Impero “Perry” Schiavo, one of the most recognisable figures in Italian travel, has died after a long illness, his family announced this week. He founded the Rome-based tour operator ITC – Be Unique in Italy in 1969 and spent more than five decades turning standard itineraries into the kind of experiences most travellers assume are impossible to arrange.
His company's credentials read like a list of firsts. In the 1980s, ITC organised the first private dinner ever held inside the Vatican Museums — imagine dining among the galleries after the crowds have gone. In 2023, the firm pulled off another milestone: the first-ever opening of the Vittoriano, the enormous white monument to Italy's first king that looms over central Rome. During the worst of the pandemic, Schiavo worked on ways to keep Venice accessible, focusing on solutions that were safe, sustainable and open to as many visitors as possible.
Those who met him rarely forgot him. Schiavo dressed like no one else in the industry: flamboyant pocket squares, a white pinstripe suit paired with tennis shoes, custom tuxedo slippers in rainbow colours. “In Rome, everyone knows me for colors,” he once told an interviewer. He liked to explain his unusual name with a joke about ancient Rome — Impero means “emperor,” Schiavo means “slave,” so he could have been either — while everyone since his school days called him Perry, after the singer Perry Como.
His son Marco has now taken over the company, and the family says Perry leaves behind a life “full of love, laughter, stories told and lived, journeys, friendships, and memories.” A funeral will be held on September 29 at 11:00 AM at the Church of San Salvatore in Lauro, on Rome's Piazza San Salvatore.
Why should a traveller care? Because the way Italy is sold today — private after-hours museum access, dinners in places that normally never host them, small-group experiences instead of coach tours — owes a real debt to Schiavo's work. If you've ever wondered who convinced the Vatican to let outsiders eat there, this is the man. His company continues under family leadership, so his approach to Italian travel outlives him. Anyone heading to Rome or Venice who wants something beyond the standard checklist could do worse than look at what his firm pioneered.
Tributes have come in from across the cruise and travel trade, where Schiavo was a fixture at conferences for half a century — a man whose presence filled a room, even a cruise ship atrium. He'll be remembered in the industry for influence, and in Rome for the colours.
