Works, objects and printed matter from Italy between 1922 and 1944, documented from private archives.
When Valentino Bompiani founded his publishing house in Milan in 1929—the year of the Wall Street crash—he launched an audacious campaign for literary cosmopolitanism that outwitted totalitarian censorship.
Founded in 1928 on the shores of Lake Maggiore as a chemical partnership between Italy and France, Rhodiatoce introduced synthetic fibers and nylon to Italy, leaving behind an imposing chapter of lakeside industrial archaeology.
In 1927, brothers Cesare and Amadeo Cassina set up a carpentry shop in Meda. Their transition from classical hand-carving to architectural serial production laid the bedrock for modern Italian industrial design.
Founded on 4 July 1926 in central Bologna, Ducati was not born on a racetrack. It began as a laboratory for precision electrical condensers, inspired by the wireless fever of Guglielmo Marconi.
Founded on Murano in 1925 after Giacomo Cappellin’s split from Paolo Venini, M.V.M. Cappellin hired a nineteen-year-old Carlo Scarpa as artistic director, sweeping away Victorian frills in favour of radical modernist transparency.
Formed on 9 May 1924 through the union of Venetian stearin candles and Piedmontese soap, Mira Lanza shaped the domestic landscape of 20th-century Italy—and left behind monumental industrial archaeology from the Brenta to Rome’s Ostiense.
In 1923, on the hilly border between Lombardy and Switzerland, Giovanni Battista Ambrosoli set out mobile-comb beehives and built an agro-industrial legacy that still defines Ronago today.
Wartime sheet for the E.I.A.R., the state radio. Scan from the Stefano Vigolo collection. White horses leap across a night
Advertising sheet for Bemberg, Gozzano. Scan from the Stefano Vigolo collection. A pair of yarn spools grows a wing and
