apollo landing; william norwich meets a storied italian family and polls the pretty people on the best parties of the year.(Borromeo family at the Apollo Circle Benefit)

Byline: William Norwich

On a cold city night not long ago, a pack of seasoned party photographers assembled in the great hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to cover the annual Apollo Circle Benefit, cosponsored by Carolina Herrera and Sotheby's. (The Apollo Circle is the museum's popular membership group, ages 21 to 39.)

Those you might call the usual suspects, lovingly please, made their entrances, the photographers responding diligently. But then into view came a most distinguished, but unknown, young man and woman, so chicly comported that you just assumed their first baby steps had to have been taken on the deck of some great yacht. Oh, happy night, there was new blood-most likely the color of old money, blue-in town.

The perfect strangers glided into the party.

Earlier in the evening, this dynamic duo, Carlo Borromeo and his sister Matilde Borromeo, were introduced to the likes of Byrdie Bell, Tory Burch, Elizabeth Lindemann, Eleanor Ylvisaker, Marina Rust, and Renee Rockefeller at a small dinner convened by Mrs. Herrera and fashion executive Mario Grauso at Marjorie Gubelmann's cheerful apartment on the Upper East Side.

For the uninitiated, the Borro_- meos, friends of the designer and her husband, are of an aristocratic Italian family that dates back to fourteenth-century Florence and whose ancestors include archbishops and, presumably more practical, some very rich bankers. At the moment, the family is perhaps best known in Europe for its four glamorous Borromeo sisters, who are to Italian society and fashion what the Cushing, Bouvier, and Miller sisters are to America. Isabella Borromeo married the petroleum heir Ugo Peretti; Beatrice is a model and actress; and Lavinia is wed to John Elkann, the Agnelli who heads his family's businesses. Remembering the fairy-tale splendor of Lavinia's wedding on her father's private island, Isola Madre on Lago Maggiore-her ivory silk Valentino dress reportedly took upward of 60 days for ruching ...