Above: prince Alessandrojacopo Boncompagni Ludovisi (left) and his father Paolo. You can view the portrait and other images from the prince’s life on the Tenuta di Fiorano website.

The Italian wine world mourns the loss of one of its brightest figures this month: prince Alessandrojacopo Boncompagni Ludovisi, who died last week after battling a short illness according to mainstream media reports. He was 53.

American wine professionals and restaurateurs knew him because of the famous wines he and his family produced just south of Rome along the Appian Way.

But in the Italian capital, where he lived on Piazza Spagna, he was widely known as the prince gallerist, a collector of modern and contemporary art, custodian of his family’s sprawling collection of Renaissance, baroque, and mannerist paintings. He regularly mounted shows by top artists. And he ran an arts and wine educational program led by leading Italian wine writer and intellectual Armando Castgano.

Some may remember a heady time in the Italian wine business, in the first decade of this century, when aged white wines from the Tenuta di Fiorano were sold for astronomical sums in New York City. In his weekly Times column, Eric Asimov featured the library releases, including his visit at the winery and farm built by Alessandrojacopo’s uncle Alberico.

At the time, one of the city’s leading wine mavens, Charles Scicolone, would openly remark that yes, the white wines were very good. But the reds, he said, were the wines that landed Fiorano among the world’s greatest. He later organized a dinner, attended by Eric and me among others, where we tasted a vertical flight of astounding Bordeaux blends.

Many years later I would host the prince at Rossoblu in Los Angeles where I was wine director. What an incredible night, tasting back into the early 80s with the prince!

He had flown to California just for our sold-out event. I asked what he planned to do before returning to Rome. I’m going to view a portrait of one of my ancestors at the Getty, he said.

It turned out to be Pope Gregory XIII, the same one that gave us the Gregorian calendar.

Sit tibi terra levis Alexander Iacobe.

Below: the estate lies adjacent to one of the most beautifully maintained stretches of the Appian Way. It can’t be seen in the photo but it stands just to the right of the road. Note the name of the crossroad: Fiornello (after Fiorano).

Happy holidays 2025, everyone! Here’s a little slideshow from our year, accompanied by our 2025 Christmas song! Georgia, Lila Jane, Tracie and I are all looking forward to the season with family and friends. Wishing everyone a wonderful end of the school year and a very merry Christmas!

The loss of your mother, as I’ve learned, is a life-changing, soul-searching epochal event in life.

It’s been only natural for me to turn to music, literature, and art to try to make sense of the unimaginable — she’s gone.

A word, an ancient neologism, kept coming to mind: trasumanar.

It was coined by Dante in his “Paradiso.” It means to transcend the human, to transhumanate as it were, to pass beyond the state of being human.

In the Paradise, Dante describes his sensation after encountering Beatrice, his earthly love and spiritual guide. He evokes the Greek myth of Glaucus, the human fisherman made immortal.

Trasumanar significar per verba/non si poria, writes Dante, transcending the human cannot be described with words. Look to the example of Glaucus to understand such transformation.

Pasolini used the lemma in the title of his last poetry collection, Transumanar e organizzare (1971), transcend the human and organize.

He juxtaposes transcendence into the divine with the earthly task of political activism. Both are necessary elements of life, one might infer.

I’ve been reading Pasolini’s book. The poems are dense, sometimes surprisingly playful, sometimes overly erudite for some readers; other times they are profound and offer harsh insights into human nature. They are always beautiful, always subversive.

For readers who don’t speak Italian, I highly recommend my friend Stephen Sartarelli’s Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini (University of Chicago).

See also this review of Stephen’s book in the Nation. It gives an overview of Pasolini’s life and work, warts and all.

There are also a number of recent translations of Dante’s Paradiso.

The book in the photo above is a first edition that I recently obtained (another story in itself).

I’ve sought to express in words how I perceive, how I feel my mother’s passing. Alas, transcending the human is not something that can be described in words. But I will continue reading and writing as I search, however endlessly and hopelessly, for meaning in her death.

Thanks for being here and letting me share my grief.

On Friday of last week, my brothers and I buried my mother in San Diego.

When the service was over, we decided to take the girls to a Chick Fil-a for a comfort-food meal.

And then, the most awful day in my life got even worse: the employees at the restaurant Jew-heckled me in front of my wife and daughters.

I wrote about the experience today for the Houston Press. Click here to read the story.

On any other day, I would have confronted the Chick Fil-a employees for what they had done. But I could not do that on the day that we laid my mother to rest.

We used the incident as a teachable moment for the girls: our black and brown sisters and brothers have to navigate these awful situations on a daily basis, we told them. We just got a little taste of what that feels like.

It felt impossible to suppress my anger but it was what I had to do that day.

Read about what happened and how Chick Fil-a responded to the complaint.

Today, a yahrzeit candle burns on our kitchen table. G-d bless the memory of my mother.