ITALY’S NEW BREED

Italy is in a bad way at the moment, with its economic and political problems, but the future may just be brighter than you think, as  a new breed of creatives and entrepreneurs help push the country into the 21st century. 

text by ivan carvalho.

PETER CORRAINI

G iven the rising popularity of the Kindle and iPad, reading books in their physical form is becoming

an activity that may soon be extinct. For traditional publishers, times are not easy, but Pietro Corraini is anything but traditional. His family, which manages a publishing house and a number of bookshops in Italy, prints paperback and hardbound copies on art and architecture, but they have garnered the most atten-tion for their high-quality children’s books.

Much of what Corraini publishes isn’t found in the local kindergarten. “We publish children’s books, many from the 1940s but also those by authors who are just starting out. Many are in between a typical children’s book and something closer to graphic design. Book-stores have a hard time categorising our titles when they get them, so they usually just make a Corraini shelf,” jokes Corraini, who looks after the family’s own Milan bookshop, dubbed 121+.

Located in the city’s Zona Tortona district – which is home to showrooms and is a popular spot during the design and fashion weeks in Milan – architects, design-ers, photographers and editors are constantly stream-ing by the windows of the 121+ store looking for creative gift ideas for friends or young family members.

“We don’t publish or sell the traditional stu!: pop-up books and the like. We work with graphic designers and artists who think outside the box when it comes to titles aimed at children: we have books printed just with colours where you then have to draw the lines. It’s the opposite of colouring books.”

The family is a big fan of Bruno Munari, the late graphic designer who wrote and drew a series of clev-er titles that attracted both young and old. Known for his dry humour and beautiful drawings, Munari came up with whimsical games to play connect the dots and learn the alphabet.

Another clever idea conceived by Corraini is a trib-ute to the popular Moleskine notebook that was once nearly extinct itself. He took the elegant little black book and used the elastic cord to create a slingshot to "re o! analogue messages, in a throwback to simpler times in the classroom when students didn’t have the luxury of secretly shooting o! SMS messages with a few quick keystrokes.

www.corraini.com

Publisher

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MASSIMO ALBA

Well-turned-out couples from Beirut to Tokyo venture into Alba’s boutique and are greeted with the quaint ringing of a shopkeeper’s bell to an-nounce their arrival as they open the door. Inside, they’ll "nd vintage furniture picked up on the de-signer’s travels, and pages taken from a botany en-cyclopaedia and gardening journals used as wallpa-per. For sale, there are sumptuous clothes designed by Alba for men and women: casual, wearable eve-ryday items such as V-neck wool pullovers, washed baby corduroy trousers and breezy blouses. All are handmade by his network of Italian artisans, who patiently craft everything from dress shirts to hats.

The designer, who often drops by the shop with Jasper, his pet golden retriever, chose the shop’s location for its proximity to the city’s botanical garden. For Alba, the garden, which was even used to host one of his eclectic fashion shows, is a source of ideas – delicate #ower patterns regu-larly appear on his pocket squares, scarves and ladies’ shirts. “My research focuses on natural elements: colours and textures. All of our "bres are left natural and never pressed. My cashmere is chemical-free, dyed in natural pigments so it’s also good for the environment.”

www.massimoalba.com

When asked what inspires his knitwear col-lection, Massimo Alba avoids the practice

of namedropping celebrities, models-turned-muses or movies he’s seen. “Whether it’s summer or fall, my starting point is always the same: the familiar. My family, the people who surround me in my work and daily life are my references,” says Alba, who even asks friends to appear in his low-key advertising campaigns.

Known for his ability to work wonders with cashmere from his earliest days in the rag trade back in the mid-1980s, Alba has built up an im-pressive CV in the Milanese fashion world – he has served as creative director for luxury brands Agnona and Ballantyne. After successfully re-launching fashion labels for others, he stepped out into the spotlight with his eponymous label "ve years ago.

In keeping with his laid-back aesthetic and wish to maintain a low pro"le, he opened his "rst stand-alone boutique in 2009 in a 19th-century palazzo on a quiet side street in Milan’s upscale Brera district. The shop is a far cry from the slick retail temples found in the city’s Quadrilatero della Moda, where big name fashion brands of-ten show o! clothes and accessories in cold, vast, impersonal spaces.

Fashion Designer

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thing new: a vegetal façade. The trees will absorb the urban pollution, and they produce oxygen. Our buildings will be a sort of mutant architec-ture from an aesthetic viewpoint, since the ex-terior will change season to season as plant spe-cies bloom.”

Much research has gone into preparing the urban forest, which is the equivalent of 10,000 square metres of woodland. Tree species have been subjected to wind tunnel tests to see how they cope with gusts of wind 120 metres above street level. Apartment owners will have a team of botanists and gardeners on call to help tend to the hundreds of #ora in pots and #owerbeds that range from magnolias to olive trees.

The green building concept is just one of sever-al urban planning schemes Boeri is eager to see realised. He is promoting an initiative to create a green belt of forest that will ring Milan with 3 million newly planted trees and a series of bicy-cle paths, as well as an e!ort to convert 60 aban-doned farms on the city’s outskirts into a food basket to grow fruits, vegetables and cereals to feed local inhabitants.

www.stefanoboeriarchitetti.net

F or years, Stefano Boeri worked behind the scenes promoting cutting-edge architec-ture and stimulating debate about the fu-

ture of cities as editor-in-chief of leading Ital-ian publications Abitare and Domus, the latter founded in 1928 by the legendary Gio Ponti and still a must-read for fans of good design. Today, Boeri is playing a more visible role in shaping the metropolis via his architectural practice and in his role as city councillor for culture in Milan – Boeri’s career in politics started in 2010 when he ran as an independent and narrowly lost the race to become the city’s mayor.

Despite that setback, Boeri is still set to leave his imprint on the city with a groundbreaking project opening next year that will alter the tra-ditionally grey and gloomy Milanese skyline. Dubbed the ‘Vertical Forest,’ the pair of resi-dential blocks, the highest rising 26 #oors, will feature a green façade made up of thousands of bushes, plants and trees arranged on the towers’ oversized balconies.

“In the last six years, 99 per cent of the sky-scrapers built in the world have been covered with a façade made of glass and steel,” says Bo-eri. “What we are trying to do in Milan is some-

STEFANO BOERIArchitect

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ALICE DELCOURT

Delcourt’s menu re#ects her background – her wine list features a fair number of French vintages mixed in with the Italian reds and whites, and she o!ers a Sunday brunch complete with eggs Bene-dict and pancakes, the latter made with lemon and poppyseed. “We use Italian ingredients with a base in Italian cooking, but I’m not Italian and it seemed silly for me to open a trattoria where we would do traditional dishes like an Italian grandma would. Here, I wanted a place that was democratic, where people can come in #ip-#ops by day or dress up nicely for an evening out.”

Delcourt does of course make room for pasta on the menu – a popular one of late is pizzoccheri, a short, tagliatelle made from buckwheat #our that is served with potatoes and greens and melted cheese. She has shown herself adept at learning new cuisines. Last year, she took top prize at a couscous cook-o! in Sicily where chefs from all over the Mediterranean competed – her winning dish was accompanied with dried fruit, sesame seeds and roasted almonds, and topped with a slice of smoked mackerel.

www.erbabrusca.it

Italians, by nature, are passionate about food. It was something that struck American chef Alice Delcourt on her "rst visit to the Bel

Paese. “I came to Italy when I was 18 and I fell in love with how excited they got about eating. Peo-ple would sit around the table and compare olive oil,” says Delcourt. “I remember eating a cucum-ber with nothing on it, not dripping in salad dress-ing like in the US; it was delicious.”

Today, Delcourt tries to recreate the same at-mosphere at her restaurant Erba Brusca, which opened last year on the outskirts of Milan along one of the city’s old canals that date to the days of Leonardo da Vinci. To ensure fresh ingre-dients are close at hand, Delcourt has built up relationships with local butchers and dair-ies, and has even planted a garden next to her eatery’s outdoor dining area so she can have a steady supply of spices, herbs and seasonal fruits and vegetables for her dishes – she is cur-rently using home-grown thyme in a risotto rec-ipe that calls for "gs and goat’s cheese sourced from a local organic producer.

Born in France, raised in North Carolina and with a stint at London’s River Café under her belt,

Chef

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MARCO VELARDI

Creative Director & Editor

Critics of Italy often accuse the country of being run by old men – scandal-plagued septuagenarian Silvio Berlusconi is often of-

fered up as evidence of this. Today’s record youth unemployment rate, now pushing 30 per cent, doesn’t help either for young entrepreneurs dream-ing of starting their own business.

Marco Velardi is proof, however, that the next gen-eration hasn’t given up on Brand Italy. Barely 30, Ve-lardi has already helped launch a successful maga-zine, Apartamento, which enjoys a cult following among those in the design world since it "rst started rolling o! the presses in 2008. Last year, Velardi won another round for the youth movement when he was hired by De Padova, one of Italy’s beloved furniture brands, to take over as creative director.

“I was very #attered when they asked, and quite surprised too,” recalls Velardi. “It’s a family-owned company and these brands prefer to pass down from one generation to another. But De Padova was willing to give me space.”

Since furniture design is a crucial component of Milan’s economic engine (together with fashion and "nance), the appointment of an outsider to an estab-lished brand caught some by surprise.

At Salone del Mobile, the premiere event in the fur-niture industry that attracts some 350,000 visitors an-nually to Milan to see where home interior trends are headed, Velardi unveiled thoughtful pieces that played up the strengths of Italy’s great manufacturing heritage and won over many critics. Among the works he com-missioned for De Padova was an outdoor table in teak by thirtysomething industrial designer Luca Nichetto in a move to promote the country’s new generation of crea-tives – De Padova’s collection of products, spanning more than half a century, already lists chairs and tables by the likes of the late Achille Castiglioni and Vico Magistretti.

In his new role, Velardi hopes to break the glass ceil-ing set against his peers, but admits it will be an uphill struggle. “There are many young creative people but there’s no support from the city or the state – Italy is a big machine politics-wise, and people have to push on their own to get things done.”

Meanwhile, he faces a daily challenge of convinc-ing buyers that De Padova’s latest pieces can match its archive of award-winning products. “It’s very di$cult to discover something new and to "nd new solutions and forms. But it’s not impossible.”

www.depadova.it