I visited Lake Maggiore on holiday in August 2019, staying at the same hotel in Stresa as the great writer George Bernard Shaw a century earlier.

Stumbling across the Museo del Paesaggio was a “Tutankhamun” moment for me. Years earlier I had acquired a beautiful bronze cast of Troubetzkoy’s Enrico Caruso, one of history’s greatest tenors. Through that purchase I met the Caruso successor Joseph Calleja, with whom I started a charity to help young musicians: The Drake Calleja Trust. So the discovery of the original plaster of Caruso (as Dick Johnson in the opera Fanciulla del West) was a catalyst for action. 

I immediately wrote to the museum curator with the idea of establishing a database of the complete works of Paul Troubetzkoy which would eventually form the basis for a Catalogue Raisonné.

In late 2019 I acquired a remarkable archive, in twenty-seven boxes, assembled over five decades by the Troubetzkoy scholar John Grioni. I hired a young Italian art historian, Giulia Suardi (who by coincidence also came from Verbania) to work in my Future Science Group office in London to create the database with our IT team and inhabit it with all the plasters and bronzes from as many world collections as possible.