The Ettore Sottsass jr. archive – currently at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, after the
2018 donation by his wife Barbara Radice – during the last two years has been the focus
of a research project promoted by Università Iuav di Venezia, with the collaboration and
support of the foundation. Part of this study, that fits into the digitization and inventorying process of the over
100,000 pieces of the archive carried out by Centro ARCHiVe – the foundation dedicated
center –, concerns the graphic design projects of the architect and designer. The work of
reinterpreting the historical context of the individual projects and their critical analysis
was based, programmatically, not only on these documents but on the reconstruction of a
networks of materials which are currently fragmented into different collections. The personal
memory of Sottsass is today in fact preserved thanks to many different archives,
divided between Venice, the CSAC - Center for studies and archives of communication of
the University of Parma and the Bibliothèque Kandinsky of the Center Pompidou in Paris.
Moreover we must add to this main archives what has been preserved by private companies,
by collectors and by those who have worked with the designer. Addressing an area
that has not yet been investigated, such as graphic design, and a defined chronological
period – from his formation to his first experiences with important industrial companies –,
this article aims at returning the results of a research based on many unpublished materials,
while highlighting some aspects of Ettore Sottsass jr. design practice.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

The paper attempts a first overview on the history of the Saporiti company, active in
Besnate (Varese) since the immediate post-war period. The analysis is carried out within
the broader framework of the need not only to recognise design as a cultural asset, but
also to set up a network of interconnected, accessible archives, supported by more efficient
ways of interrogation than the current archiving system. Thanks to the attention
paid by Saporiti’s owners to the preservation of documentation on the history of their
own company, the paper faces the sequence of products, collaborations with architects
and designers, the organisation of the company and its fortune. Phases linked to market
demands and more experimental trends emerge, and thanks to the presence of designers
such as Augusto Bozzi, Ado Franchini, Alberto Rosselli and others, the reflections of both
the theoretical debate on furniture design and the fluctuations in taste and production
methods over a period of almost seventy years can be seen.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

Fashion in all its spheres and creations is also part of the futurist reconstruction of the
universe. Among these, the gilet or waistcoat represents one of the most original and fun
garments, capable of personalizing and giving prestige to the wearer. There were not many
waistcoats, almost all made by Fortunato Depero, but today they appear as many works of
art, still fun and elegant at the same time. The article is an excursus on this garment, which
can still make us reflect on the elegance and extravagance of young fashion of yesterday
and today.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

Marco Levi’s life path, director of the historic earthenware factory “Vedova Besio” in
Mondovì, town of popular ceramic, under the sign of the colorful cockerel. Last jew of the
monregalese community, led the factory through all the twentieth century, fascism, racial
laws, war, persecution, rebirth and deindustrialization. Man of great human depth, recognized
humility, tenacity and dedication to the work tradition and to its town.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

One hundred years after his birth, the article would like to examine the artistic career of
Giorgio Cipriani (Venice, 1921- Florence, 1994). Drawing on the unpublished materials of
the Siena archive, we will retrace some stages of a figure undoubtedly forgotten but whose
path, instead, has intertwined well-known paths, ranging from ceramics (exhibited at the
IX Triennale di Milano in 1951), to fabrics art, created for companies of absolute excellence,
to the creation of decorative panels for the ships of the Lauro Fleet and up to the sets for
various Italian theaters (including Teatro S. Carlo, Naples, Teatro La Fenice, Venice, Teatro
alla Scala, Milan).

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

Edoardo “Dady” Orsi (1917-2003) has produced from the Sixties to the Nineties a large
number of reverse-glass paintings. This corpus constitutes a unicum in the context of Italian
art of the Twentieth Century. In the article, the particular connotation of Orsi’s work
as a cultured operation, although situated on the borderline between pure painting and
handicraft object, emerges on the basis of the comparison of Orsi’s work with the traditional
and folkloric reverse glass painting and the one practiced by naïf painters. We
examine the cultural background of the artist and his relationship with the craftsmanship
and design of glass between Venice and Milan in 900 (Aldo Carpi, Bottega di Pietro Chiesa,
Fontana Arte). Finally, we describe the particular poetics in which references to seventeenth-
century art, symbolism and metaphysics are declined in a “pre-post-modern” key.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

The text analyzes the decorative interventions for architecture carried out by the Venetian
master of wrought iron, Umberto Bellotto (Venice 1882 - 1940), known mainly for the many
creations exhibited at the most important exhibitions of the time and, particularly, for
his combinations of different materials, the so-called “connubi” of iron and glass. Thanks
also to the iconographic support of a photographic collection from the artist’s archives,
now conserved at the Wolfsoniana in Genoa, an exhaustive panorama of the main works
created by Bellotto in Venice and on the Lido, from the beginning of his intense artistic
career, is thus proposed, offering a more comprehensive reading of the problems of architectural
design in the lagoon city during the first half of the 20th century.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

This essay was written on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Emanuele Luzzati
(Genoa 1921-2007), with the aim of providing an overview of his ceramic work. Better
known for his activity as a theatrical set designer and illustrator, the artist, between the
fifties and the early seventies of the twentieth century, created a large production, in collaboration
with Bartolomeo Tortarolo, known as “Bianco”, in his furnace of Pozzo Garitta,
in Albissola Marina.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

In recent years, renewed attention has been paid to the promotion of decorative arts, materials
and craft techniques. Glass in its duality as a traditional and contemporary material
has enjoyed considerable success, thanks also to cultural events that have brought it back
to the centre of collective interest. In recent years, Milan, a historic exhibition centre with
the Triennials and a productive centre for the sector (especially glass, but not only), has regained
an active and central role in promoting glass from a design perspective, thanks to a
strong revival of cultural activities. The contribution traces the history of the link between
the Castello Sforzesco Museums and glass, highlighting the importance of the historical
collections and the new and recent acquisitions.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

The design production of Salvatore Caronia Roberti (Palermo 1887 - 1970) in the field of furnishings and decorative arts is still little investigated today; this despite the fact that Caronia Roberti has long been considered the most authoritative exponent in Sicily of the so-called “School of Basile”. From the beginning of the Thirties, Caronia’s academic vocation assumes more and more complex values, avoiding what generically traditionalist had guided her emancipation from the modernist “manner”. The difficult synthesis between the desire to achieve unitary forms with austere plastic solidity, the underlying aspiration to an architecture of a higher cultural level and, ultimately, the composite ethosmonumentalist, who manifested himself with full control and determination in the 1930s, would also characterize all of his subsequent design production up to the 1960s. The ideal of “new classicism” pursued by Caronia Roberti (and theorized in her volume Introduction to the study of Architectural Composition, published in Palermo only in 1949) assumes, in its best applications, the value of the ordering parameter of a design logic aimed at perfect balance between the whole and the individual components, both on a formal and functional level. His creations of furniture and interior arrangements cover a time span that goes from late modernism, to Déco, to the twentieth century; but it was only in the Thirties that his collaborative relationships with artists and companies in the Decorative Arts sector took on particular connotations, also attributable to his maturation of an original design line marked by perceptive instances that reform his classicist vocation.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.