Little Italy

The Italians have a knack for transforming the elements of the everyday—furniture, fashion, food, even the lowly coffee bean—into the aesthetically transcendental. Celebrating this national talent, "1950-2000: Theater of Italian Creativity" made a brief stop last month at the annex

of New York's Dia Art Foundation. The spectacular show was conceived by Cosmit, the group that produces the fabled Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan; organized by the Italian Trade Commission; and staged by Gae Aulenti, herself an icon of Italian design.

At the exhibit's entry, visitors first encountered two blocks of Carrara marble cut from the quarry used by Michelangelo—a nod to the deep roots of Italian genius. Inside was a tantalizing visual minestrone of Italian-made objects. More than 1,000 of them, some legendary and some quotidian, were stacked in a multi-tiered chronological display set against a background of blueprints. Interspersed amid this design landscape, speakers and monitors broadcast excerpts from radio and films from the appropriate era. Diverse experiences and fields were thus woven together in what one of the curators, Vanni Pasca, calls the "web of surprise and virtuosity, deviation and invention" that defines Italian creativity.

The most extraordinary part of the story is the complexity of that inventiveness. Italians are not just inspired designers but also innovative industrialists and gifted communicators. They're remarkably flexible in outlook, too. If Italian design expressed the exuberance of a highly national spirit in the early years after World War II, Italy's outlook is now much more international, drawing on talent worldwide. The likes of Ron Arad, Marc Newson, and Philippe Starck avidly collaborate with companies in Italy, because they remain unrivalled in their willingness to experiment and promote fresh ideas. As Pasca suggests, it is this unprecedented fusion of local and global that will undoubtedly propel Italian design to further greatness over the half century to come.