Forte dei Marmi has become an inconspicuous refuge for some of the world’s most conspicuous people, writes Marianna Giusti.
The boy looked dead. He was no older than 19, with modelesque features and dressed in designer clothes, sat on a bench on the Lungomare esplanade under pink dusklight. When we tried to shake him awake, his head flopped backwards. Someone called for help. Taupe bicycles with wicker baskets slow-motioned past us and women with fresh blow-drys and solid-gold jewellery strolled by carrying enormous raffia bags. Then a man searched the boy’s pockets and extracted something. A little girl, holding her mum’s hand, turned to stare at us. I had never seen so much cash in my life either. A bundle of €500 and €200 notes.
“You think he’s one of them?” I asked my friend.
“I suppose he works for them and the cash is payment?” he said.
We were in Forte dei Marmi. “Them,” everyone knew, meant Russians. As a doctor arrived, a waiter walked over from our restaurant to let us know our table was ready. It was July 18, 2019, the night of my friend’s birthday dinner. We followed to a dining terrace where champagne was being chilled in plastic beach buckets, and the boy became just another legend to add to the pile. Sooner or later in Forte, everyone has a story to tell about the Russians.
A seaside village nestled under the Italian Alps, Forte emerges from a 20-kilometre strip of sand that stretches along the Tuscan coast. I know this place well. As a child, I loved being immersed in Forte’s fairytale-like architecture. I loved the wrought-iron window grates lacquered in milk-mint green, the impossibly pretty terraces, the marble-tiled squares with pink flowers on every corner. The complete absence of squalor and vulgarity made me feel safe. Although we lived in the next town over, I would ask my parents if we could holiday in Forte dei Marmi. And, years later, as a teenager, I periodically escaped there to wander along its promenades, Holly Golightly on a tenspeed.
Forte has a long history of attracting pleasure-seekers. In the late 19th century, artists such as Arnold Böcklin, John Singer Sargent and Isolde Kurz discovered it. Later, the Agnellis, the Siemens, Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley, who wrote his first novel in Forte, holidayed here, ushering in decades of glitz. Ray Charles, Édith Piaf and Grace Jones all performed at Forte’s Capannina club where, local legend goes, the Negroni cocktail was first concocted for Count Negroni. (It is not the only place to claim this.) In more recent years, oligarchs and celebrities settled in: Silvio Berlusconi, Giorgio Armani, Oleg Deripaska and Oleg Tinkov among them.
Unlike Mediterranean playgrounds such as Monaco and Porto Cervo, Forte retains an air of mystery, an inconspicuous place for conspicuous people. Private security cars patrol the empty village centre at night. It’s not unusual to see armed guards in black ties standing in front of villa gates. Many of those villas are steeped in pine gardens so thick you can’t see where one estate ends and the next begins.
Naturally, the concentration of the super-rich in Forte, measuring a mere 9 sq km, has driven up prices. Villas are let for €400,000 (about NZ$732,000) for the summer season, hotel rooms average €900 per night and a spot on the beach can cost up to €500 a day. Datcha, the ultra-luxury residence owned by Tinkov, a Russian-Cypriot tycoon, is bookable for €100,000 per week or about €1 million for the season. Many of the clientele are Russian or eastern European.
When I was younger, the growing presence of Russians in Forte made its way back to us in tales of various embellishment. In school, there was a legend that a Russian driving a Porsche SUV had hit a kid’s Vespa. The driver, the rumour went, got out of the car and handed the boy €10,000 in cash to keep quiet. People my age who got seasonal jobs in Forte returned with anecdotes about being tipped with iPhones and getting to finish €500 bottles of wine. There was a story about a cleaner in one holiday villa being instructed by Russian tenants to flush the loo for them.
According to locals and reports in the Italian press, both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy currently have villas here. “It’s true,” a local hotelier whispered when I asked about Putin’s rumoured home, though, when I put it to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, he said: “This is complete nonsense.” San Tommaso SRL, a company that owns property in Forte, confirmed that the Ukrainian president’s family are shareholders. (Zelenskyy’s spokesperson did not provide a response to a request for comment.)
Last month, Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation reported that relatives of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of mercenary military organisation the Wagner Group and former Putin friend, own a mansion in Forte worth €3.5m. The organisation has previously reported that some 2500 of the 7000 homes in Forte belong to Russians. When the war escalated in 2022, many of the Russophone elite retreated here permanently.
Elena Davsar is waiting for me at Principe hotel. A 41-year-old Russian business coach and Forte dei Marmi socialite, Davsar launched a Russian-language blog, My Forte dei Marmi, in 2017. That put her at the centre of Forte’s Russian community. We’re in the historic hotel bought by the oligarch Vladimir Yevtushenkov and inaugurated in 2012, as reported by Italian newspaper Il Messaggero. I’m excited about our dinner at Lux Lucis, Principe’s rooftop restaurant. “Isn’t it Forte’s only Michelin-starred place?” I ask. “There are five,” Davsar says, with a smile. “You can read about them in my guide.”
Davsar asked a lot of questions before agreeing to meet. But over the course of the meal, she slowly warms to me. We sip an aromatic aperitivo on the terrace, as the sun sinks into the Mediterranean. “Forte is my grande amore,” she says, taking in the view. On the roof of a nearby building, an elevator bulkhead has been painted the colours of the Ukrainian flag.
She points to something behind me. A perfect rainbow has appeared, and an American couple with identical sets of unnaturally white teeth asks us to take their picture. Behind the Americans, our corner table awaits. Staff prop our handbags on handbag-sized leather ottomans, and we sit down. Before I start recording, Davsar informs me she isn’t going to comment on the political situation. By that I suppose she is talking about Russia’s occupation of Ukraine. “Also,” she adds, “I don’t refer to our community as Russian. It’s ‘Russophone’.”
Davsar moved here from Milan seven years ago. Her childhood dream had always been to live by the sea. One day, an Italian friend handed her the keys to her house in Forte. “And just like that, my dream came true.” Davsar’s descriptions of her life in Forte evoke a Mediterranean remake of Emily in Paris. When she details how she spends her time off — morning runs on the Lungomare, five o’clock teas, art vernissages in pine gardens, boutique openings, parties in private villas, days exploring the Ligurian coast by sail boat — I feel a small wave of envy. Davsar doesn’t consider herself that social: “I get a thousand invitations, but I only go so I can see my friends.”
After the war started, Davsar rebranded her blog “to erase any political imprint”, she tells me, and changed its name and URL (previously Fortedeimarmi.RF) to lose all references, however minor, to Russian nationalism. The site is also an Instagram account with some 5000 followers, which covers cultural happenings and posts pictures of beach parties and hikes.
Forte’s penchant for discretion is an element that attracts a certain breed.
Davsar’s Italian is flawless and more idiomatic than mine. She also forgives frequent slips into English. Over a conceptual eggy broth, I wonder why, with such excellent command of Italian and English, she decided to start a website in Russian. “In Forte, there are many people who speak Russian,” she says. “I created my website for them.” And has their presence intensified since the start of the war? Her dainty, ponytailed head makes an almost imperceptible nod. “There are many families who’ve fully relocated here and now spend the whole year in Forte,” she says. “More than 300 families.” (According to Il Messaggero, there are more than 500.) “Forte’s penchant for discretion is an element that attracts a certain breed,” says Davsar.
She tells me she can’t reveal her readers’ names. But as we drink a Tuscan Riesling, she specifies with a touch of pride that they are “very successful businessmen, famous internationally”. She describes them as a low-profile group who feel no desire for ostentation and favour private events in their villas to raucous beach parties. Beyond relaxation, this select crowd understands Forte is a place where they can network, “sign contracts under beach umbrellas” and operate a bit like in “an exclusive business club”. I remark they must be an exclusive club if the likes of Zelenskyy own villas here. “I would rather we didn’t discuss that,” she says.
I notice she’s been studying a large dining party nearby. “They’re Russians,” she says in a hushed voice. I comment that many Russians in Forte prefer to say they’re Ukrainian these days. “Recently, people really want to specify where they were born,” she continues, as I try to rescue some clams drowning in a pool of vanilla. Davsar herself was born in Kyiv, and raised in Moscow. “But here in Forte dei Marmi, we gather for lunch and for dinner. Here, we live together, in peace.” She then utters a sentence which in Italian would be called lapidaria, which is to say as concise as a lapidary inscription: “I was born during the Soviet period, we were all one big family.”
On my first day in Forte dei Marmi, Russian missiles are hitting cities across Ukraine, killing civilians. As I walk barefoot along Forte’s near-empty beach, all I see is a sleepy town waking up for a new season. A lifeguard repaints a wooden gazebo. Two young men divide portions of sand with long strings, preparing to plant colourful beach umbrellas in symmetrical arrangements.
Real estate agent, Filippo Mariani (not his real name) picks me up in his Renault. Wearing Persol sunglasses, a Winston Blue pack in his jeans back pocket, car volume turned up and windows rolled down, he’s treating me to a villa-watching tour of Forte. The first on our list is Zelenskyy’s house.
Neat and modern-looking, the house is in the newly affluent neighbourhood of Vittoria Apuana that only became expensive when the most sought-after quarters of Roma Imperiale “ran out of plots for sale”, says Mariani. For Vittoria Apuana, it’s a perfectly decent villa but relatively unassuming by Forte standards. I peek through the thick hedges and notice a pool. “He rents it,” Mariani shouts from the car.
After another short drive, Mariani says, “I’m going to show you La Rosa dei Venti, the Wind Rose.” He pulls over in front of a large structure with three grey gates. Behind the central gate are a pool and a villa. The two lateral gates open on to a cobbled driveway that seems to be tracing a wrap-around U encircling the villa. One of them is open slightly. I look at it, then at Mariani. “I’m not trespassing,” he says.
Then he hands me his phone, opened to Google Maps. I see the spot we’re standing clearly, from a satellite view. La Rosa dei Venti is, in fact, an oblong folding fan of nine villas arranged like spectators in an amphitheatre. They’re sitting around a central, more imposing villa. “They’re all owned by Russians.”
Next, we drive to a big favourite of my Holly Golightly days, Roma Imperiale, a residential “garden village”. Its postcode, with Capri, includes Italy’s most expensive real estate. Forte’s oldest villas, some of which have protected historical heritage, feature frescoed ceilings and wide, welcoming porticos. But most houses you find here today are strategically concealed, some by impossibly tall hedges, others by heavy-duty fences and gates, equipped with cameras. The custom of Russian buyers in this area is to either purchase historical estates and completely re-do them, or build new ones from scratch that “look straight out of Miami”, according to Mariani. “Inside some of these I saw a lot of gold, really heavy gold, marble and pillars,” he says. “It’s stuff that just doesn’t fit here.”
Forte’s property market, which has more than 150 real estate agencies, means a house’s size is of secondary importance. Everything is valued a corpo, non a misura — by body, not by measurement. “This makes things easier for those trying to clean money,” Mariani explains. When Russians arrived, they would notice villas owned by Italian retirees who’d been holidaying here for 50 years. “They would just buzz the door and offer them €3m. People always sold,” he says.
Many local estate agents believe Russian buyers in Forte behave like “colonisers”. “They’re buying the whole place,” Mariani says. I think of the lady hotelier who spoke to me anonymously over a breakfast of cappuccino and fig jam tart. She described the Russians like “an elephant walking, there’s no fighting against it”. Her tone was the same as many I spoke with in Forte, a mix of circumspection and acquiescence. I ask if Mariani, whose family has worked in Forte’s hospitality industry for decades, feels that estate agents like him are enabling the same people they describe as colonisers. Not exactly. “There’s a degree of awareness,” he says. “I have seen situations at the edge of legality — but you just do it. The whole world revolves around that.”
They would just buzz the door and offer them €3m. People always sold.
Anastasia Voznovych is late. While I wait for her at Bagno Dalmazia for lunch, a waiter insists I have some champagne. A 30-year-old Ukrainian store assistant at a Forte fashion boutique, Voznovych arrives in sunglasses and a blazer, sits down and lights a cigarette. In her 10 years working here, Voznovych has become an expert at discerning the types that make up the village’s Russophone community. “There’s a bit of everything in the summer,” she says. “But in November, at Christmas, you recognise them, the Russian permanent residents.” This winter, she says while flicking through the menu, she saw more than ever. Some used to go to her boutique and create loyalty accounts, using UAE, British or Swiss passports. Now, they have stopped registering.
Status is something members of the Russophone enclave grapple with warily, according to Voznovych. They have always been concerned with not being mistaken for what she terms “Russian trash” and would much rather pass for other Europeans. She tells me about a customer who once reprimanded her for talking to her in Russian, demanding to be spoken to in English. Her impression is that the majority of them aren’t benefiting from the war. “Although, if we’re talking about Forte,” she adds, beheading a prawn, “nobody cares if you’re pro-Russia or pro-Ukraine. What matters is: do you have money?”
Then Voznovych tells me a story. A long-time Russian customer of hers opened up about her concern for her 18-year-old nephew in Russia, who might be sent to the front line. “She had tears in her eyes,” Voznovych says. “It made me reflect on how we’re in the same boat. They are invaders. We are invaded. But the grief is the same.” Still, the Russian’s tears touched a nerve. “She only spoke to me about it because Putin was looking for new recruits. ‘Now that they want my kid to go to war, now it’s a real problem!’”
Over the course of 36 hours in Forte, this is the second story I hear of a Ukrainian shop assistant who had to soothe a rich Russian’s anxiety. The official line from the local government is that tensions in Forte dei Marmi have been carefully contained. At least since April 2022, when the gate of a Russian-owned villa in Roma Imperiale was painted the colours of the Ukrainian flag. Umberto Buratti, Forte’s former mayor, commented that Russian and Ukrainian residents in Forte dei Marmi cohabitate in peace. It would be wrong, he added, to blame any Russian citizen for the war waged by their country.
I drive home on the country roads I pedalled over as a child behind my father, when Forte was still a real-life Barbie land to me. Today, I find myself pondering whether my aspirations were part of a fantasy that itself attracted the foreigners now ruining the place, or simply misplaced. I think of the rumours that circulated in the schoolyard and the motionless boy on the bench on Lungomare. I think of the Kardashians’ Capri weddings, the Taormina of The White Lotus. But also Hydra after Leonard Cohen, the Côte d’Azur of F Scott Fitzgerald and the myriad Mediterranean places that had been unspoiled repositories of legend until the moneyed landed there with their elephant feet. “They would just buzz the door and offer them €3m,” Mariani had said. “People always sold.” Wasn’t it us who invited them in?
It’s a perfect Versilia evening. As I pass under canopies of pines, I hear some turtledoves above me and suddenly it’s 1996. Maybe even 1925. Tonight, like every night, the light is pink. It makes the mountains look as if they’re blushing, like a naughty child who might be up to something.
- Marianna Giusti is an FT Weekend audience engagement journalist
Written by: Marianna Giusti
© Financial Times