Alberto Bolaffi: international collector dies at 89

The 1938 Racial Laws that stripped Italian Jews of their civil rights were a rude awakening and made him realise that being a fascist was incompatible with being a Jew. In 1940 his shop was shut and Giulio tried to stay under the radar, while doing all he could to help other Jews in more straitened circumstances.

His siblings saw no way out and left the country. Instead, this deeply conservative man, the eponymous middle-class businessman took to the mountains and became a partisan.

Giulio Bolaffi became commander ‘Aldo Laghi’ that led the Stellina brigade (after his daughter’s nickname) and successfully fought the fascists in Val di Susa.

His wife was already seriously ill so the children were sent to shelter in the mountains accompanied by Miss Gabriella Foà, their faithful nanny. Little Alberto could not understand why he had to call her ‘aunt’ and would get a slap every time he called her ‘Miss Foa’ instead. It was the children’s first experience of hardship and, many years later Alberto would recall the “free and delicious” greens he used to pluck from the fields with a small knife. Once the fascists raided the farm where they were hiding but Miss Foà managed to mislead them.

For two years the children had no contact with their father. Alberto recalled: “I knew my father relatively little; in the two years before the Liberation he almost disappeared. I saw him again dressed in partisan attire. The first thing I asked him was to let me fire his machine gun." Giulio said no.

With the war over and his mother’s health rapidly declining, Alberto was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, where he was taunted as ‘sale Juif’ (‘dirty Jew’) and ‘sale Italien’ (‘dirty Italian’.) Later on he enrolled at Turin University to study economics but dropped out before graduating. His dream was to join the Air Force and he did qualify as a pilot but ultimately gave in to his father’s pressure and joined the family business.

That business was evolving: besides reopening the Turin shop in 1946, Giulio had dipped a toe into publishing (giving some of his fellow partisans jobs in his new venture). Just after the end of the war he launched La Settimana nel Mondo, Italy’s first weekly current affairs magazine – true to form, it included a section on philately.

But it was Alberto’s stroke of genius that radically changed the company’s direction. He understood that most people collect something, or have hobbies and want to know all they can about their passion. He realised that collecting could be a gold mine and soon there were Bolaffi publications for jewellery, antiques, watches, yachts and, of course, art. Alberto was also the first to realise that catalogues are fundamental to collecting and those he published were works of art, curated by the top specialists in their fields.

Alberto had literally invented a new branch of publishing dedicated to collecting, which was soon imitated all over the world.

Bolaffi Arte magazine, one of his greatest successes, could only have been conceived by someone with a collector’s heart: every cover was specially designed by a well known artist, and came with a beautiful print that could be framed. Five thousand prints, each hand-signed by the artist, were gifted to subscribers. The result was an amazing collection of autographs by hundreds of great artists such as de Chirico, Warhol, Miró, Henry Moore, Dalí, Beuys, Rauschenberg, Man Ray, and so on. Its success was such that they had to have a repeat cover.

The international Catalogue of Modern Art in 1976 was another revolutionary idea. Reputed to be the first book in the world conceived and printed with a computer, it listed prices fetched at international public auctions as well as photographs of the artworks sold.

Alberto also noticed the growing trend towards leisure and fun: the result was another first when in 1973 he launched the colourful Weekend magazine dedicated to travel and leisure.

Alberto never stopped being a collector himself and although he never managed to own the famous 1840 Penny Black (but had the sketch on which it was based), he was one of the owners of the 214 cosmograms, envelopes, and space stamps entrusted to the astronauts of Apollo 11, which landed man on the Moon in 1969.

Under his leadership the company kept expanding: in 1986 he founded the Collector Club, the company’s mail order sector, and in 1990, the auction house that dealt with precious objects, important paintings, posters, historic coins, plus memorabilia from the history of the world, and invaluable writings by Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin.

In 2000 he paved the way for philography, the collecting of documents that trace the history of the written word and created "philographic" collections of merchandise; scarves, ties, and perfumes inspired by writing.

Alberto had described himself as a "circumcised Jew bound to Israel by admiration for the realisation of the principles of freedom and equality” and had cultivated a close relationship with his local Jewish community. Whenever he passed the synagogue of Turin, he always noticed that there was something missing. When he was a boy there had been two Tablets of the Law on the façade, under the big rose window but they had been destroyed in 1942 during a bombing raid. He made it his mission to restore them to exactly how they were. They would be one of his final initiatives.

He would have liked to write his autobiography but he never got round to it. However, he knew what the title should be, he told a friend: “For lack of time I have done too many things but all badly”. Most people would disagree with that.

Alberto Bolaffi’s wife, Nicoletta Cacciatore, died earlier this year. He is survived by his sister Stella, his two sons, Giulio Filippo and Nicola, and two grandchildren, Alberto Leone and Tancredi.

Alberto Bolaffi: born January 6, 1936. Died July 16, 2025