With his mane of white hair framing handsome features and a cerulean gaze, Gian Carlo Bussei exudes an air of old-world glamour and mystery that would be perfectly at home in a 1960s James Bond film. He is an adventurer – someone who has built, lost and rebuilt several fortunes so that he could pursue his talents, including one for writing poetry and another for salvaging beautiful remnants from lost worlds. According to his friends, he is a romantic who believes the greatest enemy of imagination is common sense. ‘French, Italian, Russian novels and the films of my youth taught me that an interesting life is an unpredictable one,’ Gian Carlo says from his palazzo in Venice, the city that he and his wife, photographer Giorgia Fiorio, have made their second home after Paris. Unsurprisingly, the place where he feels most at ease is on a boat. Not just any boat, but a relic from the darkest days of the Cold War that he has transformed into an Eastern reverie.
Launched in 1958, Tübingen was one of the first naval vessels built in Germany after World War II. Its prowess, 380 tons of fortitude, belongs to the last generation of minehunters made from wood and epoxy resins. Other noble materials include bronze and stainless steel, which are non-magnetic, implying a complex process. ‘In other words, it is an engineering masterpiece of seamless design.’
Born in Turin in the aftermath of the war, Gian Carlo was shipped off to boarding school at an early age to curb a rebellious streak. His father was a naval officer and mathematician whose inventions, including a pioneering version of hydrofoils, earned him a place in Venice’s naval history museum. His glamorous mother came from a dynasty of industrialists who made their fortune at the dawn of the 20th century. At the age of 17, after his father’s death, Gian Carlo spent a few years travelling to Japan and wider East Asia before returning to Turin. He married his first wife at 22, had two children by the age of 25 and in 1975 founded the trading company that he still runs. Locals still remember his nonconformist style when, during the swinging 1960s and 70s, he steadfastly refused to wear jeans and trainers, instead opting for double-breasted tailored suits from the 1950s and handmade shoes.
This nostalgia for high-quality vintage design extended to all things mechanical. Gian Carlo’s immersion in his collection of historic cars, including Bentleys and a gullwinged Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, has left him with several scars and a slight limp. Motorbikes were another fixation, but the most enduring of all his passions, one he shared with Gianni Agnelli, a cousin of his first wife and the person he regards as his mentor, was boating. ‘When I was 25, Gianni gave me one of his prized possessions: the G-50,’ he says. This 1967 motor- boat, which was dubbed ‘the Ferrari of the sea’, was the result of a collaboration between Pininfarina and the famed boat designer Renato ‘Sonny’ Levi. ‘Gianni was a king,’ says Gian Carlo, ‘and suppliers went out of their way to provide him with the best made-to-measure products.’ After a few summers spent cruising the Mediterranean on that vessel, he bought and restored another maritime classic: Astra, the celebrated yacht built in 1928 for the sewing-machine tycoon Mortimer Singer.
Then, in 1997, Gian Carlo heard that the German navy was to retire Tübingen. Impulsively, he made an offer. Just as unexpectedly, it was accepted. ‘Suddenly, I had to face a big question: what am I going to do with a minehunter?’ The main objective, he recalls, was to salvage as much as he could of the original design, from the analogue details – the inter-phones, bronze switches and kitchen appliances – to its colour scheme: pale grey for the exteriors, aquamarine indoors and the occasional flash of fire-engine red. Once the engines had been restored, the question arose: ‘What to do with the interiors? Do we, Giorgia and I, really want to live in a cramped 1950s war vessel?’ The answer, considering that the belly of the vessel was a hive of tiny cabins designed to host a crew of 37 men, was a resounding no.
It didn’t take long for his imagination to conjure a Renzo Mongiardino-inspired vision. He had first met the fabled interior designer in Turin in 1975. Gian Carlo, who describes himself as a giacofumna (a derogatory word in Pied-montese meaning a man who delights in domestic activities such as embroidery and decoration), clearly connected with the architect’s scenographic sensibility. After asking Mongiardino to help with his family home outside Turin, he presented him with a nine-storey architectural triangle of masonry built in the 1840s in the city centre known as la fetta di polenta because of its narrow trapezoid shape. As Mitchell Owens noted in a 1998 article for Nest magazine, the pair turned it into ‘a decadent urban garçonnière’, with one room per floor navigated by vertiginous stairs.
Mongiardino, who died in 1998, was unable to work on Tübingen, but Gian Carlo likes to think of the fun they might have had transforming it. Which is why he turned to Roberta Puddu, Mongiardino’s assistant, and her team. Gone is the warren of cabins. In its place stands a theatrical setting inspired by an Ottoman encampment. Punctuating the rooms are old parchment trunks and family pieces, such as the velvet-damask canopy in the main bedroom and ancient textiles on the furniture. Among the few concessions to modernity are hundreds of books by contemporary authors, a series of black-and-white photographs by Giorgia and a cinema.
The couple usually set sail in September and navigate from Lisbon to Istanbul. Both loners, they avoid crowded places, seeking wild spots to swim, read and write. They are occasionally joined by two or three friends. ‘I prefer to see the world from a distance, and observe the circularity of things coming and going,’ one reads in a booklet by Gian Carlo. Altogether, these publications represent a logbook of his experiences. ‘After all, what is life if not the administration of the temporary?’.
A version of this article also appeared in the February 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
