What a life! Principessa Borghese strides from the catwalk to the art world

There have been many Sydney "princesses" to come out of prestigious girls' schools Ascham and Sacred Heart convent at Kincoppal, but none that have had quite the extraordinary life of former student Principessa Nike Arrighi Borghese.

Now an accomplished artist aged in her early 70s, she spends her days as the elegant chatelaine of a magnificent 15th-century villa an hour out of Rome.

But Borghese is back on her old Sydney stomping ground this weekend to unveil an artwork she was commissioned to create by the Vatican, which will be hung in the Crypt at St Mary's Cathedral on Sunday before being sent off to Rome.

Then she will unveil her latest collection of works at her good friend Peter Crisp's gallery in Yass, her work set within a historic sheep property where the old sheds have been transformed into galleries amid landscaped gardens.

So who is the Principessa Borghese?

Born Marcella Arrighi, her father, Ernesto Arrighi, was an Italian diplomat and an artist. Her mother, Eleanora Douglas Cox, was a prima ballerina, a leading model for 1930s dress designer Schiaparelli and a descendant of the Blue Mountains road builder William Cox.

Ernesto was Italian vice-consul in Melbourne before World War II. During the war he was consul in Nice and was jailed by the Germans for not releasing funds he held in trust for Italian workers. Eleanora fled to her parents-in-law in Rome with their two small daughters: Marcella and her older sister, Luciana. Immediately after the war she took them to her mother in Sydney where they were educated, first at Ascham, then at the Sacred Heart convent, Kincoppal, in Elizabeth Bay.

Modelling runs in the family and Nike's sister, Luciana, was with Yves Saint Laurent. Nike has strutted before Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich and was once dismissed by Paris fashion-house Nina Ricci for walking "too gaily" down a catwalk after an American fashion magazine suggested she walked "like a salesgirl in a department store".

From her modelling days she embarked on a movie career that included starring with Christopher Lee in the film version of Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out. She had a small part in Jerry Lewis' Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the River.

In Hong Kong she married Prince Paolo Borghese, the eldest son of one of Rome's best-known aristocratic families, whom she first met in Sydney when she was 15 and he was working as an engineer.