When, in 1994, New York University inherited Villa La Pietra, a vast Tuscan estate that included one of the most revered privately held art collections in all of Italy, it represented a crowning achievement in the US university’s ambitions to stretch itself far beyond Washington Square Park and become a global academic institution.

Nestled in the hills of Florence among the tall cypress trees, the 15th-century estate was bequeathed to the university by Sir Harold Acton, the Eton- and Oxford-educated writer and aesthete who was said to have been the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s character Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited.

For nearly the entire duration of its ownership of La Pietra, however, NYU has been fighting a legal battle with an Italian family that claims it is the rightful owner of half the estate. Pitting one of the world’s most famous universities against a self-described Renaissance woman and princess by marriage, the 20-year lawsuit could finally come to a head later this year.

At the centre of the legal dispute lies an alleged extramarital relationship that began a century ago between Sir Harold’s father, Arthur Acton, who was a renowned art collector, and Arthur’s Italian secretary, Ersilia. The relationship allegedly produced a child, Liana Beacci, who eventually had five children of her own and died in 2000.

Dialta Alliata Orlandi, 62, who is the late Liana’s youngest child, says her mother was deeply wounded by the fact that she was never recognised in the will of her alleged half-brother, Sir Harold. “It even killed her,” she says.

Dialta Alliata Orlandi: ‘I had to hear from their lawyer that my grandmother was the biggest whore, which she wasn’t at all.’ Photograph: Stephanie Kirchgaessner/The Guardian

With Orlandi’s encouragement, Beacci sued the university in 1995, claiming she deserved half the estate.

Orlandi – who shuttles between Honolulu and Los Angeles but likes to vacation in Italy – took control of the case after her mother died. Over the years, she says she has been the subject of countless slights by the supposedly “greedy” and “bullying” US university.

But there was one alleged insult that she has found particularly galling: the suggestion that the alleged relationship between her Italian grandmother and Arthur was nothing but a one-night stand. Orlandi, who has written a book about her family’s history that she wants to make into a mini-series, says it was a lifelong love affair.

“I had to hear from their lawyer that my grandmother was, like, the biggest whore, which she wasn’t at all,” Orlandi says. “And that [Arthur Acton] was a gigolo. [In fact], he was a genius.”

Like many allegations that are thrown about in this bitter feud, NYU refutes that characterisation, calling it “untrue” and “ludicrous”.

Unlocking the real story behind the relationship between Ersilia and Arthur seems a melodramatic trifle more befitting the tabloids than a decades-long lawsuit involving a major university. Except for one fact: hundreds of millions of euros are potentially at stake.

‘Illegitimacy’ and ‘wicked injustice’

For years, it looked like the university would win. At one point, experts even performed DNA tests on the exhumed body of Arthur Acton, but that case was dismissed before the results were official. (Orlandi says the tests proved her mother was Arthur Acton’s daughter; NYU says a court has yet to make that determination.)



But NYU was dealt a serious setback last year in the wake of a new inheritance law passed in Italy in 2012 that gives new rights to so-called illegitimate children. Previously the Italian justice system had prohibited the claims by Beacci’s heirs, saying they were essentially filed too late.

In a stunning decision by Italy’s highest court, Orlandi and her family “won big” after the court said that legal challenges could now be pursued against the deceased “heir of an heir”. It ordered the case to essentially start from scratch. The first hearing in the new case will be held in Florence on 15 September.

A view from Villa La Pietra. Photograph: Alamy

“It’s fair to say the supreme court of Cassation’s ruling was a surprise and disappointment to NYU. Some 80 years after Liana Beacci’s birth, 60 years after the death of Arthur Acton, over 20 years after the death of Harold Acton ... the proceedings are now in the courts of Florence,” says Mattie Bekink, a spokeswoman for NYU.

But the question of whether Liana was Arthur’s biological daughter alone will not resolve this case.

The more complex question raised by the legal challenge is whether the family of the “illegitimate” heir of Arthur Acton, a man who came from a modest background, should have any right to property and art that NYU says was clearly purchased by his wealthy wife, Hortense.

NYU says it is “widely understood” that it was Hortense “who had all the money” in the marital relationship and purchased Villa La Pietra and several surrounding villas. The deed of purchase for the estate, dated 1907, was in Hortense’s name, NYU says, and she in turn left the estate to her son, Harold.

“Think of the wicked injustice, even if the late Liana Beacci’s paternity claim were true, of compelling the estate of a wronged spouse to be handed over to heirs of her husband’s infidelities,” says Bekink, the NYU spokeswoman.

NYU says it has “faithfully fulfilled” Hortense’s and her son Sir Harold’s wishes for La Pietra, and turned its Florentine campus into an important venue for public discourse.

Orlandi counters those claims, saying Hortense Acton had little interest in art or the estate that her husband built.

“Arthur Acton created the Villa La Pietra. He had the vision. He was the collector ... Mrs Acton didn’t care. She hated those Madonnas,” she says.

Villa La Pietra. Orlandi says Hortense Acton ‘didn’t care’ about the art inside the home. Photograph: Alamy

“Hortense was always traveling to Paris and Switzerland to the hairdresser,” says Orlandi.

She is equally disdainful of her alleged late half-uncle, Sir Harold Acton, who the 62-year-old Orlandi recalls meeting when she was 15 years old.

“I was expecting to meet someone of the fame that he had, which was like a citizen of the world. Somebody eccentric, somebody superior. Someone that would say, you know, ‘war to the philistines’. Instead I met a philistine.”

She pauses, then adds: “He had a different mother, so, you know, it was to be expected.”

A 1983 interview in the New York Times lends some credence to NYU’s version of events. In it, Sir Harold said his decision to leave La Pietra to NYU upon his death – after the gift was rejected by his alma mater, Oxford – was a reflection of the fondness he felt for America, the birthplace of his mother. “That’s where the money came from,” he said.

Although Orlandi credits her alleged grandfather, Arthur, for being a “genius” art collector, she also freely acknowledges that her lawsuit is not really about the art.

“My husband has a collection in Palazzo Cini [in Venice] which is much more important than the collection in Villa La Pietra,” she says, referring to her spouse, Vittorio Alliata di Montereale. “There you can see a beautiful Botticelli, you see some very important paintings that La Pietra can dream of.”

She has no doubt that she will win her fight against NYU, which she says has been fought out of a “question of respect”.

“I promise to my mother her paternity on her death bed and I am going to have it,” she says.

But when pressed about whether NYU, too, might be able to consider itself an injured party in this legal saga – after all, the university was just the recipient of a gift – Orlandi becomes animated.

“Today, a museum, before accepting a painting as a gift, checks the provenance of the painting, because if it was stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish family, they cannot accept it,” she says. “In Florence – as we say in Italian – even the stones knew that my mother was the daughter of Arthur Acton.”

Orlandi is convinced that the legal case will take just three more years, and predicts that the really difficult part will come when it is time to appraise the value of the estate.

But NYU, much like Orlandi, is not giving an inch.

“We think the law is on our side, and justice is on our side,” Bekink says.

“We are fully and contentedly prepared to carry on the litigation if that is the only way to resolve this matter.”