Silvano Marchetto, an Italian restaurateur whose Greenwich Village trattoria, Da Silvano, opened in 1975 and became a star-studded canteen and a Page Six fixture, died on June 4 in Florence, Italy. He was 77.
His daughter, Leyla Marchetto, said the cause was heart failure.
For four decades, akin to a downtown Elaine’s, Da Silvano was one of New York’s reigning haunts for the art, fashion, media and film crowds. And Mr. Marchetto, a hard-living Tuscan who parked his Ferrari ornamentally outside his establishment, was its rustic host and mascot.
He wore Hawaiian shirts and yellow pants, and his wrists were covered in silver bracelets and jewelry. After he fired waiters in fits of passion, he soon missed them, sending emissaries to lure them back. And when everyone from Rihanna to Barry Diller to Patti Smith frequented his restaurant, he greeted them with a friendly growl as he nursed a glass of wine.
Before social media democratized the public’s access to the lives of celebrities, tabloids like The New York Post and The Daily News relied on Da Silvano as a source of juicy gossip. The patio tables beneath its yellow awning were coveted seating for those who wanted to be seen, and the pictures snapped by the paparazzi posted up along the sidewalk outside notified New Yorkers about how their favorite celebrities dated, argued, wheedled and canoodled.
“Page Six covered us so much people asked if I owned The New York Post,” Mr. Marchetto (pronounced MARK-et-oh) once said. “But it was good for Da Silvano, whatever they wrote.”
Mr. Marchetto’s roster of regulars included Calvin Klein, Anna Wintour, Lindsay Lohan, Joan Didion, Madonna, Yoko Ono, Harvey Weinstein, Susan Sontag, Lou Reed, Salman Rushdie, Stephanie Seymour and Larry Gagosian.
When Graydon Carter was the editor of Vanity Fair, he ate at the same table several times a week.
“You couldn’t believe who you would see there on any given night,” said Mr. Carter, who now runs the digital publication Air Mail. “Da Silvano was an important New York restaurant because it brought uptown people to downtown people. And Silvano became one of the great characters of downtown New York.”
But long before Da Silvano became a cliché interview setting in celebrity magazine profiles, Mr. Marchetto helped introduce authentic Tuscan cuisine to New Yorkers.
He founded Da Silvano as a tiny trattoria with the hope of serving the rustic dishes that he’d grown up eating in Florence. Veal parm served with watery Chianti then still typified Italian fine dining fare in the city, so his preparations of liver crostini and robins roasted with bacon won him attention. Recognition arrived early with a two-star review from Mimi Sheraton in The New York Times.
But a downtown scene was also forming at Da Silvano. The art crowd arrived first.
Dealers like Leo Castelli and Mary Boone were opening their galleries in SoHo around the same time that Da Silvano opened and they soon colonized it as their hangout. Andy Warhol, Louise Nevelson and Jean-Michel Basquiat soon joined them among Mr. Marchetto’s first regulars. It wasn’t long before Da Silvano was luring customers who didn’t dwell below 14th Street.
Gradually, Mr. Marchetto became a star in his own right, and a cartoon logo of him wearing sunglasses was printed on Da Silvano’s espresso cups and olive oil bottles. By the time he was in his 60s, he had something else in common with some of his celebrity customers: a tumultuous personal life.
Waiters filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that he had withheld wages, and a garage manager filed a sexual-assault suit claiming that Mr. Marchetto had grabbed his genitals after dropping off one of his Ferraris. (Mr. Marchetto denied all allegations and both cases were settled out of court.) After 12 years of marriage, his wife, Marisa Acocella, a New Yorker cartoonist, filed for divorce in 2016, leading to a publicized trial.
Like a boiling pot of pasta water that had begun to overflow, Da Silvano closed dramatically that December.
Mr. Marchetto shuttered the restaurant without warning after dinner service one night. He told the press that his reason was the rent, which had climbed to $42,500 a month.
“A fortune, I couldn’t handle it,” he told The Times that week. “Everybody is sad; it’s been 41 years and 51 days exactly since I opened, but I don’t care.”
But as celebrities mourned the closure, and tributes from food journalists framed Da Silvano into a lineage of haunts like Elaine’s, Mr. Marchetto didn’t stick around for the veneration. Instead, he sold his West Village apartment, and vanished from public view.
His whereabouts remained little known for nearly a decade, until last year, when this reporter, on assignment for The Times, found Mr. Marchetto living in obscurity in the hills of Tuscany near Bagno a Ripoli.
In interviews, Mr. Marchetto revealed what he’d been up to, explaining that he spent his time bottling olive oil from his trees, sometimes starting his mornings with a Negroni or two and napping after lunch.
The one topic Mr. Marchetto was resistant about discussing was Da Silvano’s closure. He brushed away questions.
“Once in a blue moon, I miss the action,” he finally offered. “But I never feel sorry for myself.”
His daughter, Leyla, a co-founder of the Navy Beach restaurant in Montauk, reflected on her father’s life after New York.
“My father wasn’t someone who talked about his emotions much, but I know he had strong feelings about what happened to Da Silvano,” she said, “I don’t think he wanted to let it go. And he always missed it, because it was his identity.”
“But in his mind, he had lived his own version of the American dream,” she added. “He came to New York from Italy with nothing. Then he opened his little trattoria.”
Silvano Marchetto was born in Trento, Italy, on Nov. 4, 1946, and was raised in Florence. His father, Enrico, was an army officer. His mother, Anna Pedrini, was a homemaker. Silvano grew up on an army base and learned how to drive an M47 Patton tank when he was 11.
In his teens, he studied at the Aurelio Saffi culinary school in Florence before working at hotels in France and Switzerland. After arriving in New York in the 1960s, he worked for several years as a waiter at the Derby Steak House in Greenwich Village, saving his earnings to open Da Silvano.
In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a sister, Franca Marchetto, and a grandson. His marriages to Vivian Raby and Ms. Acocella ended in divorce.
Living quietly in Tuscany in his 70s, Mr. Marchetto rarely broadcast his glitzy past. But there were some in Florence who knew of his prior life in New York. Whenever he visited the city’s ancient central market, butchers and fishmongers threw respectful nods at him.
As he shopped there for monkfish and porcini mushrooms last fall, accompanied by the Times reporter, a vegetable stand vendor noticed the deferential nods that he kept receiving. When he bought some basil from her, she confessed her curiosity about him.
“Are you famous or something?” she asked in Italian.
“I ran a restaurant in New York called Da Silvano,” he said. “Closed now.”
“Why?”
“Because. The rent. My knees. Divorce.”
“If it was successful, couldn’t someone have just kept running it for you?” she asked.
Mr. Marchetto’s sleepy eyes widened.
“Someone else run Da Silvano?” he said. “Absolutely not!”
