“I remember sitting on a terrace in Nice with my uncle and an old friend of his, both in their eighties. They started discussing the meaning of life, firing one saying, anecdote and reflection after another, like a machine gun, in many languages”.
That cosmopolitan, philosophical but worldly-wise way of being is what formed the art dealer Johnny Eskenazi, born in 1949 in Italy into a secular Sephardic Jewish family of Ottoman origin, with business interests from Austria and Italy to the UK.
“It was very warm and secure. There was an army of relations who would arrive from all over the world. We mainly spoke French and Italian at home, but English with my father, who had been an Intelligence officer in the British army during the war.”