Lifestyle

Mauro Morandi, Italy’s Robinson Crusoe, Dies at 85

Published

1 week ago

January 10, 2025

Mauro Morandi, Italy’s Robinson Crusoe, Dies at 85

Mauro Morandi, whose 32-year sojourn on an uninhabited Mediterranean island led to his being known as Italy’s Robinson Crusoe, died on Jan. 3 in Modena, Italy. He was 85.

The cause was a brain hemorrhage, said Antonio Rinaldis, who wrote a 2023 book with Mr. Morandi about his life on the island.

Unlike Daniel Defoe’s hero, who was shipwrecked and fervently hoped to be rescued, Mr. Morandi chose his life of solitude.

He said he had fallen in love at first sight with Budelli, a pristine, undeveloped island off the northern tip of Sardinia. He arrived in 1989, somewhat by chance, he said in interviews. He left — against his will — in 2021, writing on social media that he was tired of “fighting against those who want to send me away.”

Mr. Morandi’s singular choice to live in solitude spawned at least two books, at least one song, short documentaries and countless interviews. As the world turned inward during the coronavirus pandemic, reporters sought Mr. Morandi’s insights on isolation.

“I read a lot, and think,” he told CNN in 2020. “I think many people are scared of reading because if they do, they’ll start meditating and thinking about stuff, and that can be dangerous. If you start seeing things under a different light and be critical, you could end up seeing what a miserable life you lead.”

Budelli, one of the main islands that make up the Maddalena Archipelago, is a dab of paradise occupying less than two-thirds of a square mile. It is known for its pink sand beach surrounded by turquoise water. The island has no running water, is not connected to an electrical grid and is accessible only by boat.

Mr. Morandi lived in an abandoned World War II hut, tacking up canvas tarps in an open area in front. He created sculptures from branches, cooked on a propane stove and read voraciously, buying books and supplies on trips to La Maddalena, the largest town on the archipelago. Visitors also brought him food and water. He used car batteries and solar power to charge his cellphone and his tablet.

It was, he said, “a simple life made up of big and small pleasures.”

“The most important thing,” he added, “is that I have a serene relationship with time.”

For years he was the island’s designated guardian, hired by the Swiss-Italian real estate company that owned it.

His main task was to protect the island’s habitat from unruly tourists, who are allowed only on certain paths, part of an effort by Italy’s environment ministry to protect the rare pink sand. He told people about the marvels of the island, and how fragments of coral and shells had turned the sand pink. He picked up trash from the beach, cleared the island’s paths and carried out light maintenance.

Mr. Morandi initially chose to live as a hermit, he said in an interview at Genoa’s maritime museum, but he ultimately welcomed select people as part of his mission to make them “understand why we need to love nature.”

He said he did not miss human contact. “He didn’t like what humanity had become in the 21st century — consumeristic and individualistic — especially with regard to nature,” Mr. Rinaldis said. That was why Mr. Morandi cared about protecting Budelli.

When he finally got an internet connection, he used social media to showcase the island’s untamed beauty.

In 2016, after a protracted legal battle over the island’s ownership, it was turned over to the state and became part of Maddalena Archipelago National Park. Mr. Morandi was asked to leave.

The park’s president, Giuseppe Bonanno, acknowledged Mr. Morandi’s unique position. “Morandi symbolizes a man, enchanted by the elements, who decides to devote his life to contemplation and custody,” he told reporters. But there were other issues, including whether Mr. Morandi would be able to survive a medical emergency alone, not to mention his shack’s failure to meet code.

He fought back. He campaigned against his eviction on social media. He gave interviews to the news media. An online petition drew nearly 75,000 signatures.

“We do not want Mauro to leave the island because we think first of all that if Budelli has remained a wonder of nature it is also thanks to him,” the petition said. “And second, because we are convinced that the park has everything to gain from his presence: Mauro has lived on Budelli for a quarter of a century, he knows every plant and every rock, every tree and every animal species, he recognizes the colors and scents with the changing of the wind and the seasons.”

But after battling the authorities for five years, Mr. Morandi relented. He was 82 and no longer in good health. “Part of his resignation was tied to his fragility,” Mr. Rinaldis said, “but he was also disappointed because he had been forced to leave by the authorities.”

Mr. Morandi left the island for good in March 2021 and moved to a small apartment in La Maddalena. “I’ll leave hoping that in the future, Budelli will be safeguarded, like I’ve been doing it for 32 years,” he said.

Mauro Morandi was born on Feb. 12, 1939, in Modena. His father, Mario Morandi, was a gymnast who won the national championship for artistic gymnastics in 1936 and was later the caretaker of a school. Mauro’s mother, Enia Camellini, worked for a tobacco company.

Mr. Morandi studied to become a physical education teacher and taught at a middle school in Modena through the 1970s, when he was able to retire early. He had three daughters during a marriage that ended in divorce.

They survive him, as do a brother, Renzo, and six grandchildren.

In a 2016 interview with the Turin daily La Stampa, Mr. Morandi said that after reading Richard Bach’s 1970 best seller, “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” he “took flight,” discovering the sea. In 1989, he said, he decided that he was “tired of society and seeking a different life.” He bought a catamaran with some friends, with the idea of sailing to Polynesia.

To raise money, they scouted locations for charter cruises and came across Budelli. There they met Budelli’s caretaker, who had recently decided to leave. He offered them his job, and Mr. Morandi took it. He was paid at first, but he stayed on even after he was no longer receiving a salary; he then lived off his teacher’s pension. On rare occasions he returned to Modena for short holidays to visit his family.

At one point he read a study by the University of Sassari showing that Budelli’s flora and fauna were similar to those of the Polynesian islands he had once hoped to reach. “It was almost as though Budelli wanted me, made sure I got here, to the only beach in the whole Mediterranean Sea, which is almost similar in composition to the islands where I wanted to go,” he said in a 2016 interview with the photographer Claudio Muzzetto.

After Mr. Morandi’s death, Margherita Guerra, one of his many thousands of followers on social media, wrote: “Safe travels. Finally no one will ever be able to send you away from your beloved island.”

Related Topics:Budelli (Italy)Conservation of Resources Deaths (Obituaries)Featured islands Mauro (1939-2025)Morandi Sardinia (Italy)

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Lifestyle

A Look at Trump’s Inauguration Weekend Parties: Guests, Donors and Details

Published

4 hours ago

January 20, 2025

Press Room

A Look at Trump’s Inauguration Weekend Parties: Guests, Donors and Details

Late Sunday night, just hours before Donald J. Trump would be sworn in as America’s 47th president, his fans showed up ready to party in the president-elect’s honor.

Many arrived after 10 p.m. in black cars and vans that drove through the roads around the White House, which are otherwise closed to vehicle traffic ahead of the inauguration.

An earlier snowstorm had passed, but the temperatures remained frigid, with black ice covering the ground. The weather had already dashed the dreams of too many donors, who spent the weekend bothering Trump officials with the hopes of seeing the inauguration up-close at the Capitol Rotunda rather than being relegated to the suites of the Capital One Arena, no matter how much booze or food would be there.

Since Mr. Trump’s win in November, his supporters from Silicon Valley and beyond have opened their bank accounts to him. Inauguration weekend was no different, with donors spending millions for the opportunity to jump from ballrooms to yachts to rooftops with views of the White House for lavish events.

Billionaires seen around Washington over the weekend included Miriam Adelson, the casino magnate and widow of Sheldon Adelson; Paul Singer, the hedge fund titan who is among the most influential Republican donors in the country; Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, who spent days party-hopping as part of his attempt to win a place in Mr. Trump’s orbit; and Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google who eight years ago around this time was unexpectedly showing up at protests against Mr. Trump’s travel ban on some Muslim countries.

This year? He was unexpectedly showing up at Trump inauguration parties.

Inaugural weekends, after all, are a time-honored tradition for major donors who come to pay respects and make amends, with packages for a suite of events going for about $1 million. This year, the mood felt jubilant, with little of the unease of the last time Mr. Trump came to Washington when major corporations seemed nervous about the impacts of his administration.

The entire weekend had this Silicon Valley inflection, based on interviews and attendance at a half-dozen events. Tech companies hosted many of the biggest parties and drew assorted technorati.

At the Crypto Ball — a pro-Trump event hosted by the cryptocurrency industry, held Friday evening — Snoop Dogg performed Bob Marley’s hit “Everything’s Gonna Be All Right” for incoming administration officials from Silicon Valley and top cryptocurrency investors, some of whom, despite their wealth, waited in long lines in the cold to get inside the auditorium.

The same night, a block away, the town’s power players took center stage at a steakhouse in downtown Washington. Brian Ballard — one of the top lobbyists likely to cash in on the return to power — reveled in the adulation, fielding introductions to future clients.

The next night, Peter Thiel, once a close supporter of Mr. Trump’s, opened his mansion to figures including Mr. Zuckerberg, JD Vance, and Donald Trump Jr.

On Sunday afternoon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. braved an afternoon sleet storm to trek to The Ned, a member’s club in downtown Washington, not yet open, for a private party thrown by the co-hosts of the podcast “All-In,” a popular conservative podcast that explores tech, politics, and economics hosted by venture capitalists.

Many in Silicon Valley decided to close out the weekend on Sunday at a party hosted by X, Uber, and the Free Press, the online media company founded by the former New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss.

Held at the Riggs Hotel, it felt full of the heady energy of a rehearsal dinner. Many of Mr. Kennedy’s seven adult children took over a back room where servers passed them trays of wine and security kept them away from prying eyes.

“There are a lot of us,” said Kyra Kennedy, his youngest daughter, who is a model and fashion designer in Milan. “It’s tough to get us all together in the same room, so this is really special.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Thiel, Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor picked by President-elect Trump to the be the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Bret Baier, the Fox News anchor, roamed the main room flanked with marble columns and hanging chandeliers, finding friends in the crowds.

Other guests included Liz Truss, the former British prime minister; John Barrasso, the senator from Wyoming; Jacob Helberg, an incoming administration official; and Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami.

There was a full bar in addition to a separate martini bar. Servers passed around snacks like shrimp rolls and tuna rice cakes prepared by the Michelin-starred chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who has a restaurant in the Trump Tower in Manhattan.

The country star Dierks Bentley performed for the crowd, standing on the bar for an enthusiastic rendition of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

“It was so good, so good,” said Conor McGregor, the U.F.C. boxer, who watched the performance. He was swarmed by fans all night, his popularity seemingly unscathed despite his being held liable for sexual assault in November and the fact that he is facing a new lawsuit.

Some guests arrived in black-tie attire, having come from a candlelight dinner hosted by Mr. Trump at the nearby National Building Museum (tickets started at $250,000) or the Turning Point Inaugural Ball at the Salamander Hotel, where the Village People performed. Linda Yaccarino, the chief executive of X, was wearing a gown inspired by vintage Dior made by a close friend’s son.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas arrived around 11:30 p.m., and Mr. Brin, the co-founder of Google, stopped by just after midnight.

Mr. Musk consumed much of the night’s attention with the constant speculation of whether he would show up at all at a party hosted by his own company. He did not, although several family members, including his mother, Maye, brother Kimbal, and his wealth manager, Jared Birchall, were in the crowd, as were several of his closest friends.

Joanna Coles, the chief content officer at the Daily Beast, said the weekend reminded her a little of a television show.

“All the characters left from the first season, and now we have a whole new plot of characters,” she said, adding: “And there are going to be plot twists.”

Lifestyle

'Survivor's guilt' is real right now in L.A.

Published

5 hours ago

January 20, 2025

Press Room

'Survivor's guilt' is real right now in L.A.

Los Angeles is a place that feels physically and emotionally fractured these days. For tens of thousands who are displaced, routine is a near impossibility. Others carry on with little visible change to their daily life.

Yet that doesn’t mean there isn’t a heavy inner struggle.

How do you grasp the fact that a sizable part of our city has been decimated, ravaged and left heartbroken while a significant majority remains untouched?

It is a confusing and paralyzing time, and it is, above all else, unfair. Smoke and ash are in the air, and so is survivor’s guilt, leaving many unsure how to act or grieve.

“Everything you say feels like it’s the wrong thing to say,” says Shannon Hunt, 54. Her central Altadena home is still standing while those nearby are not. An arts teacher, her place of work, Aveson School of Leaders, is gone.

“Every time I cry, every time I feel broken, I think I don’t deserve that, because someone else has it worse,” Hunt says. “That’s stupid, intellectually. I understand that’s not right, but it’s how you feel, because these other people have no baby pictures and no Christmas ornaments and they are people that I love. How can I complain?”

Survivor’s guilt, experts caution, will for many be the new normal. I have felt it, as a single thought has jolted my mind over the last two weeks when I’ve left my place: I don’t deserve this. I’ve attempted to go to spaces I frequent for solace but have left, as comfort and enjoyment, quite frankly, felt inappropriate in this moment.

It actually shows that you have a great deal of empathy. Most of us don’t want to express our suffering when others have suffered more because we don’t want them to feel bad. So it says something about us if we’re feeling survivor’s guilt. It says we care about people a lot.

— Chris Tickner, co-owner of Pasadena’s California Integrative Therapy

“You’ve hit the nail on the head there,” says Mary-Frances O’Connor, grief researcher and author of the book “The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn From Love and Loss.” “Survivor’s guilt is, in many ways, ‘I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve to have been spared.’”

O’Connor brings up a concept of “shattered assumptions.” The term, she says, “is something we use a lot in loss and trauma research” and deals with our everyday beliefs — how life, the world and people generally work.

“Events, like loss and trauma, shatter those assumptions,” O’Connor says. “It’s not that we never develop new ways of thinking about the world, it’s that it takes time to address questions like, ‘What do I deserve?’ The process of having to pause and consider those questions we didn’t have to do before, because there was no entire Los Angeles neighborhood burning down.”

Acknowledge what you’re feeling

Chris Tickner and and Andrea-Marie Stark are romantic and professional partners, operating Pasadena’s California Integrative Therapy. They’re also Altadena residents whose home survived despite, Tickner says, everything surrounding it being devastated. As therapists, they now find themselves in an odd position, attempting to process their grief and survivor’s guilt while doing the same with their clients.

First step, Tickner says, is to normalize it.

“It actually shows that you have a great deal of empathy,” Tickner says. “Most of us don’t want to express our suffering when others have suffered more because we don’t want them to feel bad. So it says something about us if we’re feeling survivor’s guilt. It says we care about people a lot, so much so that we’re willing to be stoic and not express ourselves.”

To begin to process survivor’s guilt, it helps, experts say, to not only be vulnerable but to acknowledge and do away with our instinct to concoct a class system of suffering. The initial step to take is just to better understand what is happening.

The L.A. wildfires are an impossible-to-comprehend catastrophe, and whether you were heavily affected or relatively unscathed, a sense of survivor’s guilt is to be expected. All of us, after all, are feeling loss given our communities and our city will be irrevocably changed. And yet our inclination is to carry on and be quiet. A friend even warned me against writing this story, wondering if it was “problematic” to admit I was struggling when I was not displaced.

“The reality is that so much tragedy is existing all the time,” says Jessica Leader, a licensed marriage and family therapist with L.A.’s Root to Rise Therapy. “Burying our heads in the sand saying, ‘Just focus on me,’ I don’t think is the right approach.”

The reality is that so much tragedy is existing all the time. Burying our heads in the sand saying, ‘Just focus on me,’ I don’t think is the right approach.

— Jessica Leader, a licensed marriage and family therapist with L.A’s Root to Rise Therapy

For one, it’s isolating. “Every single person, no matter what they’ve experienced, has started their session by saying, ‘I’m so lucky. I don’t have a right to complain,’” Leader says. “That is really rattling around in my brain. The collective experience right now — survivor’s guilt is seeping into every conversation that we’re having. It’s normal. But it’s also paralyzing.”

Turn your attention outward

Survivor’s guilt, says Diana Winston, director of Mindfulness Education at the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, is a “constellation of feelings” — “despair, hopelessness, guilt, shame.” The longer we sit with them, especially shame, the more reticent we can become to discuss them. Winston recommends a simple mindfulness trick called the RAIN method, an acronym that stands for “recognize, allow, investigate and nurture.”

Consider it, in a way, as a beginner’s guide to meditation. “I think people, without a mindfulness background, they can work a little bit with RAIN,” Winston says. “‘This is what I’m feeling, and it’s OK to have this feeling. It makes my stomach clench and I can breathe and feel a little bit better.’ Anyone with a little self-awareness can do that.”

Just take a moment to focus intently on the last aspect, “nurture.” “A lot of people are feeling guilt, fear and panic, and what we can do is turn our attention out toward other people,” Winston says. “It tends to help people not be lost in their own reactivity.”

An exercise like RAIN also can help us articulate and share our emotions, which is integral. Don’t bottle them up. That can lead us into a nihilistic place of feeling as if nothing matters, or accelerate our grief to the point it becomes a part of our identity. Dwelling on things, Leader says, can inspire a resistance to letting go, of feeling guilty if we are not living in our memories daily.

O’Connor says to think of what grief researchers refer to as the “dual process model.”

“When we’re grieving, there’s loss and restoration to deal with,” O’Connor says. “Restoration can be reaching out and helping our neighbors. We need a moment to have a drink and cry and talk with a person who gives us a hug. The key to mental health is being able to do both, to go back and forth between the building and the remembering. People who adapt most resiliently are the ones who are able to do both.”

Take the smallest possible step toward comfort

It’s also important to acknowledge what we’re capable of in this moment.

“There needs to be a caveat,” Tickner says. “Practicing mindfulness right now is really hard.”

Hunt says friends have recommended she take a moment to herself. It’s just not possible. “A friend was like, ‘I have a pass to a spa day. Maybe you can take it and relax.’ I said, ‘That sounds awesome, but I do not think I can do it.’ I would just start bawling on the table. I can’t imagine sitting in a hot tub. My brain is spinning. That kind of self-care would not work for me right now.”

Restoration can be reaching out and helping our neighbors. We need a moment to have a drink and cry and talk with a person who gives us a hug.

— Mary-Frances O’Connor, grief researcher and author

In such instances, says California Integrative Therapy’s Stark, simplify it. “Talking to friends, talking about how you feel, writing it down, making art, listening to music,” Stark says. Then, of course, get out and be a part of the community. Volunteering can be especially comforting.

And when friends offer help, accept it.

“We’re staying at a friend’s right now,” Stark says, “and their neighbors came over and they said, ‘We made too much pasta. Do you want some?’ And I started to say, ‘No, no, no, I can’t take.’ Then I heard myself say, ‘You have to accept. It’s just pasta.’ So I said yes, and they came over with the beautiful ziti and it was warm and lovely. And it made me feel so much better, even though I was in terror.

“So please,” Stark says, “say yes to anything people offer you.”

Say yes, write, put on music and volunteer if you can — easy tips, says Stark, but ones with long-term health benefits.

“Every time you do a practice like that, you’re literally opening up a new neuronal pattern in your brain that expands your selfhood, your ability and that wonderful word we use called ‘resilience.’”

Lifestyle

Olympic Medals From Paris Games Are Falling Apart. LVMH Has Fallen Silent.

Published

12 hours ago

January 20, 2025

Press Room

Olympic Medals From Paris Games Are Falling Apart. LVMH Has Fallen Silent.

Rarely in Olympic history had a single company been as ubiquitous as LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the luxury goods empire owned by France’s richest family.

As the Paris Olympics’ biggest corporate sponsor, LVMH was everywhere. Its Moët & Chandon champagne flowed in V.I.P. suites. French athletes were clothed by LVMH’s Berluti fashion house. And, in contravention of at least the spirit of the Olympic charter, Louis Vuitton luggage was trotted out during the opening ceremony and seen by more than one billion people worldwide.

But its most significant role involved the Olympic medals, which were designed by Chaumet, a luxury jewelry and watch maker and part of the LVMH group. Gold, silver and bronze — the very best athletes would take them back home as mementos of their feats at the Paris Games.

Now those medals are falling apart — and LVMH has fallen silent.

In just over 100 days since the Olympics closed, more than 100 athletes have asked for their crumbling medals to be replaced. Last month, Clement Secchi and Yohann Ndoye-Brouard, French swimmers, showed their flaking medals on social media. “Crocodile skin,” Mr. Secchi wrote.

Nick Itkin, a U.S. Olympic foil fencer, said his bronze medal started to deteriorate a few days after the Olympics. “But after like a few weeks, it got more noticeable,” he said, adding that he planned to ask for a replacement.

Medals have had to be replaced in other Olympics — notably in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. But in no previous Olympics has a company stamped its brand credentials so prominently.

The issue seems to be most acute with the bronze medals, problems for which athletes first started flagging shortly after receiving them.

The International Olympic Committee has apologized and says it will find replacements. Monnaie de Paris, the French mint, which produced the medals, has so far taken responsibility, blaming the problem on a technical issue related to varnish.

And LVMH has been happy to let the other organizations do the talking. A spokesman for the company said because it did not make the medals and is not responsible for them, LVMH has no comment.

But in the buildup to the Games, and during the event itself, LVMH was showing off the roles of its expert artisans in crafting the medals. On the second floor of a club it created, just a few yards from the Élysée Palace, the residence of the French president, designers from Chaumet proudly explained the yearlong project to design the medals in secrecy. At the heart of each was a piece of the Eiffel Tower.

Chaumet had never previously designed a sporting medal, and of the three they were asked to make, the bronze was the trickiest.

“It’s the most difficult because it’s the most delicate,” Philippe Bergamini, one of Chaumet’s longest serving jewelry designers, told The New York Times at the time.

The company tweaked the designs hundreds of times until a special committee of athletes and Olympic officials were in agreement. Designers then joined forces with the mint, a French institution that has produced money and other precious objects since the Middle Ages.

Each medal took 15 days to complete, from stamping out the design to dipping it in gold, bronze and silver and then finishing it with a coat of varnish.

So when one athlete posted photos of his bronze medal rusting last August, just weeks after the Games, the mint began an internal inquiry to “understand the circumstances and cause of the damage,” the organization said in a statement.

The mint discovered that the varnish used to prevent oxidation was defective. Its varnish recipe is a trade secret, but the coating was weakened after the mint changed it to conform to recent European Union regulations banning the use of chromium trioxide, a toxic chemical used to prevent metal from rusting, according to La Lettre, a French industry newspaper.

A spokeswoman declined to confirm the report, but said in a statement that the mint “has modified the varnish and optimized its manufacturing process to make it more resistant to certain uses observed of the medals by athletes.”

Faced with a deluge of deteriorating medals, the International Olympic Committee has vowed to find replacements. “Damaged medals will be systematically replaced by the Monnaie de Paris and engraved in an identical way to the originals,” it said in a statement.

For LVMH, the Olympics were a coming-out party. It was a major foray into sports, and a moment to promote the company in a way that it had previously avoided, preferring instead to showcase its individual brands. .

“Obviously because it’s the medal, it’s super high profile and everyone is asking the question how does this happen and especially coming from LVMH, whose raison d’être is quality and precision,” said Michael Payne, who devised the I.O.C.’s original marketing strategy.