Ciro Orsini has a charming gap in his teeth, which makes it possible to recognise him in the celebrity photos covering the walls of his Knightsbridge institution. Ciro’s Pomodoro is a pizza joint that’s been running for 46 years on Beauchamp Place. In every photo, shoulder to shoulder with the rich and famous, sometimes old and leather tan, baring his sleeves of tattoos, sometimes young, blushing and rosy, it is always the very same Ciro, smiling, baring that little gap.

Most nights, Ciro graces the dark corners of this underground pizzeria, roving from booth to booth like a lost Guns N’ Roses roadie, or some sort of high priest: he wears a massive crucifix over his bare chest, silver chains, leather cuffs with spikes, dangly earrings sagging the soft flesh of his earlobe. The weight of all that bling appears to weigh him down, though his slow and staggered gait might have more to do with his age – he is 75 years old.

The celebrity snapshots suggest that Ciro has, for some decades now, been adjacent to fame (Sylvester Stallone, Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp) and power (Reagan, Clinton, Pope Francis, Boris Johnson), remaining just far enough outside the rank of celebrity to venerate it. During our conversation, he is constantly name-dropping his famous friends. Most are before my time, but I recognise a few – Jerry Springer (Ciro named a parma ham pizza on Pomodoro’s menu after him), Putin’s best buddy Steven Seagal, writer Paulo Coelho, the late actor Pat Morita. ‘You know Mr Miyagi, Pat Morita?’ he asks me. Yes, I say, doing a little wax-on, wax-off hand motion. Ciro tells me they were friends for 25 years: ‘I have his ashes in my house.’ With glittery-pink painted nails, Ciro pries off one of his bracelets for me to inspect. He tells me the heavy silver bangle was a posthumous gift from his good friend Patrick Swayze. ‘Five years after he died, through the spiritual world he sent me this’, he says. Since losing his father in the eighties, Ciro has been in contact with people on the other side, including his own previous incarnations – in past lives, he has been ‘in China for sure’, a Japanese warrior and in ‘many sweat lodges’ as White Cloud, his Cherokee spiritual guide.

It was around the time of Ciro’s enlightenment that he opened a Pomodoro in L.A., where he met Jill Weatherwax, a small-town girl from Michigan chasing a dream of stardom out West. She was of middling talent – a perfect match for Ciro, who crowned her ‘Miss Hollywood’ in a kangaroo beauty pageant he staged, gave her gigs at Pomodoro and signed her to a contract with his own record label.

Ciro loved Jill, and lavished her with gifts when they were together in LA – according to her sister, he spent $15,000 on Jill’s teeth. When Detective Al Murietta found her body in an abandoned lot on the outskirts of Fresno, California, riddled with 29 stab wounds, he remarked to the investigative journalist Tom O’Neill that her teeth ‘were beautiful. Straight. White. Clean.’ She didn’t look like she belonged in a muddy clearing riddled with crack vials and used condoms, Murietta remarked – ‘and that’s probably what got her killed.’

Jill’s murder remains unsolved, and Ciro was never a suspect. ‘She was in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ he says, opening his wallet, where he keeps an old photo of Jill. He points to another photograph of her on the wall above us – an unknown beside many more familiar faces who achieved the fame she sought.

‘She’s still around.’ Ciro rolls up his sleeve to show me a tattoo of a heart with a cross through it, ‘JW’ inscribed in one corner – ‘Jill Ann Weatherwax, my angel,’ he says to himself. ‘She comes back a lot through my medium,’ the same medium who has also put him in touch with his past lives. The spiritual communion with Jill gives him solace: ‘I don’t fear death because you don’t die.’

These are bold words from a pizzeria owner (though I can’t accuse him of totally disregarding health when it comes to his cuisine – the Ciro’s Pomodoro menu has a page advising patrons on how to order according to their blood type). But on the side, Ciro is building up his ‘wellness centre’, the House of Orsini. Its goal is finding a way around death.