House Of Gucci Today
The trial was a theater of the absurd. Patrizia arrived in full Gucci regalia: a silk shirt, dark glasses, and the iconic horsebit loafers. When asked why she didn’t just hire a private investigator or a lawyer, she scoffed. “My eyesight is not good. I did not want to miss.” She famously declared, “I’d rather cry in a Rolls-Royce than be happy on a bicycle.”
“You’re the one who doesn’t want to be a Gucci,” she purred, sliding into his orbit at a party. He flinched, caught. “I’d rather be an architect,” he admitted. She tilted her head, a panther studying a lamb. “And I’d rather be a star. We both want what we’re not.”
The legal battle was a war of attrition. Maurizio, now controlled by a new, cooler woman named Paola Franchi, wanted out. Patrizia wanted everything else. The penthouse. The millions. The title. In a Milanese courtroom, she raged, “He reduced me to the key, the cooker, the wife! I am Patrizia Reggiani! I do not cook!”
In prison, she was allowed one luxury: her pet ferret, Bambi. She kept a tidy cell, studied law, and refused to ever admit regret. “It wasn’t a great success,” she said of the murder, “but the price was right.” House of Gucci
When she was released early for good behavior in 2016, an Italian journalist asked her why she didn’t pull the trigger herself.
At first, the whispers were soft. “Your uncle Aldo is old,” she’d murmur, brushing a hand through Maurizio’s hair. “He treats you like a clerk.” Then, louder: “You have the blood. The name. Why do you only have the crumbs?”
Patrizia Reggiani, the last true Lady Gucci, flicked a piece of lint off her vintage jacket and smiled a smile as cold as a tombstone. The trial was a theater of the absurd
Maurizio, weak-willed and haunted by his father’s ghost, listened. The shy architect was slowly buried under the weight of his wife’s ambition. With Patrizia as his strategist, he staged a coup. He allied with a shady financier named Pina Auriemma—a woman who knew where every skeleton was buried—and ousted Aldo. Then he turned on his own cousin, Paolo, the clown prince of the family whose disastrous designs were only matched by his pathetic desperation for approval.
The jury was not charmed. They called her “the Black Widow.” She was sentenced to 29 years.
She didn’t do it herself. A queen does not wield the knife. She found her old friend, Pina Auriemma, who found a man—a hitman named Ivano Savioni, who worked at a pizzeria and killed for the price of a used Fiat. The payment was 360,000 Swiss francs. Patrizia wrote a check. In her diary, she simply noted: “Paris. Size 5.” The code for the deed. “My eyesight is not good
Milan, 1978. The air in the Gucci boutique on Via Montenapoleone smelled of opulence: rich leather, cold champagne, and the faint, powdery whisper of wealth. It was here that Patrizia Reggiani, a woman with eyes like cut glass and a laugh that filled every corner, first saw the man who would be her ruin.
March 27, 1995. Maurizio arrived at his Milan office, a glass-and-brass palace of his own making. He was carrying a music box for Paola. The morning light was pale, indifferent. As he climbed the three steps to the entrance, Savioni walked up behind him, calm as a man ordering a coffee.
“Signore Gucci,” the board members would say, looking at Maurizio. But everyone knew who really held the gavel. Patrizia sat behind a one-way mirror in the hallway, smoking a long cigarette, listening. She chose the fabrics. She suggested the firings. She was the Lady Gucci , and she wore the title like a crown of thorns.