Olga Polizzi says with a wry smile that she has always been defined in relation to her famous family – the Forte hotel dynasty. As a young woman, she was known as the daughter of patriarch Charles, who founded the empire. After that, she was the sister of Rocco Forte, who runs the luxury hotel group of that name, where she is head of design and a significant investor.
More recently, her identity is as the mother of Alex Polizzi, of Channel 5 TV series The Hotel Inspector.
‘I was my father’s daughter, then my brother’s sister and now I am my daughter’s mother,’ she laughs.
Feminists might object to a woman being seen primarily through her relationship to others. But Polizzi is such a powerful force she can afford to take it lightly. She is director of design and deputy chair of Rocco Forte Hotels, which she helped create.
She also has three hotels of her own: the Tresanton in Cornwall, the Endsleigh in Dartmoor, Devon, and The Star, in Alfriston, East Sussex, near her home.
All this, as she approaches her 80th birthday – she exudes the vitality of a much younger woman.
Dynasty: Olga Polizzi says that she has always been defined in relation to her famous family
Charles Forte, who died in 2007 aged 98, emigrated to the UK as a child but remained a traditional Italian male.
It seems never to have entered his head that he could have chosen a daughter to succeed him. He made Rocco chief executive of the Forte Group, then a FTSE 100 company, in 1983 and handed the chairmanship to his son a decade later.
Did Polizzi ever wish she had been given the chance?
‘Well, not really,’ she says. ‘I was never brought up like that and it wasn’t on offer. It was Rocco and five sisters, so it was always the little prince. Rocco was always meant to follow on.
‘We daughters were going to marry someone and they were going to look after us, that was it.’
She did get married, in 1966, to Count Alessandro Polizzi, an Italian marquess, and the couple had two daughters, Alex and Charlotte. But in 1980 he died. ‘I had these two small daughters and their father was killed in a car crash,’ she says. ‘Then my father said… you’ve got to work.’
She joined the family business, on the building and design side.
In the 1990s, she and her brother found themselves in the throes of a hostile takeover. Losing the family business to the predatory Granada leisure and TV group riles Polizzi even now, as it does Rocco.
‘It was ghastly, I was so upset and so angry. It still rankles. I hated them,’ she says, adding of the late boss of Granada who led the bid: ‘I did an Italian incantation against Gerry Robinson.’
Granada no longer exists, but her family business lives on in Rocco Forte Hotels, founded in the aftermath. Its high-end properties include Brown’s in London’s Mayfair, where I meet Polizzi, The Balmoral in Edinburgh and the Hotel de Russie in Rome.
Family firms like theirs, she says, ‘is how Italy keeps going’.
‘The country is always nearly bust but these businesses carry on,’ she says. ‘Would the UK be stronger if there were more family firms? Yes, I really think so.’ Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni is, in Polizzi’s view, ‘the only good leader in Europe’. As for British politics, she says: ‘I was cross with the Conservatives, but I am even more cross with this lot.’
Labour, she says, is ‘kicking business to death’ with the increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions. And Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ decision to scrap the winter fuel allowance for pensioners strikes her as insane.
‘I was getting it – I pay a lot of tax so it was quite nice – but I would have been very happy to send it back,’ she says. But of those who need it, she adds: ‘To take it away from other people is just mad. Every Labour government has been a disaster and they have always left us on our knees.’
The strength of her bond with Rocco was forged in childhood, when, as the two eldest, they were often thrown together.
‘I sometimes have different ideas from Rocco, but I know who’s the boss,’ she says. ‘I trust my brother absolutely and I bend over backwards to help him.’
Do they disagree on style?
‘On the whole, we have the same taste though he is a bit more glitzy,’ she says. Her design credo is to combine luxury with comfort and a sense of place. Not for her the formulaic hotel chains, where rooms are the same anywhere in the world.
‘I want people to wake up in our hotel in Florence and know they are in Florence. I try to use local artisans and materials,’ she says. ‘Everyone is copying us in terms of sense of place.’
How does she reconcile retaining individuality with creating an atmosphere that is identifiably Rocco Forte?
‘We want to keep the names of the hotels, because some are famous,’ she says. ‘Subliminally, I try to put in RF on the towels and bits and pieces, but it probably isn’t enough.
‘Rocco, because he is recognised a lot, doesn’t believe people don’t know all the hotels are ours. It matters, because if people like one, they will want to stay in another Rocco Forte.’ There are openings planned in Milan, Naples and Sicily.
Business was always part of family life. Polizzi says: ‘When my father came back in the evening, he would put his finger on the front bell and not take it off until the door was open. We would hear ring, ring, ring and would have to rush downstairs to greet him.
‘When we were a certain age we would have dinner with him and talk business. There was always a mass of people around him. He always had acolytes, everywhere.’
She is less gregarious than her father or second husband, the writer Sir William Shawcross, whom she married in 1993. She says: ‘William is very much a people person. I am not, though I don’t want to use the word shy because it is a bit stupid at my age.’
She would rather not draw attention to her approaching 80th. Like Rocco, who is slightly older, and was doing triathlons into his 60s, the years have been kind. ‘We do have a lot of energy,’ she muses.
As for retirement: ‘I’ve got a lovely family and a lovely husband, but I have never been a home bod. I’m so used to getting up and going to work. I’m just not a lady who lunches.
‘Now I am older I would like to have more days off, but somehow or other it doesn’t happen.’
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