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Marella Agnelli, an offspring of Neapolitan nobility who lived a rarefied life of palatial estates, decorative yards, fine art, haute couture and lofty society, died on Saturday at her home in Turin, Italy. She was 91.

The fatality was announced by the Agnelli family in a statement.

With her hubby, Giovanni Agnelli of the Fiat automobile manufacturing realm, Mrs. Agnelli owned more than a dozen houses, including an estate in Turin, a ski lodge in the Italian Alps as well as a Park Opportunity apartment in New York. She cultivated an esteemed social circle that included the Kennedys, Henry Kissinger, Katharine Graham as well as Truman Capote. The pair's storage rooms were full of spotless clothing.

Mrs. Agnelli's beauty mesmerized the imagination of musicians as well as style developers. He apparently informed Ms. Graham, the Washington Blog post publisher at the time, that if Mrs. Agnelli as well as Infant Paley, one more of his socialite muses, "were both in Tiffany's home window, Marella would be a little bit much more pricey."

Mrs. Agnelli remained energetic and innovative in her later years, acquiring and also recovering a worn out rental property in Marrakesh, Morocco, and releasing an autobiographical coffee-table book.

She was birthed Princess Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto on Might 4, 1927, in Florence. Her mommy, the previous Margaret Clarke of Peoria, Ill., was a well-off Anglo-American expatriate, the child of a distiller; her papa, Filippo Caracciolo, became part of a Neapolitan noble household.

In a first-person short article for Vanity Fair in 2014, Mrs. Agnelli described the firm her household maintained as "a collection of individuals who spent their days visiting one another's exquisitely polished gardens and also crumbling suites on capitals of Florence as well as getting involved in interminable philosophical disquisitions."

Marella's world expanded with her education and learning. She studied art and also layout at the Académie des Beaux-Arts as well as Académie Julian in Paris prior to relocating to New york city in the very early 1950s. There she modeled for the opportunity to find out about digital photography from Erwin Blumenfeld, a Vogue contributor.

The life of Mr. Agnelli, called Gianni to his close friends, seemed in line with the adventurous one she intended to lead. She had actually heard tales concerning his service in The second world war from friends as well as knew well of his tight-knit family's propensity for prestige and speed.

Fiat, the company Mr. Agnelli's grandpa founded in 1899 in Turin, had experienced incredible growth after the war during a duration known as Italy's "miracolo economico," or financial miracle. Appropriately, the Agnellis shielded their lives with unwanted: events, villas, private yachts, autos, women.

Gianni, the eldest of the seven Agnelli children as well as the head of the household given that his moms and dads' deaths, had an online reputation for being a playboy and also had often been pointed out in chatter columns. So when he and also Marella obtained participated in 1953, it was an alleviation to his siblings.

The couple wed on Nov. 19, 1953, in the church of Osthoffen castle in northeast France. Marella used a white satin Balenciaga gown with sleeves and also a lengthy shroud, Gianni a tailcoat and also pinstripe trousers.

Another picture of Mrs. Agnelli, from December of that year, would certainly assist specify an age of appeal. Richard Avedon shot her in half account, putting on a strapless gown that highlighted her lengthy neck. The black-and-white picture, which remains in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been contrasted to a Modigliani painting.

After the wedding, Mrs. Agnelli was not excited to tackle the function of homemaker. She had actually just recently invested 18 months apprenticing with Blumenfeld and accepted a reporting work with Condé Nast, which she deserted after the wedding celebration.

What she did love, however, was the leisure and also the high-end. In the Vanity Fair post, she recalled a purchasing journey in Paris shortly after the wedding event. Mrs. Agnelli had actually scheduled an overnight train from Turin, and also when she boarded her sleeping auto, she located that it had lots of her home conveniences: monogrammed towels, her favorite toiletries, also fresh blossoms.

" This, I quickly uncovered, was how the Agnellis traveled when they took an plants by mail evening train," Mrs. Agnelli wrote. "This was also when I understood I had entered a really different way of life from the one I was made use of to."

She established the Agnellis' preference for the finer things in life-- customized garments, formal dinner celebrations, designer home furnishings-- while preserving a loosened up home atmosphere. After an excursion of the luxurious apartment or condo of the billionaire couple Sid as well as Mercedes Bass, Mrs. Agnelli apparently mentioned: "It will take her one more life time to understand wicker."

The pair had their very first youngster, Edoardo, in 1954, and also Margherita followed the following year. Mrs. Agnelli is survived by her child, Margherita Agnelli de Pahlen, her brother Nicola Caracciolo di Castagneto and eight grandchildren. Her kid passed away in 2000.

As parents Marella and also Gianni remained to refine their photo as a power couple. They obtained an extensive modern art collection that included jobs by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and also Frank Stella; yachted backwards and forwards the Amalfi Shore with John and Jacqueline Kennedy as well as swam in the Adriatic Sea with Mr. Capote; gathered cars and trucks, luxury yachts and private airplanes; and also cultivated acres of excellent yards at their several homes on three continents.

Horticulture was one of Mrs. Agnelli's lifelong passions. She invested decades collaborating with the English garden designer Russell Page to ideal her family's 25 acres at Villar Perosa in Turin, and also later got included with the Italian Environmental Fund, a company focused on maintaining historical landscapes. Her love of landscape architecture was cataloged in 2 books that she co-wrote, "Gardens of the Italian Villas" (1987) as well as "The Agnelli Gardens at Villar Perosa: Two Centuries of a Household Resort" (1998 ).

In 2002 the pair founded Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, a Renzo Piano-designed gallery in Turin real estate their collection of works by Matisse, Modigliani, Renoir and Manet, among others. Mr. Agnelli passed away of prostate cancer cells the next year at 81.

After her other half's death, Mrs. Agnelli handled one of her most ambitious projects: the restoration of Ain Kassimou, a vacation home in Marrakesh that she had bought from the Hermès household. The indoor designer Expense Willis as well as the landscape architect Madison Cox helped her turn the property into an adeptly polished yard estate. Its renovation as well as cultivation, in addition to those of her various other houses, was chronicled in Mrs. Agnelli's 2014 memoir, "The Last Swan."

" One is never ever really 'done' with a garden, just as one is never 'done' with life," Mrs. Agnelli wrote in Vanity Fair, right before her publication's magazine. "Each day and also step by step, one just keeps on finding new and brilliant methods to make them flourish, both in sunlight and in storm."