Ciprolla, Miss Monaco: 1. Considering your national culture and what your childhood was like, how has your culture and upbringing shaped who you have become? If at all. Well just like Monaco, I’m very worldly and globally focused. I’m also very intellectual, and I’m the second-tiniest contestant in the Rainyverse pageant. I moved to Monaco when I was 16. My grandmother had retired there, and we went there for a short visit and I just fell in love with the country and couldn't leave. Well, first I fell in love with a beautiful Greek boy I met on the beach there. Then I fell out of love with him and in love with Monaco. I stayed behind and lived with grandma when my father and mother went back to France and Spain, respectively. I have two brothers, one older and one younger. We’re very close. The younger one is in Spain with mom right now, and the older one is in his sixth or seventh year at Brown. He's studying painting, or philosophy. Maybe the philosophy of painting, or international politics. I don't know. One of my grandfathers on my father's side was a big shipping guy in Hong Kong. My father dabbled in filmmaking and mother was a big fashion model in the 60s. Before I moved to Monaco, I grew up in an artists' colony near Barcelona with all those surrealists. They kept lobsters in the pool, and you could wear whatever you wanted at any time. It’s really hard not to be worldly and creative when one lives in a place like Monaco, surrounded by really intellectual artists and classy people. I'm always busy. I love collecting things. They say I have a very acquisitive personality. I love posing for pictures and going to parties. I have little part in a movie about Robert Mapplethorpe that's coming out in May. All the photography scenes are shot in black and white. it's deliciously artistic. And I'm working with a company to launch a signature line of tablewear - beautiful plates and silver. The cheese knives look like little curled-up lobsters, it's wonderful. The temperate weather makes us all very passionate people. Personally, I just got out of a very tumultuous, devastating love affair. He's a big novelist, very intellectual, and he sees all these beautiful models. He's very important, and we had a very passionate, artistic relationship. It was torrid and terrible and effervescently fizzy and wonderful and all kinds of extreme. I heard he's writing a play about it. That was a devastating experience, but I'm over it now. I'm terribly in love with a beautiful Italian, but it's unrequited. It's awful. I can't sleep at all because I'm keeping it a secret. I haven't told a soul. I think it's unhealthy, but it's not the sort of thing you can just talk about. My friends say I should just seduce him, but I don't think that would work on him, he's not shallow. He's really very cerebral. You meet such interesting people in Monaco! They come from all over to visit our beautiful country. And of course we have to return the favor by taking our beautiful people elsewhere. Wittgenstein once told me that it’s really essential to keep things in balance, and I think that’s so important. I used to go to Morocco and buy beautiful things and go horseback riding in the desert. I have some Arabian riding boots that are just amazing. I'll never tell anyone where I got them. I can't go there now, so I love to go to Thailand and ride around in those little boats. Sometimes it’s hard, though. Monaco is such a fast-paced, exciting place to live. I'm so busy! I wish I could take more time to just do little mundane things. And I wish I could live someplace very austere, surrounded by clean surfaces. But I can't escape the clutter. Things are the detritus of life, I suppose. I'm really very passionate about things. I'm very articulate and pensive. And I'm very egalitarian. I just love people, and Monaco is the best place to be if you’re a person who loves people and artistic expression.