Topazia Alliata

Topazia Alliata (5 September 1913 – 23 November 2015) was an Italian painter, art curator and writer.
Alliata was born in Palermo, the daughter of Prince Enrico Alliata di Villafranca, duke of Salaparuta, while her mother was a former opera singer, Amelia "Sonia" Ortuzar Olivares, the daughter of a Chilean diplomat. After graduating from the Liceo artistico Alliata studied fine arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Palermo, where she was a fellow of Renato Guttuso, who portrayed her is several paintings.
In 1935 she married Fosco Maraini, at the time an unknown scholar, who would later become an important anthropologist. In 1941 they moved in Japan, where in 1943 they were deported in a concentration camp in Nagoya because they had refused to swear allegiance to the Republic of Salò. Released in September 1945, in 1946 they returned in Italy, settling in Bagheria, where Topazia engaged in the family business, the Salaparuta's Crow Wines.
In 1955 the couple split, and Alliata moved to Rome, where she continued her work as a painter. In 1959 she founded the Galleria Topazia Alliata ("Topazia Alliata Gallery") in Trastevere, where she mainly exhibited avant-garde painters.
Alliata was also author of several books, notably Love holidays. Quaderni d'amore e di viaggi, a partly photographic autobiography published in 2014 by Rizzoli.
She died in Rome on November 23, 2015, aged 102 years old. She was the mother of writer Dacia Maraini.