The Italian collector and arts patron Nicoletta Fiorucci can’t imagine a home without art. “Art is domestic. I like to be surrounded by art—it is my comfort. I don’t understand how you can live without considering art as a companion in your life, without collecting or going to museums,” Fiorucci told Artsy. Her eclectic collection of more than 2,000 artworks is spread across her homes in the U.K., France, and Italy.
Visitors to her Venice apartment that overlooks the Grand Canal are greeted with art before they’ve even walked through the front door. Two trompe l’oeil works decorate the staircase: Sylvie Fleury’s Chanel Shopping Bag (2008), cast in bronze, and Cinzia Ruggeri’s Borse cane a mano di tessuto (1988), a handbag in the shape of a dog with an accompanying silver dog bowl. Once inside, one of the first pieces you’ll notice is a huge rosette of oversized blue flowers bursting from the ceiling—Forget-me-not (2020) by the duo Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano. Fiorucci explained that she wanted the artworks to offset the building’s austere Venetian grandeur, with its high ceilings, terrazzo floors, and marble doorframes.
After 15 years based in London, Venice marks a new chapter for Fiorucci and, in some ways, a return home. She grew up in Rome, where she was exposed to many religious paintings in the city’s churches, giving her what she calls “a very classical approach to art.”
But, when she went with her father to an art auction as a teenager, it was a small Dutch oil painting on wood that became the first piece in her collection. “Living in Rome, you see only paintings with humans, saints, angels, or gods,” she recalled. “I fell in love with this little landscape painting because it was nothing like that. My father bid on it and bought it for me as a gift: I found it propped up on a chair outside my bedroom when I woke up the next morning!”
It took her a while to become passionate about contemporary art. As an adult, she moved to London, where she became heavily involved in the art scene as a patron and member of nonprofit art centers like Studio Voltaire and Gasworks. In 2010, she founded the Fiorucci Art Trust with the curator Milovan Farronato and began to hone her interest in emerging artists. “I feel at home in London,” she said. “I owe the city a lot, and learned a lot there.”
Until 2021, the Trust ran a program of exhibitions, residencies, and workshops in locations across Europe, from acting as an exhibition partner with London’s Serpentine Galleries and Chisenhale Gallery, to inviting artists to live and work on the Italian island of Stromboli—with an active volcano as tempestuous backdrop—or Li Galli, a rocky, mythical archipelago evoked in Homer’s Odyssey that was bought by Fiorucci’s husband Giovanni Russo. Today, Li Galli’s flag, a canary-yellow ‘G’ set in a sky-blue background, flutters from the couple’s Venetian terrace.
After the COVID-19 pandemic forced the Trust to end its work sponsoring performance art, Fiorucci turned her focus to museum patronage for a few years. Her foundation supported the launch of the first contemporary art program at Pompeii, called Pompeii Commitment: Archaeological Matters—where, in 2023, the artist Sissel Tolaas created an artwork that bottled the molecular smell of archaeological ruins—and Serpentine’s 2022 installation of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s “interspecies artwork” Pollinator Pathmaker at Kensington Gardens in London.
“I’m adventurous in my tastes, so by definition I’m exposed to new things,” she explained. “And as a private patron, I can take risks.”
Her approach to collecting has evolved over the years. “I’m more cool-headed now!” she admitted. “I used to be more emotional in my choices. That’s because art is a privilege; it is a pleasure; it’s something that adds joy to your life. My collection is an asset, and so I’m more aware of value now. Just because I fall in love with an artwork doesn’t mean I have to bite.”
Fiorucci does, however, make a point of working with artists who aren’t already very well-known, because she wants “to grow with them.” That’s part of the goal of her new project in Venice under the Trust’s new banner of the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, her non-profit arts organization.
In December 2024, she purchased a 15th-century home that used to belong to the painter Ettore Tito in the city’s Dorsoduro neighborhood. A month later, the Georgian artist Tolia Astakhishvili moved in to create a site-specific work for the site’s inaugural show, ‘to love and devour’ (2025). Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the show also includes works by invited artists such as Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Zurab Astakhishvili, and Thea Djordjadze.
“I went from supporting artists on a remote island with an active volcano to the most relevant city in the world!” Fiorucci laughed. “Being in the middle of Venice and having the chance to express yourself and dominate a space is a great opportunity for an artist.”
With the Foundation, Fiorucci plans to continue the Trust’s mission of promoting unconventional media in art and advises collectors to move away from more traditional choices. “We are all buying paintings now because we love paintings, because it’s a safe choice, because we know how to hang them and store them,” she told Artsy. “But I think art is producing so many meaningful works in unconventional media, and it’s important not to lose this kind of expression.”
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