Giorgiana Notarbartolo di Villarosa works with her family's single family office, PFC – Partners For Change, where she is the Head of Impact and Philanthropy. Among other things, her work explores how inherited wealth can become a force for social and environmental change. She is a graduate of Bocconi University and INSEAD, a mother, and writes about stewardship, inheritance and systems change.
When I look at my son, I no longer spend much time wondering how much I'll leave him. My partner and I have had that conversation and, for now, we've found an answer that feels right. What occupies me much more is what I'll leave him carrying, because what we carry tends to shape a life far more than what we own.
I often say that I won the “ovary lottery”, a phrase I borrowed from Sid, co-founder of Generation Pledge, which captures exactly how I feel about inherited wealth. I played no role in being born into my family and did nothing to deserve the opportunities that came with it. The more I sit with it, though, the less I believe inheritance is really about assets. Assets are only the visible part, the tip of the iceberg. What we really inherit are stories, fears, expectations, silences and ways of seeing the world that pass so quietly from one generation to the next that we mistake them for truth.
Ways of seeing the world that pass so quietly from one generation to the next that we mistake them for truth.
In terms of assets, I inherited wealth when I turned eighteen. Legally, that was the moment I became wealthy. Psychologically, I don't think I inherited it for another fifteen years. At first I ignored it almost completely, because I wanted to build a life on my own merit. Later I acknowledged that it existed but related to it as a hot potato, something I hadn't created, didn't particularly want and certainly didn't feel capable of managing. It seemed to me both incredibly valuable and incredibly fragile, and my role was simply to pass it on without breaking it or losing it.
Looking back, I can see that I wasn't only inheriting wealth. I was inheriting a way of understanding wealth.
My ancestors built businesses, foundations, institutions and companies whose names were already part of Italian history, and measuring myself against that felt impossible. Growing up, privilege was acknowledged in my family, but it was never celebrated. My father reminded me that we were fortunate and that this carried a responsibility to be kind and generous with the world.
Alongside those lessons came another inheritance, which was caution. On my father's side, the family story was one of decline. The Notarbartolo di Villarosa family had once owned vast amounts of land across Sicily before successive generations gradually lost it, and the lesson I took from that was that wealth could disappear. On my mother's side, another story shaped my understanding. During a difficult financial period her beloved pony was sold because the family could no longer afford to keep it. They could have sold a painting instead, they didn't. Whether that decision made financial sense is almost irrelevant now; what remained was the lesson that even when you are surrounded by privilege, security can vanish. So I inherited privilege and scarcity at the same time. Perhaps that is not such an unusual combination. It is deeply human to fear losing something we value, and many families pass on abundance and the fear of its disappearance together.
There was another inheritance too, which was what it meant to be a woman. At home I grew up surrounded by incredibly strong women, my mother and grandmother held enormous authority within the family. Outside the home, I watched men's careers take precedence over women's as though that were simply the natural order of things. At the beginning of my MBA we were told that, statistically, women should expect to earn around 30 per cent less than the men sitting beside them, and I remember wondering how a difference that large could be accepted as normal. Ironically, even getting to business school involved resistance. My mother struggled to understand why I wanted an MBA when I was already engaged.
For years, I unknowingly carried these inheritances. They quietly guided my choices, shaped my relationship with wealth as something to preserve, fear losing or distance myself from, rather than consciously steward, and influenced how I understood my place in the world, as both a woman and an inheritor.
The turning point came in 2015, when I discovered impact investing. People often assume impact investing changed the way we invest at PFC, and it did, but it also changed something much more fundamental. It changed my relationship with wealth, my understanding of my career and, ultimately, the direction of my life. For the first time I realised that I could make more than money with money, and, more importantly, I found a way to take ownership of something I had spent years trying either to ignore or simply to preserve. Only then do I think I truly inherited my wealth. Only then did I begin to embody my privilege as a capacity, and a responsibility, to help change the world for the better, rather than as something to protect.
That was also the beginning of a question that has stayed with me ever since: how can I maximise the positive impact of the extraordinary lottery I won? That question gradually reshaped my own relationship with wealth and the way I thought about our family's capital. I came to realise that together our capital could achieve far more than any of us could individually, and I began to see the untapped potential of the family office as a platform for advocacy and influence rather than only an investment vehicle. Over time I came to believe that our greatest contribution might not come from our capital alone, but from demonstrating that wealth can be stewarded differently and, in doing so, encouraging other families to rethink the role their own wealth can play.
If I wanted us to walk a different path together, though, I first had to find my own voice within my family and our family office. One memory on that journey has stayed with me. At one of our regular family meetings, my grandfather read out every listed equity position, its dividends and its performance, and I asked how those results compared with the benchmark. The room froze. To me it was a reasonable question; to him it was probably a challenge to his authority, a questioning of his judgement and a lack of appreciation for everything he had created. That moment was not really about investments at all. It was about governance, and about a culture in which decisions had traditionally flowed from the top and questioning those who led felt unsafe.
As my grandfather gradually stepped back from leadership, space opened for a different kind of conversation. I met one to one with each of the other nine shareholders, using the Sustainable Development Goals as a starting point for understanding what mattered to each of us and what we wanted our wealth to stand for. Slowly, those conversations helped us broaden our definition of success, from creating value primarily through financial growth to asking how that value could also contribute to society. One of the most important tools in that journey has been our family constitution. Many people imagine a family constitution as a legal document. It isn't, at least not primarily. It is a conversation across generations about who we want to be together and what we want our wealth to do.
It is a conversation across generations about who we want to be together and what we want our wealth to do.
For a long time I believed my responsibility was to preserve what I had inherited. Today, I think stewardship asks something more demanding. A willingness to keep asking:
What is worth keeping?
What needs healing?
What deserves to end with us?
Those questions have quietly shaped every part of my work over the last decade. They explain, at least in part, why our family office is on a journey towards impact investing, why we think about philanthropy as part of a whole portfolio rather than something separate, and why I eventually made tax justice the primary focus of my own redistribution, despite initially wondering what tax had to do with inequality. Over time I came to understand that catalytic, systems-change philanthropy can achieve extraordinary things, but that fair taxation builds the foundations of a society in which fewer people need philanthropy in the first place. People often describe these choices as political. To me they have always felt deeply personal.
In that search for positive impact I often return to an idea immortalised in The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, that everything must change so that everything can stay the same. I take it as a warning not to mistake movement for genuine progress. It reminds me to keep asking whether the work I am doing is changing systems or merely changing appearances, because what I fear most is realising that, despite the opportunities I inherited, my efforts created activity rather than lasting change.
I take it as a warning not to mistake movement for genuine progress.
The further I walk this journey, the more I believe inheritance is simply what passes from one generation to the next. Sometimes that is money. More often it is stories, fears, beliefs, dreams, trauma, shame and ambition. The question is less whether we inherit and more what we choose to carry forward.
When I look again at my son, I return to the question with which I began: what will I leave him carrying? I hope it is the confidence to question, the courage to change his mind, and the conviction that whatever privilege he has carries opportunities as well as responsibilities. Most of all, I hope he knows that his worth does not depend on what he owns, earns or achieves. Beyond our family, I hope his generation inherits a world where power is shared more fairly, where abuses of power become less acceptable, and where opportunity depends less on the accident of birth.
Perhaps inheriting differently is simply this: choosing, consciously, what deserves to endure, what needs healing, and what should end with us.