Antonella Maia
Expert in communication, with a past at KPMG, for over 20 years Antonella has been transforming information into news, dealing with the visibility and notoriety of brands in the fields of art, design, lifestyle and food, alongside international fairs (such as Mercanteinfiera and Cibus) but also companies and museums. www.antonellamaia.com
Italian design: A philosophical approach to made in Italy design
"Lezioni Americane. Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio" is a book taken from a series of lectures that Italo Calvino prepared in 1985 in view of six lectures to be held at Harvard University as part of the prestigious "Poetry Lectures" in honor of Charles Eliot Norton. Lightness, Exactness Multiplicity. Three of his six lectures are exactly the...
Italian design: BAM Design, the poetics of rust
With their skill they have enchanted a Sardinian, the Alghero designer Antonio Marras, who for his showroom in Milan in Via Cola di Rienzo, wanted a scenic fountain 15 meters long and 4 meters high, with 100 goldfish and sentinel statues, totemic figures inspired by the Sardinian territory. The materials? Strictly ferrous, but thanks to skilled han...
Italian design: Mercantinfiera, the exhibition of historical design, art and rarities in Parma
Antique ivory and tortoiseshell coin cabinets, huge neoclassical mirrors and nineteenth-century vases from the Trapani tradition, Liberty pieces, trumeau, baccarat crystals, cavet de liqueur, English cabinets and jewels. Then he, the design. This is Mercanteinfiera à la carte, the appointment of Fiere di Parma first announced, then postponed, susp...
Italian design: In praise of (un)useful design
In 2019 at the Salone del Mobile was presented Pinocchio, a Murano blown glass vase with the strong features of the well-known character of Carlo Collodi, created by Italian designer Giulio Iacchetti for Internoitaliano. It is a tribute to one of the most representative icons of the Italian spirit in the world that has its strong point in the nose,...
Italian design: Joe Colombo, the James Dean of Italian design
Cesare Colombo (aka, Joe), whose death marks 50 years this year, was one of the great Italian geniuses of the second half of the twentieth century, although Wikipedia insists on defining him as "simply" an architect and designer. Someone has rightly called him the James Dean of Italian design for his life, short but intense (he died of cardiac arre...
Italian design: Toscanini and the art of hanging
Excluding computers and smartphones, which are now actually indispensable, there are other things that we find ourselves using every day - and often without paying too much attention to them - that writer and journalist Luigi Pintor defines as "timeless objects": scissors, buttons, shoelaces. And then there are the hangers (also known as "crutches"...
Italian design: Idarica Gazzoni, the designer who unrolls enigmatic flowers and birds on the walls
Who doesn't remember those ‘70s rooms wallpapered with geometric patterns, between delicate and faded, almost afraid to be noticed? Then all of a sudden you come across the wallpaper collection by Murals Wallpaper that transforms the stylized motifs of the most famous building on the Manhattan skyline, the Chrysler Building, into patterns. Or you c...
Italian design: Virtual galleries, beauty at home at the time of the pandemic
If we were in normal times, in the afternoon we would be strolling through the galleries of Italian cities visiting the open exhibitions of the week and immersing ourselves in the somewhat artificial and decadent glam of openings and vernissages. But we have to stay at home and we put ourselves in the hands of the internet in an attempt to absorb o...