I first spoke with Gabriella Campagna in 2009. She was a yoga teacher in Brooklyn, a Kathak scholar who had lived in Varanasi and written her senior thesis on the devotional aspects of the classical north Indian dance form in the Western context. She listed her three things she could not live without as food, music, and love. She listed ninunina.com among her favourite websites. She would say the same thing now about the food, the music, and the love.
Seventeen years later, Gabriella Campagna is a somatic therapist, mother of two, former actress, and the co-founder of Casa Milana, a 4,000 square foot living, working, and healing space in Milan that she built with her husband, Italian furniture designer Mario Milana. The apartment is simultaneously a showroom, a family home, and a venue for her wellness and meditation workshops. She runs her herbal apothecary from the studio kitchen. The children run between the high-ceilinged rooms with their original tile and terrazzo floors.
The story of how she got from Brooklyn to here is a story about what it means to build a life around what you actually believe, rather than around what is expected. It took moving from New York to Milan in 2021, concurrent with the birth of their first child. It took two apartments becoming one. It took finding that the boundary between living and working could be dissolved entirely, and that the result was not chaos but something closer to harmony.
