Damiano David and Dove Cameron are set to get married this month in Italy and are also the cover of Vogue Italia’s next issue. Read the interview and check the pictures below:
I meet Dove Cameron and Damiano David on the terrace of the American Academy in Rome, surrounded by umbrella pines and domes stretching across the horizon. Founded in 1894 as a residency for American artists, architects, writers and scholars, the Academy occupies a singular place in Rome, where ancient Roman studies and American intellectual life meet. It feels like the perfect setting for two artists who have built a life across continents.
Since confirming their relationship in 2024 and announcing their engagement earlier this year, Damiano David and Dove Cameron have become one of pop culture’s most closely watched couples. He is the Roman frontman who took Måneskin from busking on Via del Corso to arenas around the world before embarking on a solo career. She is the actress and singer who first rose to fame through Disney before becoming one of today’s most distinctive musical voices. Their careers unfold on enormous stages, but they seem most intent on protecting everything that happens once the spotlight is off.
Photographer Malick Bodian has imagined today’s story almost like a short film. Together with stylist Luca Galasso he has taken the couple on a journey through hidden corners of Rome rather than posing against its monuments. A romantic road movie off the beaten path.
We begin in Monteverde Vecchio, just a few minutes from Bravetta, the neighborhood that shaped Damiano long before stadium tours and Grammy ceremonies. It was here that he first introduced Dove to his Rome and, in many ways, to his life. Over the past few years, Dove has spent months constantly on the move, recording music, filming independent projects and, more recently, becoming the face of Diesel’s first women’s fragrance under Glenn Martens’ creative direction.
But when Damiano first showed her the city, he opted instead for a trip down memory lane through his adolescence.
“Of course there was the classic Trastevere stroll. We went back to the pub where I used to hang out and all the streets where I had my first formative experiences,” Damiano recalls. He mentions Samovar and the legendary Bar San Calisto, where elderly regulars still play cards over Peroni beers while students, artists and musicians fill the piazza outside. His favorite restaurant is a family-run place near St. Peter’s owned by two childhood friends.
Their first holiday together was in Puglia. At lunch one afternoon, Dove looked around the table in amazement. “She said, ‘There’s not a single thing on this table that isn’t accompanied by bread,’” Damiano recalls, laughing. “Of course. Bread is your friend!”.
As we enter one of the Academy buildings, Dove apologizes in flawless Italian. “Devi parlare molto lentamente.” (You’ll have to speak very slowly.) For a moment I’m convinced she’s already fluent. She laughs. “No, I’m still taking lessons.”
Cameron, born Chloe Celeste Hosterman and later adopting the nickname her late father called her, first became a household name through Liv and Maddie and the Descendants films before launching a music career that culminated in the billion-stream, platinum hit Boyfriend. Today, with more than 64 million followers across platforms, she moves effortlessly between music and film, releasing her first overtly political song, Breakfast, in 2022 in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and most recently completing Roxy Sorkin’s independent feature Hot Year, accepting the role, she says, simply because she “couldn’t stop thinking about the script.” This fall she’ll release her new album, featuring her most personal music yet, work she describes as instinctive and emotionally honest.
A similar process seems to be unfolding for Damiano. The teenager who busked on the streets of Rome with three friends before finishing second on X Factor would, within a few extraordinary years, win both Sanremo and Eurovision with Måneskin’s Zitti e buoni, who were nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist in 2023, sell out arenas, from Tokyo to New York, record platinum albums like Teatro d’ira: Vol. I and Rush!, and become one of the defining frontmen of his generation. In 2024, he stepped away from the band for another leap into the unknown. Funny Little Fears, his first solo album, released in 2025, revealed a more introspective side of his songwriting.
Now that the couple divide their lives between Rome and Los Angeles, I ask what it has felt like to step into each other’s worlds. Dove’s curiosity extends well beyond the studio. Growing up, she spent long periods in India because of her parents’ work. Her mother is a writer and poet, and her late father, Philip Hosterman, was a jewelry designer and classically trained pianist who played jazz. “I’ve always felt comfortable stepping into a different culture. I find it one of the most exciting and interesting privileges I could ever have: entering worlds that are unfamiliar to me and feeling embraced. It’s really one of the most important parts of my life.” She smiles. “And if something scares me that’s usually the first sign that I should probably do it.”
Dove has embraced Italy with remarkable openness. Has Damiano approached America with the same curiosity? I ask him. He laughs. “I stopped looking for Rome in LA.” At first, he instinctively searched for Roman rhythms, streets, and habits. Eventually he realized Los Angeles could never replace his hometown and it became something else.
Today he lives far from the manicured fantasy of Hollywood. The white-picket-fence version of Los Angeles never interested him.“When I’m there, my life is almost the complete opposite of what it is in Italy. Los Angeles has become the place where I go to recharge. I sleep more, wake up later, take better care of myself. And because I make almost all of my music in English, there’s an infrastructure there that lets you work at the highest possible level.”
Asked about recording at legendary studios like Sunset Sound, where everyone from The Doors to The Rolling Stones left their mark, he admits the mythology is thrilling, but only as a visitor. “Then you actually work there and realize… Nothing beats the feeling of recording in your own home.”
Home studios have become his ideal environment: gardens outside the window instead of parking lotsand sunlight instead of fluorescent bulbs. “My favorite part is the songwriting. It never feels like work. It’s like summer camp,” he says. “The first hour we just talk nonsense around a table. Eventually someone plays something, somebody else adds an idea, and suddenly there’s a song. If nothing happens, you come back the next day.”
Dove’s Los Angeles is equally far removed from cliché. When I ask about her happy place, she laughs. “It’s an old movie theater in Burbank, near the high school I attended after moving to Los Angeles at thirteen. Whenever I’m overwhelmed, I just want to disappear there. I get an absurd amount of popcorn and candy and hide in another world for a few hours. Film is therapy for me.”
Somewhere between an ocean and two continents, they seem to have arrived at the same definition of home. It has become less a place than a shared state of mind. The couple spends weeks at a time rearranging film shoots, recording sessions and travel so they rarely have to spend long apart.
“We don’t want to be in a long-distance relationship,” Dove says. “We put a lot of effort into making it feel normal.” Damiano nods. “In my heart and in my mind, home will always be Rome, but these days it has much more to do with who I’m with. When I’m with Chloe, even if we’re on tour and happen to be in Baden-Baden, Germany, I feel at home. We really are enough for each other.”
I ask about their favorite domestic ritual. Damiano giggles before admitting, “We watch reality shows.” He proudly tells me he recently made Dove binge The 50, pausing to explain the contestants and the tangled web of Italian celebrity lore. “After all, that’s culture too.”
The same philosophy carried over into Damiano‘s marriage proposal. It happened at home while they were packing for a trip. Dove was wearing an oversized T-shirt, her hair still wet, without makeup. Before asking her to marry him, he told her that while many people dream of elaborate romantic gestures, their world was already full of spectacle. Romance, he said, had come to mean something else: doing chores together, cooking together, growing old together.
“Because of the way the internet works, people only see the big moments. I was just in Malta accepting an award, and of course those photos stay in circulation. But in between that, there were two months when we were just grocery shopping, cooking, and figuring out our new juicer,” Dove adds.
Between conversations and outfit changes, it’s time to shoot the sunset photographs at Il Fontanone on the Janiculum, the monumental seventeenth-century fountain overlooking Rome and one of the city’s most photographed viewpoints. Around Dove and Damiano, chaos reigns. There isn’t much time and everyone is racing the setting sun. A portable changing room is loaded onto a van. Phones ring constantly.
At one point, Damiano stands shirtless while a stylist adjusts his clothes. Dove absentmindedly traces the tattoos across his back as though no one else were there. Later, while everyone debates lighting, he leans over to kiss her forehead. This seems to be their superpower. Everyone else is having panic attacks, but they keep finding each other in a private calm.
The piazzale in front of the fountain is more crowded than expected. A tour bus full of kids has just pulled in alongside a crowd of bachelorette party girls. Paparazzi and curious onlookers begin circling the production vans. A police officer arrives, followed by a military officer. It turns out our permits are technically in order, just not exactly. The request hadn’t specified that the roof of the Spanish Embassy, visible from this angle, cannot appear in published photographs for security reasons. Someone jokingly suggests calling the mayor. The military officer smiles politely. “We’re in Rome, even the mayor has to follow procedure.”
It may be the most quintessentially Roman moment of the day: that peculiar collision of grandeur and bureaucracy. Emperors, popes, and municipal offices exist on the same administrative continuum. When I glance inside the van, I catch Damiano rolling his eyes with the faintest I told you so expression. Like a true Monteverde native, he has seen this movie enough times to know exactly how it will end. Dove, meanwhile, seems almost delighted. Later I ask whether this kind of thing ever frustrates her.
“Not at all,” she laughs. “I feel like this is Rome. At a certain point you just surrender to the chaos. Something always happens. If everything went perfectly, you’d have nothing to remember. Instead, it becomes one of those stories you tell forever.” She loves the informal atmosphere that develops in Italy.
“When you meet people here, you feel like you’ve known them already. There’s no getting-to-know-you process. That’s my dream. I always feel like I know people anyway. I just want to skip to the part where we’re all friends.” Damiano says that’s exactly what he values most about her.
“I have enormous respect for the way she relates to people. She has a much greater ability than I do to open herself up to the world and invite people into her life. I’m more of a grump. I tend to keep my guard up and protect myself from the world. But somehow those two sides fit together perfectly.”
As the sun begins to set, the permits still haven’t arrived. We give up on the Fontanone and head instead to Villa Sciarra, a choice much more in keeping with their intimate nature: hidden paths, secret staircases and a small wrought-iron-and-stucco temple tucked into the upper part of the park near the ancient walls and a tunnel of wisteria, one of Rome’s most romantic corners. In the coming months, this young couple will be married. Before then, Dove’s new single, When in Rome, will have been released (Sept. 9th).
In a way, they’re the Sartre and Beauvoir of contemporary pop music. Separate bodies of work. Shared life. “There was a point where I got so scared of what everyone was saying,” Dove tells me. “I started thinking less about, ‘What do I want to say?’ and more about, ‘Will people like this?’” Eventually she replaced that question with another: “What would I write if nobody ever heard this song?” The answer became a collection of songs that read almost like diary entries, drawing from the music she grew up with.
Damiano has a slightly different inner monologue. “I honestly never thought an Italian artist could reach that many people, sell that many tickets… and to do it with the three friends I started playing with when we were fourteen, when the whole thing felt like a joke. There’s something incredibly romantic about that.”
Then, with perfect Roman cynicism, he adds: “But at the end of the day, I sing songs. We’re not demigods. I like reminding myself of that. Sometimes people in this industry start thinking they’re messiahs.”
Even if they fiercely protect their separate creative processes, the conversation between them never really stops. “He told me the other day, ‘You love a shuffle,’” Dove laughs. “And I realized he was completely right. We don’t really collaborate. We just want to create next to each other.” Damiano has an even simpler way of putting it: “Siamo amici, profondamente.” (We are deeply friends.)
Gallery Link
Photoshoots & Campaigns > Vogue Italia (2026)
