That was Francesco: a man from the last century, in any sense of the word.
His collection, put together over the last fifty years of his life, was his great joy, the source of endless inspiration, every single day of his life – never to be finished and to be admired always.
I met Francesco Carraro in 1992, at Christie’s New York, where I had just started working as the junior cataloguer in the department of 20th Century Decorative Arts and Design and it was there, that we began a lifelong friendship. For every auction Francesco knew what was there, what was good, what was indifferent and what needed to be considered for purchase.
Born into an industrial family from the Veneto, Francesco Carraro lived his early formative years in Rome, embracing those exceptional years of the 1950s in that city. Never tired to see, to learn, to know; it was Rome, where he studied the arts of that city and began his profound knowledge of art, culture and music.
He was able to pursue a life with the arts due to his father Giovanni’s business, a company manufacturing agricultural machinery. Knowing that this technical business would not be for him, he asked his father to pay him a salary like a worker and with this he began studying music, specifically twelve-tone music. In 1966 he moved to Berlin to continue these studies, alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen.