"[3] Ferrary was born in the sumptuous Hôtel Matignon, Rue de Varenne in Paris, where he resided until two years prior to his death.

Once the festive gathering place for the Ancien Régime society, at the start of the Bourbon Restoration in 1815, Louis XVIII traded the Hôtel de Matignon for the Élysée Palace.

Raffaele de Ferrari was co-founder of the Crédit Mobilier with the Péreire brothers, rivals of the Rothschilds, who financed many of the major construction projects of the second half of the 19th century: railroads in Austria, Latin America, Portugal, upper Italy and France (the Paris-Lyon-Marseille line), the digging of the Fréjus Rail Tunnel and the Suez Canal, and the reconstruction of Paris designed by Baron Haussmann.

After the death of Ferrary's father, the Duchess proposed that Philippe, Count of Paris (heir apparent to the French throne) take up residence at the Rue de Varenne.

The Duchess soon became disenchanted with the adverse social environment for the monarchists, quit Paris, and left Hôtel Matignon to the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, who made it his embassy in France.

[2][8] Ferrary started collecting in his youth, and then he inherited a great fortune of approximately 120,000,000 French francs (£5 million), which he dedicated to the purchase of rare stamps and coins.

Amongst his extremely rare stamps were the unique Treskilling Yellow of Sweden and the 1856 one-cent "Black on Magenta" of British Guiana, which he bought in 1878 for £150 and which after his death was sold at the third bid of his collection, in 1924, at Paris for 36,000 US dollars.

[10] Another piece owned by Ferrary was the only known cover featuring both values of the first Mauritius "Post Office" stamps, which has been called "the greatest item in all philately".

He purchased many important old collections, including those of Judge Frederick A. Philbrick (1835-1910) for £7,000, Sir Daniel Cooper's for £3,000, and W. B. Thornhill's Australians, and was a large buyer in the leading capitals of Europe for a great many years.

[13] Wishing to make his unequalled collection accessible to the public, in his will dated 30 January 1915 he bequeathed it to "the German nation" for display in the Postmuseum in Berlin, along with funds for maintenance, 30,000 guldens.

Leaving his several hundred albums in the Austrian embassy, he fled to Vienna early in 1915 and then to Switzerland where he died soon afterwards, and so did not see the dismantling of his life's work after the war.

These sales enabled several famous collectors at the time to acquire the rarest philatelic items known, which, arguably, contributed to the development of the hobby in the first part of the 20th century.

The British Guiana 1c magenta was bought by American collector Arthur Hind, who outbid King George V of the United Kingdom.

[14] Caspary (a well-known New York collector) also acquired the only unused copy of the 2 cent Hawaiian Missionaries stamp, which had also belonged to Ferrary.

Napier compiled an index of the fourteen catalogues from the sales which was sold in aid of funds for the Royal Philatelic Society London.

Today, many of the rarest stamps extant on the philatelic market proudly bear an "ex-Ferrary" in their provenance, which tends to raise considerably their desirability and value.