Gio Ponti seems to encapsulate the phrase Dal cucchiaio alla città—"from the spoon to the city"—a saying first famously set in ink by the Italian architect Ernesto Rogers in 1933's The Athens Charter. Rogers’s quip, published thanks to Le Corbusier, described his particular cohort of Milanese architects active between the First and Second World Wars. They were a prolific bunch, known for their dexterity, approaching the design of a teaspoon with the same conviction as they did an entire city.

Ponti, the architect, designer, and writer who did much to shape the course of 20th-century Italian design, lives up to the broad swath of disciplines this maxim covers. From the pages of his magazine, Domus, to the skyline of Milan, Ponti’s influence was immeasurably vast. Which is precisely why a new exhibition at Rome’s MAXXI museum seeks to shed light on the polymath's lesser-known feats.