Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio's Spirit Surely Enjoyed the Chanel Show at His Villa d'Este

The Cardinal who originally built Villa d’Este in 1568 with architect Pellegrino Tibaldi — home of Chanel’s recent Resort 2025/26 show was Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio. The Cardinal was a self-made man by all reports, a thinker deeply influenced by the movement AOC continually calls out, thanks to Brunello Cucinelli. The philosophy is called ‘humanism’ and even ‘Christian humanism’.

As AOC noted in Anne’s recent post examining the religious views of the controversial US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his embrace of Christian Nationalism and the Crusades, Arab world universities were instrumental in translating and preserving ancient Greek and Roman texts, which would later be transmitted to Europe and spur on the Renaissance.

Anne of Carversville works really hard to find new twists and turns in historical stories for which we believe we have the facts. The role of the Arab world in intellectual discussion and debate about Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and more in Europe’s most valued and prominent universities in the early Renaissance is one of those stories.