"Isn't it fun?" asks Larry Gagosian, scanning the oval-shaped salon of Rome's Palazzo Barberini. The 62-year-old padrino of the art world has just swept in with his lithe girlfriend, Shala Monroque, to celebrate his latest, greatest triumph: opening the first major American gallery in the Eternal City (near the Spanish Steps, not far from here, in a neoclassical 1920s building that, fittingly enough, used to be a bank). Joining him in this Bernini-designed 16th-century palace are more than 300 members of the international arterati—dealers, artists, and the collectors who buy them—along with the likes of Willem Dafoe, Marc Jacobs, and Sir Bob Geldof for a dinner in honor of the gallery's inaugural exhibition, "Three Notes from Salalah," by Cy Twombly. From above the fray, the winged maidens of a Pietro da Cortona fresco gaze down at the crowd approvingly, as if they're anointing the newest members of the city's patron class, who, like the generations before them, will kick up some dust among the Roman ruins.
If the Twombly show is modest—a triptych of dark-green 8-by-12-foot canvases with trademark white cursive lettering—the party is anything but. When it's finally time to eat, we wind our way, glasses of Gardet Champagne in hand, down the candlelit elliptical stone staircase to the dining rooms on the ground floor, where Gagosianites have covered the red walls with black fabric and hung a disco ball in the foyer. The freewheeling menu has surf (jumbo shrimp wrapped in seaweed), turf (turkey slices in martini glasses), and pasta galore, and soon Valentino, Joseph Kosuth, Miuccia Prada, Francesco Vezzoli, and hedge fund gladiator (and modern-day Medici) Steven Cohen are all conquering the buffet like it's Sparta. The talk, of course, is art, art, and more art, from Gagosian's eyebrow-raising purchase of Jeff Koons's Hanging Heart for $23 million at Sotheby's to theories about his motives for opening an outpost here. "He's come here to buy, not to sell," insists a prominent Gagosian client. "There are a lot of older collectors here in Rome who he'll be buying from."
The real intrigue on the Tiber, though, is Twombly himself, who, despite his reputation as the Thomas Pynchon of the art world, has made a rare appearance tonight. In the flesh, with his chest-high wide-wale corduroys, the 79-year-old Virginia native looks more like a Southern moonshiner than an Abstract Expressionist emeritus. "It was an overkill opening," he tells me in his antebellum drawl, but it seems like he means it in a good way, as if he's both amused and amazed at all the pomp. Leaning back in his chair at a corner table, he also downplays his role in the expansion of Gagosian's global empire: "I've been with Larr-eh a long time, living in Rome for 50 years, and he asked me to do it, so I did!" Twombly is so obliging, in fact, that I can't help but ask him why he's so socially scarce. "I'm not on the scene," he concedes with a sly smile. "I live by the sea here and in Virginia. But if someone speaks to me, well, I speak to them."
