Meet the 80-year-old designer behind Mercato Mall celebrating 50 years in the UAE: 'This is my country, my home'

Dubai: Annamaria Amarante Damiani's first day in the UAE did not go to plan. She landed on 29 June, straight into the heat, and her suitcases were nowhere to be found, lost somewhere in Beirut. She would eventually get them back three months later.

And yet. "I fell in love with this place as soon as I arrived, although it was not easy," she says. That was 1976. Fifty years later, she hasn't left, and has no intention of doing so. "This is my country. After 50 years."

Italian "very much Italian," she insists, Anna was actually born in Eritrea, in Africa, where she spent a good part of her early life before circumstances forced the family to leave. After a brief spell in Italy, they were offered the chance to come to the UAE, arriving first in Sharjah with her husband and their four-year-old daughter, Antonella Damiani. Her husband, Agostino Damiani, started out as a businessman and then was also asked to be the honorary Italian consulate for six years back when a consulate didn't exist.

Life filled up quickly. Anna is a lifelong tennis player, her daughter took to horse riding, her husband to diving, and the family built a rich, active life around all of it. What sealed her attachment, though, was something quieter. "The main thing is safety, protection. You feel protected," she says. "It's a very good life, a little bit like the life we had in Africa. That's why I'm very attached to it."

Interior design wasn't Anna's first love, fashion was, but a conservative upbringing meant certain paths were closed to her as a young woman. So she waited. Once her daughter was old enough not to need her quite so much, she finally began working as an interior designer, and never stopped.

These days she runs her own small company rather than the large firm she once worked for, and she wouldn't have it any other way. What she loves most is the collaboration. "Interior design is not only the ideas of a designer, it's the ideas of the client that we have to work on, to enhance, to beautify, to make it practical." Decades in, the satisfaction hasn't faded.

Anna's most cherished professional memory is one many UAE residents walk through without a second thought. Her company designed and built Mercato Mall, the Florence-inspired shopping centre whose façade mimics Renaissance buildings and whose interior nods to Tuscan farmhouses and an old railway station.

She'll never forget its opening night, in 2002. The mall stood dark, empty, the crowd waiting outside for the inauguration.

His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, arrived to cut the ribbon. "At the moment he cut the tape to declare it open, all the lights went on, and the Italian national anthem went on," she recalls, followed by the UAE anthem. "It was so emotional. I had tears in my eyes, to see how welcome a piece of Italy was in this country."

Ask Anna what her favourite memories are and she can talk for hours on end, and she doesn't reach for the glamour. One story she shared with us was from 35 years ago.

She was rushing her then 13-year-old daughter to horse riding, in a hurry, when she took a wrong turn. Driving fast, she didn't notice the road was about to run out, and before she could react, the tarmac gave way to open desert. The car shot off the edge and buried itself in the sand. She couldn't move it. There was nothing and nobody around, and the closest building she could make out was at least a 45-minute walk across the dunes, an impossible trek in the heat with a young girl beside her.

Then, far off on the horizon, she spotted something. A shape, moving. "This figure that I saw far away slowly, slowly came closer. It took shape," she remembers. It was three men on camels, making their way toward the stranded car.

"At the beginning I was a little worried because I didn't speak the language," she admits. But there was nothing to fear. The men reached them and simply asked, "shoo mushkila?", what's the problem? She explained she was stuck, and had her little girl with her.

Their response was relieving: "mafi mushkila, mafi mushkila", no problem, no problem.

What happened next she still can't quite believe. The three of them set to work, looping ropes to the camels, and together the animals hauled her car up out of the sand and back onto the road. Then they were gone. No fuss, nothing asked in return. "I don't think this would ever happen anywhere. I'll never forget it." Her daughter, 13 that day, is 55 now.

Something else Anna shared with us was her art.

Walking inside her villa in Sharjah we spotted her intricate paintings all over her walls.

Years ago, she met the wife of the Hilton Hotel's manager, a woman named Rekha who travelled the world and taught batik. Anna had never heard of it. "I was a good designer at school, but I never knew what was batik," she says. She learned it's an intricate Far Eastern technique, drawing with wax heated to 300 degrees to protect each colour, and she still has the old equipment she learned on.

She took us through what she loves about it is that you never quite know what you'll get. "At the end you don't know what is coming out, because it's all a big mass of wax and colours," she explained. Only after ironing the wax out with newspaper does the finished piece finally reveal itself. "Then you have a surprise."

Her work captures the old sanded-floor souk of Sharjah, Bastakiya, a mosque, a falcon, a Sharjah beach, and more recently African subjects, which she says are the hardest of all, the fine detail nearly impossible to achieve. She credits it all to her teacher. "I was very lucky because my teacher was very good," she says. She once exhibited the pieces at the old art centre in Jumeirah.

Then there was the tennis, a love that had to wait. It began, in a sense, when she was a teenager, but her conservative upbringing meant lessons were out of the question. So she taught herself.

"Nobody teach me, but I was always looking, and I was always hitting the ball on the wall," she says. She only really started playing properly once she was in the UAE, and she threw herself into it, matches under the August sun with a swimming pool right beside the court. The moment a game finished, in they'd all go. "We would jump in the swimming pool with the shoes, with a racket, everything."

She played alongside a whole circle of women, one of whom, she notes with some pride, went on to become a senior figure at Wimbledon. "I won, I lost. I have trophies."

Now Anna wants to put it all down on paper. She's begun writing a book about her life, and she's particular about one thing: she wants someone from UAE to help her tell it.

Her reason is the same one that runs through everything she says. She wants the world to understand that the UAE is "not only the glamour and the beautiful things," but a place with a very good base of understanding, of respect. Half a century in, that's the story she's still trying to tell.

"I do love UAE," she says. And after fifty years, a lost suitcase, a desert rescue and a mall full of Florentine light, it's an afternoon spent unravelling years of fond memories and love for a country that she calls her home and more.