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David Rafaello is a teacher of and writer on history and art history. He is a member of the universities of Chicago, California, and Cambridge. He was taken to his first opera – Le Nozze di Figaro at the Peabody in Baltimore – at the age of 11, and he spent his last evening resident in the United States at a performance of Der Rosenkavalier with the incomparable Elisabeth Schwartzkopf singing the Marschallin. He is now so old that he can recall overnight queuing for tickets for Covent Garden – in the days when it was worth going to Covent Garden regularly.
David would like to divide his time between the North Norfolk coast and Rome (or the farmhouse in Tuscany) but unfortunately has to work to afford glimpses of this preferred lifestyle. But whether in Italy or England, he spends his summers – Glyndebourne aside – sitting on a beach soaking up the sun, reading the New Yorker and poetry, and sipping chilled California Zinfandel.
Okay: you may think he's just a boring twit - and you may be right. He is also the founder of a wine society, the sometime chairman of one of the most illustrious documentary film societies in the world, a keen but poor – though prize-winning – photographer, a fitness fanatic (he hates fat), a practising Catholic, and the very proud godfather of a stunningly beautiful Roman child. If you want still more he might tell you about Jean Genet or the last Frank Zappa concert at UCLA. He talks a lot when drunk.
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