A Look Through Milton Gendel's Lens

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

It's impossible to categorize Milton Gendel. Born in New York City to a pair of Russian-Jewish emigres, he arrived in Rome on a Fulbright scholarship in 1949. Over the next seven decades in the city, he continued to insist he was "just passing through." After early stints working at Olivetti and Alitalia (at the heights of their postwar corporate glamour), he established himself as an art critic, collector, facilitator and convener. Along the way he charmed everyone he befriended, from the queen of England on down. And everywhere he went, he snapped pictures with his Rolleiflex camera; at home, at his typewriter, he recorded his impressions in his diary.

For many of his nearly 100 years—he died in 2018 just two months shy of the century mark—he was perhaps best known for all the people he knew. Relatively late in his life, after several successful exhibitions of his subtle yet witty photographs, he was recognized as a significant artist. Now, with the publication of Just Passing Through: A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday: The Diaries and Photographs of Milton Gendel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), we find out what a capable first-person writer he was, too.

Though Gendel traveled widely, he trained his focus primarily on his adopted home city, depicting it as indelibly as Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed 20th-century Paris or Samuel Pepys chronicled 17th-century London. “He was a quintessential observer, led as much by the eye as the ear,” editor Cullen Murphy writes in his introduction to the book.


Lord Snowdon and André Leon Talley at Rome’s Palazzo Ruspoli, 1987.

Through 126 black-and-white images and a selection of diary entries spanning from 1967 to 1985, there are intimate portrayals of Gendel’s personal life: of his second wife, English aristocrat Judith Montagu, and their daughter, Anna; and with his third wife, artist Monica Incisa della Rocchetta, who descends from Italian nobility.

Nearly every day, it seems, Gendel encountered eminences of arts and letters, from Alexander Calder to Evelyn Waugh. In Rome he frequently dined with Peggy Guggenheim, Gore Vidal and Muriel Spark; at the Ritz Bar in Paris he lunched with Salvador Dalí. Then there are tycoons such as Gianni Agnelli and William S. Paley, along with their wives, the swans Marella and Babe. There is royalty (Juliana, queen of the Netherlands, swims up to his boat), and there’s rock ‘n’ roll (Mick Jagger, whom Gendel described as “a well-mannered fellow with blabber lips” after an encounter in London, 1970).

Above all,  Just Passing Through  offers candid depictions of Princess Margaret—his wife Judith’s close friend—as well as other members of the royal family, whom the Gendels holidayed with. At Balmoral, for example, Milton snapped a kerchiefed Queen Elizabeth serving dinner (hamburger) to her corgis, and a contemplative Margaret behind closed doors; at Windsor, he got everyone splashing in the pool.

Gendel’s diaries total 10 million words, and his archive contains 72,000 negatives. The book is but a small sampling of his charmed world.


Clockwise from top left: Transporting a statue of Marcus Aurelius, Rome, 1981; Rome’s Villa Borghese, 1995; Gendel’s daughter, Anna, playing with Ned Lambton at Sutton Place, in Surrey, England, 1968.

Photographs courtesy of Fondazione Primoli, Rome. All photographs from   Just Passing Through , by Milton Gendel, edited and with an introduction by Cullen Murphy; published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux .