On August 9, the Romazzino, a Belmond hotel set above the water on the Costa Smeralda, becomes the setting for one of the more closely held events of the European summer. Big Art Festival returns to Porto Cervo for a second consecutive year, and this time the headline booking is Robbie Williams.
The evening is built around the hotel's pool. Guests arrive for a sunset cocktail over the Mediterranean, sit down to a gala dinner, and the night ends with a live performance.
A stadium artist in a room that is not a stadium
Williams has spent more than three decades doing this, has sold over 85 million records, and has a back catalogue that functions as generational shorthand. What has always distinguished him live is the ability to turn a set into something closer to a conversation with the room.
That quality is easier to deliver to a few hundred people than to a stadium, which is the argument the evening rests on. The distance between performer and audience effectively disappears, and the result belongs to one night and one group of people rather than to a tour.
Why events like this exist now
The luxury market has been moving for several years from things you can buy toward experiences that cannot be reproduced at scale. Value attaches less to the name on the poster than to the context around it: where it happens, who is in the room, how the night is paced, and how close you actually get.
Big Art Festival has spent five years building a format at that intersection, mixing music, art, fashion, gastronomy and hospitality, and drawing an audience of collectors, entrepreneurs, family offices and cultural figures. The Porto Cervo edition marks the project's fifth anniversary.
Jewellery as part of the programme
Chopard returns as a partner, continuing a long standing relationship with the festival. Rather than staging a conventional presentation, the Maison will show Haute Joaillerie pieces during dinner, paired with silhouettes from Caroline's Couture, so the jewellery moves through the evening as part of the visual narrative instead of sitting behind glass.
DENZA, the premium brand within the BYD Group, joins as the other principal partner and brings the technology dimension, showing its own reading of contemporary luxury built around intelligent design and comfort.
