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The Italian Way of Design

April 23, 2026

The Italian Way of Design

How beauty, craftsmanship and everyday life define Italy’s enduring design influence

Wherever you are in the world, “Italian design” speaks to more than aesthetics. It evokes a mood of ease, an enduring instinct for beauty, a way of living

Why, you ask? 

Part of the answer lies in something surprisingly simple: in the boot-shaped country, design has never been treated as a separate discipline. It’s part of everyday life. Long before it became a global buzzword, Italians were already thinking about how things looked, felt and functioned, from the way a chair supports the body to how a table is set, or how light enters a room at a certain hour.

This way of thinking goes back further than modernism. The Renaissance workshop didn't separate art from craft or engineering: Leonardo da Vinci drew flying machines and anatomical studies with the same hand. That refusal to silo disciplines never really disappeared. It simply changed shape.

The real inflection point came in postwar Italy. As the country rebuilt in the 1950s and 60s, a generation of architect-designers – Gio Ponti, Achille Castiglioni, Vico Magistretti – turned their attention to everyday objects and asked a simple question: why shouldn't a lamp, a chair, a typewriter be as considered as a building? Olivetti became the shorthand for this idea. The company didn't just manufacture office equipment: it commissioned architects to make that equipment beautiful. When Ettore Sottsass designed the Valentine typewriter in 1969, fire-engine red and aggressively portable, it ended up in MoMA. An office tool. In a museum. That's what we at ISSIMO like to call the Italian move.
 

Valentine Portable Typewriter, 1968, Ettore Sottsass and Perry King – Photo credits @MoMa

The Makers Behind the Names

What's less romanticised – but just as important – is the infrastructure that makes Italian design possible. Behind every iconic object is a network of small, often family-run manufacturers most people outside the industry have never heard of. Leather workers in Tuscany, glassmakers in Murano, textile producers in Lombardy. Specialists who've been refining the same techniques across generations.

In Italy, the relationship between designer and maker is closer and more iterative than in most other countries. A concept doesn't leave the studio and arrive at the factory finished. It gets worked out in dialogue, on the workshop floor, with the material pushing back. That's where a lot of the magic actually happens: in the back-and-forth

It also explains why Italian design tends to have a quality that's hard to attribute to any single decision. The technical precision is there, but so is something less definable:  a rightness of weight, finish, proportion that you feel before you can articulate it.

The Reason It Travels

Italian design is inseparable from the Italian way of living – convivial, tactile, sensory. It's about how we gather around a table, how we move through a city, how we relate to our surroundings. The most iconic Italian objects are tied to moments of everyday life: a perfectly balanced espresso cup, a beautifully proportioned sofa, a Vespa weaving through narrow streets.

There's also a certain boldness. In the 1960s and 70s, the Memphis group – Sottsass again – challenged everything: loud colour, ironic forms, objects that looked like they were having a better time than you were. Italian design proved it could be rigorous and playful at once, and that tension never really resolved. It's still there.

Italy isn't famous for design because of a single movement or a handful of iconic objects. It's famous because design is woven into the culture, in the gestures, the spaces, the details that might go unnoticed but that, together, create something unmistakable.

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