Beppe Sala, mayor of the city, has long been committed to making the “small” Milan a creative, economic and spiritual nation’s capital and beyond, capable of competing with metropolises of the world. His look at Design events in Milan opens Design Super Show book.

In these months of pain and uncertainty, Milan’s life seems to fade almost becoming a memory. This book and its author’s energy put us back on the road of values for which Milan has been, is and always will be, one of the capitals of creativity. There are other cities, of course, especially in Italy, boasting absolute beauty and unattainable artistic heritage. But Milan has on its side a combination of work and creativity which make it a unique and irreplaceable reality. This combination has a name: design...

Beppe Sala, mayor of the city, has long been committed to making the “small” Milan a creative, economic and spiritual nation’s capital and beyond, capable of competing with metropolises of the world. His look at Design events in Milan opens Design Super Show book.

In these months of pain and uncertainty, Milan’s life seems to fade almost becoming a memory. This book and its author’s energy put us back on the road of values for which Milan has been, is and always will be, one of the capitals of creativity. There are other cities, of course, especially in Italy, boasting absolute beauty and unattainable artistic heritage. But Milan has on its side a combination of work and creativity which make it a unique and irreplaceable reality. This combination has a name: design.
Milan is one of design capitals not for a spiritual or artistic vocation but because great industrial events, Milanese and not, have found in this city an ideal cradle to give shape to their products.
This story’s key point was the choice of Olivetti, a proudly Ivrean company which chose Milan to create a dialogue between its products and man of the 20th century’s culture and sensitivity. The most evident symbol of a large part of that experience (the most vital and generative) was Ettore Sottsass, the “giant” mentioned in the first pages of this book.
In fact, Milan design story could have vanished together with that industrial world which had decreed its destiny and greatness. Instead, it was able to reinvent itself by becoming the driving force of an experience that from the industrial mission has been able to engage a much wider role as generator of contemporary taste.
Recently, the death of Manlio Armellini, one of the people who best interpreted this transformation making Salone del Mobile as flagship event of international lifestyle. Gisella Borioli in this book’s pages offers us the other side of the Moon, a research “in the field” of solutions, consideration and views on our life forms. Superstudio was a pioneer of this way of interpreting design, its protagonists, its dreams and even its excesses, by throwing and bringing to germinate the seed of what has become the largest open-air creativity experiment in the world, the Fuorisalone.
We have had dark times. But the world is already starting today from that beauty which knows how to turn into projects in service of man and his life. The world restarts from Milan.

Giuseppe Sala, Mayor of Milan.