
He must have had an instinct because he never joined a fascist youth even before America.
Was there something more than gallantry that drove Pucci to protect Countess Ciano?
In Italy, everybody assumes that he had this roaring affair with Ida Ciano. He never talked about it. She never talked about it. And I cannot say yes, I cannot say entirely no. We describe it in a chapter of how they met and how they came together in Capri at a certain point. And he was very friendly with her brother who was a pilot who died. It is inconclusive.
I recently read Stefan Zweig’s biography of Marie Antoinette, and he said something to the effect that she became a queen in adversity.
[My uncle] had an incredible, incredible sense of loyalty with friends. And of course, these diaries written by her husband, the foreign minister, were a crucial aspect of his coming to her rescue. We don’t know if she hadn’t had these diaries, this document….
You and Terry went and you physically mapped Pucci’s experiences.
Yes, yes. And in the same days of winter, we made a point of leaving or really following the same trajectory at the same moment.
Your description of Italy’s post-war flowering was informative. Vogue started reporting about fashions in Europe in this period.
I’m sure you’ve been to Florence many times, but in my childhood, walking down the streets for us it was normal to always look in a shop and see somebody working there, whether making leather, silver…. And suddenly after the war, all these people were working for a cause, working to build up the country again, and at the same time for export. I mean, my first job was working for a buyer for Macy’s. I remember she had an office in the tower of the Ponte Vecchio. I was sent to Prato and all these little towns where there were factories making sweaters to check all the sweaters before being shipped to Macy’s. Made in Italy was being born and there were all these buyers coming and designers from the department stores designing and having everything made here. And so I saw this incredible excitement, and I witnessed the fashion shows arriving and where suddenly, because of [Giovanni Battista] Giorgini, this incredible, incredible man who saw in the future [he organized the first fashion shows for buyers in Florence], all the streets would become suddenly the most festive things. The whole of Florence became a protagonist because wherever you turned, there were models being photographed. The monuments here in the piazzas, everywhere, suddenly this incredible stage set that would become alive almost. So it was a fantastic time, really.
What would you like you readers to take away from the book about Emilio?
It’s important for readers and young people to realize that this curiosity has to be stimulated, has to be nurtured, in order to acquire the power of resiliency. [It is] so important today not to accept things as they come, but question them. And in the young people, the stimulus to be imaginative, because we all have that. We all have that, the power of imagination. It’s the only thing that can be a savior in terrible moments, and then also in relationships, in the empathy and the sympathy, these emotions that are so important between friends and people. And I think that if this book expresses something, it’s in this field.
