The Agnellis unleashed

At first one thinks it's a love affair between the two dogs; in effect it's more like my love affair with them, though they did like each other in the end. They did. But it took a while.' Priscilla Rattazzi, the New York-based photographer, is discussing her new book,

Priscilla is the daughter of Susanna Agnelli and Count Urbano Rattazzi. Her mother's brother was Gianni Agnelli, who ran Fiat until 1996 and was the head of the clan until his death in 2003. Through Exor, the Agnelli Group investment company, the family own banks, newspapers and industrial concerns, and its investments constitute the largest percentage of the Italian stock market. It is no exaggeration to say that the Agnellis have emerged as the substitute royal family of Italy since the Second World War.

'My parents separated when I was very young and my mother went into politics when I turned 18,' says Priscilla. Starting in 1974, Susanna Agnelli was mayor of the Tuscan district of Monte Argentario for ten years, during which time she became an MP for the centre-left Republican Party (PRI), an MEP and, from 1983, a senator. In 1995, at the height of her career, she became the first and only woman ever to be Italy's Minister of Foreign Affairs.

'She liked power, she liked being important; there's no question about it,' Priscilla recalls. 'She was also quite good at it. First of all, most importantly, she spoke English beautifully. Many Italian politicians cannot speak English. She was tall and good-looking. I have this great picture of her in the Oval Office with Clinton and Gore and a bunch of guys, and she's the only woman. Good for her! In Italy, at that time, there were few women politicians. In terms of her style she was known for her bluntness, but also for her sense of humour.'

Priscilla's great-grandfather on her father's side, also Urbano Rattazzi, was a senator from a Piedmontese family who held high office in various governments. 'I didn't grow up with my father so it's a part of my history that I've neglected,' she says casually. Indeed, she always felt that she belonged more to her maternal family. Her mother had one pre-eminent lesson drummed into her as a child by her English nanny: 'Never forget you are an Agnelli.' In 1975, Susanna, who was the third of seven siblings and the closest in age to Gianni, wrote a memoir, We Always Wore Sailor Suits, about growing up as an Agnelli in pre-war Italy.

Priscilla first became aware of the burden of belonging to the clan as a teenager in the
1970s, when wealthy Italian families faced the threat of kidnap by revolutionary terrorist groups such as the Red Brigades, which kidnapped and murdered Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. 'That's why I moved to New York. We all moved,' says Priscilla. Susanna Agnelli took her two youngest children to live in Manhattan in 1971. 'My mother kept saying, "We've got to get out of Italy, we've got to get out of Italy." So the younger ones did. My older sisters were already married and had children, so they couldn't leave, but they were careful. My mother had a bodyguard when she was in Italy. I went to boarding school in France and then to boarding school in Wales, Atlantic College, and finally I went to college in the US.'

School holidays, too, were taken abroad. 'My uncle [Gianni]'s daughter Margherita is my age, and his son Edoardo was very close to my brother Lupo. So it was always the four of us. We were always together. We would go on vacation with them. It was very glam-orous – that's when I became aware of this glamour factor. We were 14 years old and my aunt had rented this fabulous house in Mallorca that belonged to a wealthy Spanish family. Truman Capote was one of the guests. He had this very distinctive voice, and my cousin [Margherita] and I would impersonate him. He would be holding forth outside and we would hide in the bushes and make fun of him. We were insufferable teenagers. When we were 15, my aunt Marella rented this fabulous seaside house in Mexico over Christmas, just south of Acapulco. It was my first time on a private jet. That's when it hit me. It was always like that: private planes, glamorous venues. My brother and I were not like that, but with them [Gianni's family] it was always the stratosphere. I liked to joke that we were the poor cousins. He [Gianni] was the defining uncle because he and my mother were so close. He was incredibly charismatic, funny and quite cynical. He was the king of the family, there's no question about it. He liked me, for sure, but he liked his nephews much more, because he was just that kind of guy.'

Long before Gianni's son Edoardo, who was something of a mystic and a self-styled ascetic, committed suicide by driving his sports car off a viaduct, he had already been deemed unfit to lead the family business, so the Fiat succession passed from Gianni to his grandson John Elkann, known as Jaki. 'History repeated itself,' says Priscilla. 'Gianni did with his grandson what his grandfather did with him. It has to do with control of the family business. In that sense it was very much like a kingdom, but Gianni did it to maintain family control of the company. It's very Italian, this belief that family companies need to stay within the family.'

For the last couple of years, Priscilla's cousin and childhood companion Margherita has been at war in the Italian courts with her son John Elkann. She blew the whistle on the family to the Italian tax authorities, claiming that Gianni hid assets worth more than £1 billion offshore in the form of bank accounts, moorings on the French Riviera, property in Paris and New York, shares and works of art. Margherita, whose mother and other son sided with John Elkann against her, believed that the family had conspired with their advisers to deprive her of her full inheritance. 'Someone took my sons hostage,' Margherita has claimed. 'Were I not morally strong, I would have jumped off a bridge as my brother did.'

From her semi-detached vantage point in New York, Priscilla looks upon her cousin's litigation with dismay. 'We've all watched it for almost three years. We're all very upset about it. I think it shouldn't be public. There's always two sides to a story. I think everyone's wrong and everyone's right.' She says that Margherita's action has been an own goal, because it caused her to pay a huge fine to the Italian tax authorities. 'It was not a good move on her part,' she says. 'I just wish, frankly, that it had been resolved in private. It has been resolved to a degree, but not entirely.' Nonetheless, Priscilla still talks to both sides of the family: 'I don't believe in drawing lines in the sand; I think it's a big mistake. But being in America gives me a different perspective. In Italy, people are definitely not taking my cousin's side, but I'm maybe a little more forgiving.'

Priscilla studied photography at Sarah Lawrence College in America, then worked in New York as an apprentice to the Japanese fashion photographer Hiro. 'I wanted to be an artist but I couldn't paint. But I absolutely knew that I had an eye. I won a photography prize when I was in boarding school and won a prize when I was in university. It was not a big deal, just something that kept me thinking I could do this.' Along with Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, Hiro was one of several photographers who redefined fashion photo-graphy in the 1960s. He was shooting all the advertising for designers such as Halston and Hanae Mori, and it was the beginning of the supermodel generation. 'All these beautiful women came to the studio every day with their make-up artists, Christie Brinkley, Iman I was completely starstruck.'

After a year, Priscilla became a fashion photographer in her own right, working for various American magazines as well as for Vogue Italia. And soon after that she married her first husband, Alex, son of the Italian film producer Carlo Ponti (who produced Doctor Zhivago) and stepson of Sophia Loren. 'We met through my brother in New York in the late Seventies. Alex and I went out for about a year. I was too young when I got married, at 23. Also, I think that I wasn't made to have an Italian husband. I prefer Anglo-Saxon behaviour, the whole faithful thing. I found out through reading the New York Post that he was cheating on me and I thought, "I don't think I can really stomach this one for the long term." ' Does she think Italian men are predestined to be unfaithful? 'Probably probably,' she answers.