Alliata was born in
Palermo to Prince Enrico Maria Alliata di Villafranca, Duke of
Salaparuta (1879–1946), and a former opera singer, Oria Maria Amelia "Sonia" Ortúzar Ovalle de Olivares (1892–1981), the daughter of a Chilean diplomat. After graduating from
liceo artistico, Alliata studied fine arts at the
Accademia di Belle Arti di Palermo, where she was a fellow student of
Renato Guttuso, who portrayed her in several of his early paintings. They were released at the end of the war in September 1945, and returned to Italy in 1946, settling in
Bagheria, where Alliata engaged in the family business, the Salaparuta's Crow Wines. In 1955 Alliata and Maraini decided to separate. However, as divorce was illegal in Italy at the time, they were only able to
divorce in 1970. Alliata subsequently moved to
Rome, where she continued her work as a painter. In 1959 she sold the family wine business and founded Galleria Topazia Alliata in
Trastevere, where she mainly exhibited avant-garde painters, including
Carla Accardi, Eugene Charlton, Mario and Egidio de Grossi,
Jannis Kounellis,
Piero Manzoni,
Fabio Mauri, Mohamed Melehi and
Lucio Pozzi. In 1973 Alliata was one of the co-founders of the Guttuso Museum in Bagheria. In 2014 Alliata published ''Love Holidays: Quaderni d'amore e di viaggi'', a partly photographic autobiography. In 2016 her work was the subject of a large retrospective at Fondazione Sant'Elia in
Palermo. == Works ==