At 89, Renzo Piano, the Genoa-born architect behind the Centre Pompidou in Paris and London’s Shard, has given one of his most personal interviews yet. Speaking to Aldo Cazzullo of Corriere della Sera, in a conversation later picked up by Vanity Fair Italia and HuffPost Italia, he talked less about buildings and more about the people who shaped him.
A name passed down in sorrow
His earliest memory, he said, is of his mother crying every evening at seven o’clock. She was mourning her son Renzo, who had died at 13 after an accident during a football game. The future architect was born nine months later and was given the same name. He grew up in her arms, he recalled, and for years believed that every mother in the world wept at that hour.
School was no easier. Piano describes himself as a hopeless pupil who nearly had to repeat a year in primary school, and remembers a priest telling his mother that her son was not normal. Looking back, he sees it as a gift: growing up convinced that everyone else knew a little more taught him to keep learning from others, taking the good ideas and quietly forgetting the rest.
Friends, love and the “great age”
The interview is full of affection. Piano speaks of his first wife Magda, with whom he set off for London in May 1968 in a battered Fiat 1100 whose door would not shut properly, and of meeting his wife Milly at a dinner in Portofino. He recalls lifelong friendships with the Ligurian songwriters Fabrizio De André and Gino Paoli, choosing Creuza de mä and Sassi as their finest songs. Wartime memories of planes over the hills where his family had taken shelter still shape his idea of happiness, which he describes simply as the moment a war ends.
Among the projects closest to his heart is a university in Bangladesh for young women who have fled Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. When one 16-year-old student was asked what she wanted, she replied that she would like a window, having grown up in a closed room. Piano refuses to talk about old age, preferring to call it the “great age”, and credits his longevity to what he calls an emotional infrastructure: friends, the people you love, and the habit of getting up again whenever life knocks you down.
Built on what we keep
It is a reminder that the things we treasure most are often tied to the people behind them. A pendant necklace, a meaningful ring or a simple bracelet can carry a memory for decades, just as a well-made handbag travels with us through a lifetime of journeys. Browse our jewellery collection for a piece worth passing on.
Sources: Corriere della Sera (Aldo Cazzullo interview, 8 November 2026); Vanity Fair Italia (Monica Coviello, 9 November 2026); HuffPost Italia (8 November 2026).
