Princess Luciana Pignatelli died in her seventies last October after taking sleeping tablets washed down with a bottle of gin. She had lost out on two currencies: her money and her looks. She could have managed with only one of them but not without both. “I can’t face being old and poor,” she told her friends after learning all of her investments were worthless. A memorial service was held two weeks ago in Rome for the woman who had once been the object of desire for Italy’s most dashing men about town, including Fiat’s Gianni Agnelli and his brother-in-law (Prince) Carlo Caraccioli, founder of the left-centre newspaper La Repubblica.

Older readers might recall her Camay soap commercials, described by Camille Paglia as “strangely somnambulistic.” There’s a 1974 one she did, when she was married to a cousin of photographer Richard Avedon, on YouTube. Her earlier marriage to Nicoló Pignatelli, a handsome, clever prince from Italy’s black aristocracy, gave her the name she kept. The New York Times Magazine’s beauty editor Mary Tannen profiled her in 2003, quoting from Pignatelli’s The Beautiful People’s Beauty Book: “I underwent hypnosis, had cell implants, diacutaneous fibrolysis, silicone injections, my nose bobbed and my eyelids lifted.” And that was just in 1970.

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