Richard Demarco

My family are a mix really. They arrived in Scotland from Italy. My father’s family came via Paris at the end of the 19th century and my mother’s family came from Italy via Dublin and Belfast. My blood is Italian with a touch of Irish. They were some of the first Italians to arrive in the late 1890s I was born in Edinburgh in the 1930s not far from here. I’ve seen great changes to Edinburgh in my lifetime.

The biggest change of all was the sense of being connected with Europe. The only way I felt connected before was through my Italian family restaurant called Maison Demarco in Portobello on the promenade. It smelled of my uncles French cigars and Italian coffee it was all very continental.

The Edinburgh I was born into was a city that had little contact with the continent except through the Italian community that came here in significant numbers and made the Scots aware of delicacies like ice cream.

My Italian heritage has given me a totally objective view about Scotland. I look at it every day as if I’m in a strange and exotic, foreign place. 

This helps me see Scotland isn’t the only place in which I can work. It makes me feel at home in other countries everywhere, in Europe particularly. I have worked in 52 different countries with artists of all kinds.

My job is to bring together artists (painters, sculptors, writers, singers, dancers, composers, musicians) in dialogue with scientists of all kinds, politicians, businessmen, economists, soldiers, sailors, police what I’ve just described goes back to the Scottish Enlightenment where you had painters like Henry Raeburn speaking to great scientists like James Hutton and economists, philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith.

Edinburgh inspired great poets like Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns and when architects were like artists, they thought like artists. Robert Adam who built Charlotte Square is an example of this. I hope and pray that during my lifetime this spirit will revive, so I keep my balance between business and art.

I realise I’ve been blessed to have experienced every single Edinburgh International Festival, all 60!

What I love about the Festival Fringe is the fact that it is increasingly important to the lives of countless young people at school and university who travel in some cases many thousands of miles to present their love of theatre.

Perhaps the high point of the Edinburgh Festival was the first production in 1948 of The Thrie Estaites in the Assembly Hall, associated with the annual gathering of the Church of Scotland Ministers.

I myself used Inchcolm Abbey in a production of Macbeth in Italian and Scots in ‘87 and ‘88, Inchcolm is an island in the Firth of Forth, with strong associations with the world of Shakespeare and Macbeth. I still have hopes there will be another production on that sacred island.

 Last year I was delighted to present over 70 performing arts productions. I found on my theatre programme highly professional Broadway veterans from Toronto in a world premier of a musical celebrating the life of Rob Roy.

Alongside that was a production from an American university called Davidson College working in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Sunderland Youth Orchestra. There was also a play from a High School in a North American Indian Reservation in Arizona. 

My greatest achievement ever in the arts was helping to establish the Traverse Theatre. I was a co-founder. I couldn’t stand Edinburgh being so quiet once the festival was over: I wanted the spirit of the festival throughout the year.

I had friends that shared my need and hope. They were all very conscious of the fact that the Edinburgh Festival had given the city a chance to play a major role on the international world stage, attracting the attention of the world’s greatest artists to Edinburgh.

The Traverse was born out of the festival, The Demarco Gallery was born out of the Traverse and the Demarco European Art Foundation was born out of the gallery. The Demarco gallery and foundation have created institutions that are to linked to education through the arts and the best known of these institutions is called Edinburgh Arts.

Edinburgh Arts was founded in collaboration with Edinburgh University in 1972 as an experimental summer school for highly creative people from all over the world. The aim was for them to be inspired by Edinburgh, Scotland and the Edinburgh Festival and collaborate with the leading Scottish artists, scientists, historians and teachers.

The Traverse helped me to fulfil my dream of being a teacher, using the language of the arts and the sciences to help Scotland retain a sense of its European cultural identity. I believe that if Scotland loses this sense of cultural identity it is not properly prepared to play its role on a world stage.