Despite the Giro about twenty years ago, in the Milanese environment Of the models agencies there are those who still remember him, and still calls him “paw”: and that nickname seems to attack Paolo Zampalli, 55 years old, multifaceted entrepreneur with a role in the diplomacy of the United Nations, as well as a brand new “special correspondent” of Donald Trump in Italy. Because of “paw”, in life, Zampollo has given several.
The last one came thanks to the toning president of the United States, who has just chosen “his friend Paolo” as his eye in our country. The official role that Trump has attributed to him, that of “Special Envoy”, means that Zampalli will have the task of strengthening the political and economic ties between Washington and Rome, ranging from commercial relations to cooperation in the defense sector. In short, while the brand new Ambassador of the United States, Tilman J. Fertitta, will manage traditional diplomatic commitments, Zampoli will follow the most “delicate political and commercial negotiations. This inevitably precipitated him to the center of a thousand curiosities. And his biography helps to feed them. Paolo, in fact, was born in Milan in 1970 and is the only son of an entrepreneur: Giovanni Zampalli, the founder of the Harbert toys House, who in those years distributed the dessert of the American Hasbro in Italy, but also the characters-beams of Stellar Wars and the Superheroi Comics and Marvels.
When Paolo is 18 years old, his father dies in a ski accident. In an interview of September 2016 at the New York Times, Zampollo tells that that sad blow requires him to leave university and also forces him to sell Herbert. Meanwhile, Milan begins to stay close to him. Travel. It does things. He sees people. In 1994 he participated in the organization of the Look of the Year race in Ibiza, where he met John Casablancas, founder of the Elite Models, and here the classic existential turning point has been insane: because Casablancas notes his certain skill and advises him to go to New York to work in the sector. This is how Paolo moves into the Big Apple, to Union Square, where he founded his agency, the ID Models, and begins to travel the world to engage in the parade beauties such as Heidi Klum and Claudia Schiffer. In 1996 “Zampa” also brought a certain Melania Knauss to America, a promising Slovenian model, to which he makes photo shoots without too many veils.
Hectic, nice, and obviously smart as a fox, Meanwhile, the young Zampolli also attends the right clubs of New York, from the Privé of the Moomba Restaurant to the Bowerry Bar, where it tightens important friendships: for example Trump, at the time manufacturer. And it is Paolo who makes Melania and Donald known: not for nothing, he always told Nyt, “I have always been very good at putting people together and making things happen …”. The meeting between the two, and the love at first sight takes place in September 1999 during a Fashion Week party at the legendary Kit Club, on the Broadway. 2004, “Zampa” still changes sector. It is his friend Donald who convinced him: “Paolo, you are too intelligent for a modelle agency”. Then he starts working in construction, for the Trump group, and for four years ago the director of international development. Then, however, he ends up getting back on his own, mixing his two previous experiences: the Paramount Group, a decidedly innovative real estate agency, was born, which organizes visits to apartments and extra -luxury properties for very wealthy buyers.
The peculiarity of the Paramount lies in the fact that it entrusts its customers to beautiful modelstransformed into seductive sellers (“the image is everything”, underlines Paolo), who forget them for Manhattan in Rolls-Royce, or make them fly over the city on great helicopters, or bring them to the Hudson aboard elegant private yachts. As often happens to the genes, Zampoli has a multifaceted personality. Not happy with the life of Businessman, who has guaranteed him a remarkable wealth – whose concrete sign is a house in Gramercy Park, with paintings by Canaletto, De Chirico and Picasso – for a dozen years he has also given himself to diplomacy. In 2011 the Dominican Republic appointed him his ambassador to the United Nations, and in 2013 ambassador for the oceans and seas.
Now, thanks to Trump, Zampolli has a much more important diplomatic role, Which will often take him to Italy and who will probably carry out the splendid wife Amanda, already a model of his New York team at his side. It is not the first task that his friend Donald entrusts him, as president: in December 2020, just before ending the first term to the White House, Trump had already appointed Paul on the board of directors of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a rarefied cultural institution of Washington. But Zampelli is truly transversal politically, so much so that in January 2021 Trump’s successor, Democrat Joe Biden, had put it on the President’s Council for sports, fitness and nutrition, a Think -ank that should promote healthy lifestyles for Americans. For all this, it will not be easy to contain it. Also because, at 55, “Zampa” still has two ambitious projects in the drawer, one decidedly playful and the other so much: «I would like to be” adopted “by Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon. For my son Giovanni, who is 15 years old, I would like to study Harvard instead. And that became president of the United States ».
