THE KINGDOM.(Valentino Garavani's works)

June has never been an easy month for Valentino, the seventy-three-year-old Roman designer. But this spring was more frantic than usual. He introduced a new fragrance--V--and celebrated in New York at the end of May with a party that began at Bergdorf Goodman, continued at the Four Seasons, and ended, close to dawn, at Bungalow 8. Two days later, he was back in Rome before travelling to Milan--a city he detests--for his men's-fashion show, which was entitled "Memory of Capri" and featured models in Lycra shorts acting out reveries from his youth. After that, he returned to his villa on the Via Appia Antica for a day of rest with his six pugs--Margot, Maude, Monty, Molly, Milton, and Maggie--and then dragged himself back to Milan, where, on July 1st, the Valentino Fashion Group was listed on Italy's stock exchange. With that, Valentino became the first of his country's famous designers--before Prada, Versace, or even Armani--to see his name quoted on the bourse. Dressed formally in a dark-blue suit, white shirt, and gray silk tie, he stood at the opening bell surrounded by mannequins draped in the red dresses that have become his signature. Within half an hour, the company's stock price had risen by eight per cent. Half an hour after that, Valentino was on a plane to Paris, where he spent the weekend making final adjustments to the forty haute-couture outfits he would put on the runway at the Theatre National de Chaillot the following week. (Haute couture remains Valentino's consuming passion, and there were still thousands of dollars' worth of jet pendants to attach, as well as scores of silk flowers to examine.)

Valentino Garavani (the surname is hinted at by the monograms on his shirts and the matchbooks on his yacht) has been working this way for nearly fifty years, since 1960, when he returned to Italy from Paris, where he had studied at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne and served his apprenticeship. "Why I ever thought I could go out on my own like that, God only knows," Valentino recalled recently. "But my parents gave me a little money and I started. I had no idea what I was getting into. Sometimes ignorance is a wonderful thing." Rome was in the final stretch of its postwar glory years. Fellini had just shot "La Dolce Vita," a film that could have served as an early documentary about Valentino's life. Anita Ekberg, Elizabeth Taylor (who was preparing to embark on "Cleopatra"), and Sophia Loren were all on the Via Veneto that year. Valentino opened an office on Via Condotti, then moved to an eighteenth-century palazzo fifty yards from the Spanish Steps, and he has been there ever since. Rome soon began to fade as a fashion center, and designers, seeing that the future was in factory-made clothes, moved to Milan, the industrial city. Valentino never considered leaving. Neither did his employees, many of whom have been with him for decades; some of his seamstresses remember the first dresses he turned out. These days, their daughters are pursuing more remunerative careers. The generation of designers Valentino grew up with--Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, even Coco Chanel--long ago passed their ateliers on to successors. Only Valentino remains. "There is the Pope, and there is Valentino," Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome, told me. "In this city, I don't know who else is as famous."

Few people have devoted more energy to the pursuit of luxury than Valentino. His homes are nearly as famous as anything he makes. There is a villa in Rome, tucked into arbors that line the route Caesar took to the imperial city; Wideville, an estate not far from Paris with a chateau surrounded by a moat and flanked by low houses, some of the most lavish gardens in Europe, and its own parish church; Chalet Gifferhorn in Gstaad, a ski lodge, where Valentino likes to spend Christmas; an apartment near the Frick museum, overlooking Central Park; and one of the largest private houses in London's Holland Park, which he bought four years ago and has restored to its original nineteenthcentury state (and then some). There is also the T. M. Blue One, a hundred-and-fifty-two-foot yacht with four flat-screen televisions, a full-time staff of eleven, and a selection of art ranging from Picassos to two of the four prints that Andy Warhol made, in 1974, of the designer himself. The first time we talked, Valentino was sitting on the aft deck of the yacht, about to set off into the Mediterranean. He is a short, powerfully built man with hair so tightly coiffed that from a distance it appears to have been baked in a kiln; he was shirtless, with patterned blue-and-white silk pants, and on his wrist he wore a new supersized Cartier Santos watch with a striking orange band made of alligator that went nicely with his tan. Valentino spends a lot of time in the sun. His skin, the color of melted caramel, has the texture of a lovingly preserved Etruscan ruin.

It is hard to have a conversation about Valentino, or with him, that does not eventually turn to the issue of retirement. He and Giancarlo Giammetti, his lifelong business partner and alter ego, sold the company in 1998, but they remain the central figures in the house, and recently, after having been sold again, the brand has experienced something of a renaissance. Sales have surged, and the number of new boutiques is growing. Rumors persist, though, and they are never fully denied either by Valentino or by the company that now owns the house. "We don't talk about these things with him," Michele Norsa, Valentino's chief execu-tive officer, told me when we met in Rome not long ago. "He is a man of a certain age, and this is difficult to address. He will go when he is ready."

"What would I do if I didn't do this?" Valentino said when I asked him about retirement. "I can't just suddenly do nothing. I am tired, though. Eight collections a year, the launches and appearances, drawings and meetings. I cannot let up for a second. You get up in the morning, you are in Rome. Then Milan. Then Paris. It's all details and deadlines: there are the dresses and fabrics and shoes and fragrances." Lowering his voice, he said, "There is also my life. On Monday and Tuesday, I will simply have to steal two days from my work. I have no choice. They called me from Wideville. What has happened at Wideville is hard to believe." I had no idea what he was talking about. "There has been an explosion of roses," he said. "There are thousands. Hundreds of thousands. You cannot imagine it. . . . I must go. It is not convenient. Perhaps it is not right. But this garden must be seen now. There are many things you have to do in life, but you cannot ignore the roses. When they demand to be seen, one simply has no choice but to go to them."

Valentino produces hundreds of drawings each year, his company manufactures a remarkable amount of clothing, and if he could he would stitch every dress himself. But he is also a man who has fully embraced the concept of quitting time. "I don't think you have to suffer and weep to make a dress,'' he told me one day in his studio in Rome, while he was fitting a black chiffon gown on a model for his Paris show. "I do my work, but when I am done I am done." No one who knows Valentino well would question for a minute his need to look at roses in France at the busiest moment in ...