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M ondadori Sartogo is the ultimate guide into Cabana's rarifi ed world. As the scion of a wealthy and infl uential Italian family dynasty that includes the publishing empire Gruppo Mondadori and home appliances manufacturer Zanussi, she was born into the Cabana lifestyle. Her late father, Leonardo Mondadori, was a collector of ancient Roman mosaics and Old Master Impressionist paintings. Growing up in Italy surrounded by those possessions gave her a passion for art history, she says. She and her father frequently traveled to New York, where they stayed at an apartment at The Carlyle hotel and dined with Tom Wolfe and Jacqueline Kennedy. Renzo Mongiardino, who decorated The Carlyle's sumptuous restaurant, also decorated the family home in Milan where her mother, Paola, still lives. Like any globetrotting tastemaker, Mondadori Sartogo is also a lifestyle brand. The Cabana website sells her collection of furnishings, dinnerware, glassware, tabletop, linens, silk scarves, and jeweled gold cuffs. At Cabana, she calls on some of the world's top photographers, including François Halard and Miguel Flores- Vianna, to capture her exclusive orbit. The book opens with its fi rst magazine issue from Spring 2014, with a leafy cover in grisaille by Pierre Frey. The author — it's never clear who it is — is on the search for the elusive Lavender Cross, a writer of enchanting books. Five years elapse, then fi nally an email arrives in 2011 from a mysterious man named Luc, who sets up tea with Cross at her home in Milan. While waiting for Cross, the author wanders the rambling, book-fi lled house alone, summoning courage with a swig from a pocketed fl ask: "Her home. Wallpaper, coat stand, one straw hat, a statue of a spotted dog, the smell of something (lemongrass?), a hall of blood- red carpet. The kind of place that might belong to someone fond of hunting." Words are spare and evocative at Cabana, leaving ample room for rich imagery. We're treated to an impossibly charming 17th-century Jacobean estate in the Cotswolds; the watercolor drawings of Teddy Millington-Drake's travels to India and Patmos; fl ower- and tile-fi lled rooms in Tangier and Santo Domingo; lavish estates in Palermo and Lisbon; an uninhabited house in Algiers with crumbling stucco, falling-down rusted balustrades, broken colonnades, and a wildly overgrown parterre. Inside, it's frozen in time, like the pages of Cabana, with rooms layered in antique carpets, patterned textiles, wallpapers, tiles, and painted furnishings. Detail in Palazzo Grosso, Turin, Italy The Notting Hill fl at of London antiques dealer Peter Hone A magnifi cient room in Palermo Martina Mondadori Sartogo (continued from page 78) MIDDLE LEFT PHOTO OTTAVIA CASAGRANDE; MIDDLE RIGHT PHOTO TINKO CZETWERTYNSKI; BOTTOM PHOTO GUIDO TARONI