MARIA MANETTI SHREM
MAJOR BENEFACTOR AND HONORARY BOARD MEMBER OF THE MASCARADE FOUNDATION
Maria Manetti Shrem has enjoyed extraordinary success in business, in particular in the fashion industry, where she played a major role in establishing Gucci as a truly global force. Today, her focus is philanthropy, and Maria has made no secret of the fact that she and her husband, Jan Shrem, aim to give away the bulk of their wealth in their lifetimes. A wide range of organisations across the fields of the fine arts, education, science, and music have been the beneficiaries of their great generosity.
“I want to give with my warm hands, not after passing,” Maria says. “And we want to inspire other wealthy people to give now. For me, the art of living is the art of giving.”
“Artists must be supported not just financially but also emotionally,” she notes, “given their long stretches on the road, far from loved ones.”
With her long-standing connection to singers, it was no surprise in May 2023 when Maria generously re-upped her Great Singers Fund gift, with a new $1.5 million pledge to the initiative. She met at the time with the Metropolitan Opera’s General Manager Peter Gelb about the gift. Impressed with his managerial acumen and surprised that the General Manager’s role was not already a named position, she decided to commit to an additional $5 million naming gift. Effective immediately, the leader of the Met is officially the Maria Manetti Shrem General Manager. Her hope is that the gift will lead others to consider naming other positions at the Met and elsewhere, a tribute not just to an institution, but to the talent behind the organisation that allows it to thrive. Beyond her support for the arts, Maria’s life has been positively operatic. She started a successful fashion import/export business with her first husband but left him when she fell in love with her second one, losing everything at a time when divorce in Italy was considered unacceptable. A leap of faith led her to the Bay Area to be with her second husband, with whom she built the fashion-distribution powerhouse Manetti Farrow. When that relationship dissolved, she embraced Buddhism to get her through (and the Buddhist notion of “detachment” remains a force in her desire to share her wealth). At her estate in Napa Valley, California, she has hosted the likes of Renée Fleming, Luciano Pavarotti, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Isabel Allende, and Sophia Loren.
Since the mid-1990s, when philanthropy became Maria’s abiding mission, she has contributed generously in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, the UK, and Italy, where she was born, in Florence. She has not forgotten the roots of her cultural Florentine upbringing: ranging from the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation to the Theatre of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, one of the nearly 50 projects she is supporting is the Fondazione Mascarade Opera, dedicated to opera training and performance at the highest level. Indeed, it was in her hometown that Maria fell in love with opera as a 15-year-old, when she heard soprano Renata Tebaldi singing Mimì in Puccini’s La bohème.
Maria has been a Met supporter for a number of years, as a member of the International Council, and in 2019 she launched the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Great Singers Fund, which helps finance the appearances of some of opera’s starriest singers. A huge fan of artists, she counts sopranos Renée Fleming and Nadine Sierra, as well as the tenor Michael Fabiano, as personal friends. She was especially close to Luciano Pavarotti, treating the legendary tenor as family whenever he performed in San Francisco, where Maria is based. She is one of the major donors to H.M. King Charles III's Royal Drawing School. A few years ago, the President of Italy bestowed on her the title of Grand Officer of the Order of the Star of Italy for her consistent support of collaboration between Italy and the U.S. She favours haute couture fashions from Dolce & Gabbana, as an enthusiast for the “Made in Italy” ethos of handmade artisanship. Named as the new ‘Electress Palatine’ by the Mayor of Florence for her extraordinary philanthropy, Maria truly follows in the majestic Renaissance footsteps of the Florentine Medici family.
