EVEN IN THE SWELTERING 110-degree Moroccan summer, the Italian countess Marta Marzotto has not lost an inch of her hauteur. When the spry 82-year-old arrives at Marrakech's trendy Nikki Beach epool club in the midst of a late June scorcher that has wilted even the local citizens, she is still able to command attention in her custom-made orange, yellow and black silk caftan and gold-leaf Giuseppe Zanotti sandals.  Four attendants in aviator sunglasses snap into action; ice buckets are sent for, fruit is whipped into frosted cocktails, and platters of sushi are presented with deference. A fully stocked table is how Marzotto prefers to host her guests, whether she's commanding the social scene from her perch at home or entertaining friends out on the town.  "If you love minimalism, she's not your woman," says her youngest son, Matteo Marzotto, the former chairman of fashion brands Valentino and Vionnet.  Nothing—not today's heat, not the weight of her massive jewels and certainly not her age—can dampen Marzotto's enthusiasm for over-the-top entertaining or fashion. Since the early 1950s, when she married Umberto Marzotto, an heir to one of Italy's wealthiest and most powerful textile dynasties, the countess has been a centrifugal social force on the European scene. At any one of her homes—in Marrakech, Rome, Milan or Cortina d'Ampezzo—she has held court for a palace's worth of princes, princesses, dukes, barons and counts, not to mention Andy Warhol, Federico Fellini, Kevin Costner and Sean Connery.  Although some of her peers in conservative Italian society bristle at her maximalist style, it is welcomed in Marrakech, where she and her house incarnates the spirit of this often exuberant, colorful city.  "This is my world," she says earlier that day, gesturing to the arched courtyard of her riad, dubbed Rose du Desert, where a magnificent breakfast is spread on an antique Italian lace tablecloth. Before her shines a pool lined in emerald-green tiles—the vital center of the five-bedroom home she purchased 12 years ago after decades of visiting Marrakech and the desert that surrounds it. The riad, her only home outside of Italian borders, is an oasis brimming with antique furniture, Bedouin carpets and tiled in a kaleidoscope of traditional Moroccan patterns. Once inside the bougainvillea-covered front door, it is impossible to conceive of the chaos of noise and dust that swirls just outside, in the city's Bab Doukkala neighborhood.  "The house is my small jewel," Marzotto says matter-of-factly, fanning herself with a pink floral ventaglio. To be honest, none of Marzotto's jewels are small, but she wears them lightly. Her finger permanently hosts a 22-carat diamond ring, which she shrugs off as "poor quality," that is surrounded by a removable black plexiglass frame she designed herself. Her adornments are either richly authentic—such as a bib of pink and blue sapphires—or fabulously fake, like a huge studded skull strung on two strands of gumball-size crystals that resemble carnival candy.  "She really puts her personality into her décor," says Matteo. "She fell in love with Moroccan and Arabic taste when she bought this house."  The restoration of the crumbling riad to its intended glory took years of work, befitting its location within the ancient medina—the historic, walled center of the city. Marzotto recruited American-born, Moroccan-based architect Stuart Church (whose clients also include Kuwaiti royalty, as well as Pierre Bergé and the late Yves Saint Laurent) to breathe life back into the rose-walled compound. In addition to the carpet-lined entrance hall (which lies open to the blue skies), the plush, striped velvet banquettes, jade silk couch beds and ceilings inlaid with mirrored mosaics, Church designed the intricate patterns for the traditional Moroccan tile work—called zellige—that explodes over nearly every floor and wall in the house.  "They took big bricks of colored stone and broke them up," Marzotto remembers of the master craftsmen from Fez, who painstakingly hand-chiseled each tile into a rainbow of hexagons, stars, diamonds and petals. "It took a year to do." Sunlight pierces the rooms through carved screen doors, called mashrabiya, illuminating floral designs painted by local artisans on wooden panels and coffered ceilings. Two massive Moorish-style limestone tubs, one in vibrant red and the other in sage green, were created with traditional tadelakt—a glazed and polished plaster. The many hand-knotted Bedouin carpets came from the king of Morocco's own source for the royal palace. Recalls Marzotto of the tribal dealers, "They came in from the desert and left 150 carpets from the 1930s in the doorway."  The riad's classic configuration was maintained, with rooms unfolding symmetrically around a central courtyard and accessed through open-air salons. To furnish the interiors, Marzotto scoured local antique dealers such as Mustapha Blaoui and Galerie de Velasco for candelabras, gold mirrors and mother-of-pearl bureaus.  In one room hangs a copper chandelier studded with multicolored glass that looks like it came directly from Aladdin's cave. Through an intricately detailed arch that echoes a traditional Islamic mihrab, two bronze camels stand guard, while a tranquil blue sitting room features a painted enamel mirror depicting flowers and foliage. Each of the four guest bedrooms is individually decorated, one with a metallic jacquard thrown over a silver-inlaid wooden bed, another with a cracked mirrored ceiling trimmed in gold, and all with linens imported from Italy. Marzotto herself sleeps in a small but quaint ground-floor room.  In the winter months, guests take refuge from the chilly evenings by the fireplaces in the turquoise or rose side salons, but the courtyard comes alive on sultry spring nights. There, her eight brass candelabras, each over five feet tall, illuminate the fountain, the massive green ceramic vases and the low copper tables.  Since her first visit in the '80s, Marzotto slipped effortlessly into the folds of Marrakech's expat scene—which included everyone from Italian socialite Marella Agnelli to the late artist Keith Haring—as well as local society such as the late King Hassan, who hosted her at his palace. (At one royal dinner during an early visit, her butterfly-embroidered Roberto Cavalli caftan was so admired by the king's sister-in-law that Marzotto, who was wearing a slip dress underneath, promptly removed it and gave it to her. The royal family returned the favor by sending her a locally made caftan adorned in gold and silver.)  After decades of such exploits, and closetfuls of custom-made caftans, she has become a featured celebrity on the walls of the city's iconic boutique La Maison du Kaftan Marocain. "Going through the medina with her is tough," says Cavalli's wife, Eva. "Everyone knows who she is, so every 10 meters, someone stops and asks for a photo."  Such a glamorous existence could not be further from her childhood in Mortara, a small town in Italy's Lombardy region. "We couldn't even afford socks," she says. "My toes look like this [gnarled] because my mother stuffed my feet into shoes even when they didn't fit." Daughter of a train station attendant, the future countess, at 15 years old, began working for a tailor in nearby Pavia and soon became a model, which proved to be her ticket out of town. In 1952, while in Venice modeling swimsuits for Cole of California, she met Umberto. The two fell in love, married two years later and moved into the family's ancestral 15th-century palazzo in Veneto.  But after nearly 15 years, during which time she had two sons and three daughters, the countess decamped to Rome and took a lover, the Italian artist Renato Guttuso. Although her husband had already done the same, it was audacious: "In 1972, adultery was a crime punishable by two years in prison," she explains. "My husband could have pressed charges against me." But they agreed not to break up the family and remained amicably married until 1992.  "In Italy, there's a proverb that says: 'Behind a great man there's always a great woman,' " Marzotto says, rolling her eyes. "But I've always been side by side with my men, never behind and very often even in front. Why? Because I decide what I do." She continued to scandalize Rome's Catholic families by publicly continuing her relationship with Guttuso, and later took up with politician Lucio Magri. She also turned Rome's ossified social structure upside down by opening her doors to guests from across the social strata.  "Marta Marzotto is the woman who changed Italy's social customs," explains Italian social fixture and author Cesare Cunaccia. "Before her, aristocratic society was closed. She brought people together that had never been in the same room before."  "Everyone wanted to go to Marta's," says Marchesa Marta Brivio Sforza, who met the countess in Rome in the late '70s. "There were painters, artists, writers, politicians, princes, high, low, rich and poor. She was the queen of Rome." The guest list included Irwin Shaw, Gay Talese, Gianni Agnelli, Giorgio de Chirico, Bernardo Bertolucci, Monica Vitti—even the Nobel Prize–winning poet Salvatore Quasimodo, whom Marzotto once whisked off to a Roman discotheque.  During those years, Marzotto transported her salon around Europe: In the winter, she hit the slopes of Cortina and, in the summer, held court in Sardinia's Porto Rotondo (in a home which she has since sold).  In 1991, in a move akin to Gloria Vanderbilt designing denim, she began creating clothing for Standa, a now-defunct Italian supermarket chain—a five-year project that yielded high-fashion looks at high-street prices. Throughout the '90s, Marzotto produced her own watch line, which sold in Italy and Japan. She also designs bold costume jewelry under her own name, produced by the upscale Milanese jeweler Carlo Zini.  The proceeds from her jewelry line go in part to fund the Italian Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation, a charity she founded with her son Matteo and the rest of the Marzotto clan after her daughter Annelisa died in 1989, at age 32, from the disease. "I've seen her come roaring back to life from situations that would have killed a horse," observes Matteo. "She has great enthusiasm and hunger for life."  Vionnet owner and oil magnate Goga Ashkenazi, who socializes with her frequently in Italy, agrees. At Venice's annual Carnival this winter, "Marta was up with us until 5 a.m. dancing," Ashkenazi says. "My biggest wish in life is to be like her when I grow up."  Today, Marzotto's peripatetic social schedule remains as packed as ever. The day before, she was at a ball in Rome, and in two days' time she'll head to Spoleto and then Capri. But she's never gone long from Marrakech: "I'm like a tornado spinning around the world," she says, laughing in her infectious manner. "So it's nice to come here for some peace and to realize that nothing changes."
Of the four homes owned by the international hostess, her restored riad most perfectly reflects the thrilling exuberance of a woman known for doing nothing halfway.