Nicola’s summer began more eventfully for what was happening within her family than in her own life, and it helped her focus on what was very real rather than on pipe dreams.
         Roseanne’s belly was expanding quickly, there were family parties and baby showers to attend.  Nicola enjoyed walking with her sister down Arthur Avenue past the shops selling christening items—the silk and cotton dresses, the teething rings, the picture frames—along with wedding gifts, silverware and china, whose presence in the windows always caused Roseanne to nudge Nicola to ask, “So when’s my little sister going to find a man and settle down?”
         Nicola would sigh and reply, “Maybe when you stop bugging me about it. Right now, as you may have noticed, I’m kind of busy.”
         Meanwhile, brother Tony clinched the deal with Joe Bastone and was moving ahead with his restaurant re-design plans, which began with taking down the ugly old Bella Napoli sign and completely gutting the interior.  New plumbing, new gas lines, new refrigeration, new stoves—but he kept the old pizza oven, believing that the flavor of the restaurant’s renowned pizzas was suffused throughout the brickwork.
         Then he began working with Nicola to do the interior design.  His vision was a more dramatic version than what it had been before.  He wanted shiny black and white surfaces, including naked tabletops, track lighting and black and white photos of Italian movie stars on the walls.
        Aside from the last item, Nicola disapproved of it all, contending that it was way too much of a departure for the neighborhood. Instead, with the images of her favorite restaurants in Milan dancing in her head, she wanted the new restaurant to have a more traditional trattoria look of a kind that many downtown Manhattan restaurants had been copying, yet without becoming a cliché—sponge mottled walls, wainscoting, wooden floors, perhaps some exposed brickwork, nice table linens, colorful outdoor canopies, and, okay, photos of Italian movie stars on the walls. (She was thinking of Paper Moon.)
        After considerable discussion, Tony came around to Nicola’s way of thinking, saying, “Hey, you’re the one going to the fancy arts school and you’ve seen what the trattorias look like in  Italy,” and gradually, as the décor took shape, he warmed to it.
        In fact, there had been significant changes in New York’s Italian restaurant scene and a shift away from the Italian-American formats of the past.  The supposed heaviness of tomato sauce and the overuse of garlic and oil was frowned upon by young chefs and restaurateurs who concocted an ersatz “northern” Italian menu that was supposed to be lighter by virtue of eschewing garlic and using more cream and butter in the sauces.  Even the tomato sauces became a little lighter—made fresh and without meat—rather than a ragù cooked all day on the back of the kitchen stove.
        But by 1985 there was another factor driving a new love of Italian food, and, not surprisingly, it was flamed by New York’s fashion crowd.  For in the mid-1980s the city’s downtown neighborhoods of Greenwich Village and SoHo were becoming the new nexus for contemporary art galleries like Leo Castelli  and Mary Boone and boutiques like Comme des Garçons.  And the art and magazine world, which had already shifted its allegiance to Italian fashion, needed some place to eat that evoked those trattorias they ate at in Milan.
      
Artist Robert Rauschenberg with Gallery Owner Leo Castelli

 Ten years earlier, a Tuscan named Silvano Marchetto opened a four-table trattoria on the edge of Greenwich Village and SoHo named Da Silvano, and another Tuscan, Pino Luongo, who had been a manager at Da Silvano, opened his own place, Il Cantinori, on West 10th Street.  Acclaimed by the New York food press, the two trattorias began to attract the city’s art and fashion crowds.  Da Silvano, in particular, had to grow fast, expanding to two rooms so as to always have tables for Hollywood and Broadway actors, Andy Warhol’s people and editors from Condé Nast and Hearst, who had to take limos downtown to eat at Da Silvano and Il Cantinori.
        Those two restaurants set the decorous tone for “trats” that Nicola was aiming at, a look that was definitely different from the restaurants in Belmont, which toed an established line that ran to red checkered tablecloths, badly painted murals of the Bay of Naples, Roman statuary downsized to fit into an archway, and family photos dotting the room.
        Detail by detail Tony’s dream restaurant took shape, but he’d fallen out of love with naming it Trattoria Santini, which sounded too traditional.  He’d gone through scores of names trying to get just the right sound.  “Tony’s” was too old fashioned;  Vasto too unfamiliar; La Trattoria too obvious.  But he had time to think about it.
        Meanwhile, Nicola had kept her toe in the modeling world by happily agreeing to pose for the second issue of Willi, which would be less aggressively thematic than the first but still edgy, with a mix of street and high end fashion throughout.  Elena wanted Nicola for the feature fashion article in the middle of the magazine, which only took a day to shoot, this time outside The Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue.
        While there, during the long set-ups, Elena thought to ask Nicola if she’d signed with an agency. Nicola said no, she really hadn't given it much thought.
        “You’ve gotta go with an agency, Nikki,” Elena said. “I mean, I’ll use you whenever I can—and I’d get away without paying the agency a commission.  But, if I did, all the agencies would gang up and refuse to allow me to work with their models, and I can't afford that. So, listen, here’s a card for a new place, SNAP.  It’s owned by a young guy who’s hungry and needs out of the ordinary girls.  He comes from money and he watches his girls like a brother.  He watches out for them, keeps them away from the trash and the druggies and all the rest of the scuzz in this industry.”
        By then the Sodom and Gomorrah orgies of the Studio 54 disco era had passed, but the fashion industry, inextricably engaged with the entertainment business, was still fueled by drugs and lechery, just as it had become among the hangers-on from Wall Street.
        Nicola took the card and read it, then said, “Y’know what?  I think this agency called me in Milan and wanted to sign me. And I said I’d think about it.”
        “That’s great,” Elena said.  “Then they know you and already want you. I’ll call them first.”
        “Thanks, Elena, but, I just can’t become a full-time model right now.  I don’t have the time and, frankly, I don’t have the inclination.”
        Elena rolled her eyes and said, “Honey, what you’ve got is the look, and you can make more money part-time with that look than ninety-nine percent of the struggling models out there will ever make in a full-time career.  Listen, I want to use you every month—till I get tired of you and dump you on the heap—just kidding—so you’ve got this gig.  But I can’t do that if you’re not signed with an agency. So, if nothing else, do it for me.”
        Nicola thought that was a perfectly sensible solution to her problem and said she’d be happy to sign with SNAP, if they still wanted her.
        And they most certainly did. The agency’s owner and president, Steven Holtz, told Nicola, “My God, I thought I’d lost you! You never called me back.  Well, I’m glad I have you and first things I’d like to do is to get you photographed and put together a book for you.”
        Nicola mentioned that she’d already done one shoot for Willi, and Steven said, “Elena’s terrific—she called me about you, y’know—but she’s not going to give me any prints before the first issue of Willi comes out in August. So, we’ll have one of my best photographers shoot you. Let’s see, when can you come in for a whole day?”
        The two of them discussed her schedule and with a handshake the deal was informally sealed. 
        Three days later Nicola went to the photographer’s studio in a loft not far from Willi’s offices.  The photographer, who was British and named Ronnie, received her cordially, asked if she liked some water or tea, and got to work.      
        With music blasting away—Wham, Madonna, Hall and Oates—and lights constantly being shifted, he worked at a furious pace, snapping through a roll of film, putting out his hand to receive another camera from an assistant, lying on the floor looking up, getting on a chair looking down, and, as Nicola posed, he kept up the fashion photographer’s annoying mantra: “Fabulous! Sensational! All right, work with me! Sell it to me! Make every woman who sees this want to look exactly like you!”
        Nicola found none of it amusing or even particularly helpful, but her own natural beauty seemed to please her Pygmalion.  When it was all over, Ronnie dropped the act, thanked Nicola very much and said he’d send the photos over to Steven by Monday. And that was that.
        By Monday afternoon, Steven was on the phone with Nicola, raving about the photos, then said, “When do you want to start to work?”
        Nicola said she wasn’t sure and that she didn't want to compromise Elena’s first issue by appearing in other magazines. Steven said, “Not to worry. If a magazine used you tomorrow, their next issue wouldn't be out till November at the earliest.  So that’s not a problem.  What’s your schedule like?”
        Nicola said that aside from the classes she was taking at Columbia, she was pretty free.
        “Fabulous,” Steven said. “Okay, I’m sending the contract over to you today by messenger.  Have your lawyer look it over, sign it, and let’s get to work.”