When the art dealer Edmondo di Robilant co-founded Robilant + Voena in 2004, his son, Michele, was eight years old. Family businesses, Michele would one day learn, should be treated like old-master paintings: preserved carefully, handled delicately, and rarely altered. Twenty-two years later, as director of the newly independent Robilant gallery, he understands those nuances firsthand.
Born in London to the Canadian journalist Maya Even, Michele moved to Venice in 2004 with his mother to learn his father’s language—the same year Edmondo opened the gallery’s first outpost, on Dover Street. “It was quite a shock because it happened from one week to the next,” he says of the move, “but it was fantastic.” He enrolled in a local school while his mother—who spoke only English at the time—took Italian lessons nearby. Every morning, they would leave for their respective classes and meet up again in the afternoons for ice cream, discovering the city through its Renaissance churches and contemporary-art museums.
