Attilio Simonetti, Roman painter and antique dealer, was one of the most representative figures of the Italian art world during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

Born in the first half of the nineteenth century, in a papalist Rome that still lived closed off in its own past, he experienced the city’s rebirth as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy and was a leading figure in the style revolution during Umberto I’s reign and the more profound one of the Belle Époque that was to transform the whole world.

The meeting with the great Catalan painter, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal, shaped his destiny.

From the first ten years spent with the latter in the studio at Palazzo Altemps, where he cultivated his art and began his true life as a dealer, to Palazzo Simonetti in Rome’s Via Vittoria Colonna (which he bought from Prince Baldassare Odescalchi), his work and his professional success followed a constantly upward trajectory.

He became an artist enjoying international recognition and his clients included members of the Italian Royal Family, the Rothschilds and John Taylor Johnston, one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

After he devoted himself to his Gallery as a dealer, figures such as John Pierpoint Morgan and Lord Waldorf Astor numbered among his clients.

The Roman Carnival saw him inspiring and featuring in events in which his collections of antique clothes found their rightful place.

His was a long, rich and intense life guided by a great artistic sensitivity but also by a singular talent for business.