Made in Italy was not always an emblem of pride; it was originally a regulatory clause. An outsider label to indicate product of foreign origin, it quickly evolved into an indicator of an identity, beauty, and excellence. But what is truly Italian in Made in Italy? 

With respect to design and architecture, Made in Italy has always been less of a distinction of origin, and more of a political ideology. From Gio Ponti’s domestic utopias to Ettore Sottsass's ironic postmodernism, Italian design has engaged discourse around the relations of form to life to society. It came to represent not just products but a manner of thinking: design as moral engagement, architecture as cultural mediation, beauty as civic engagement.

The economic expansion of the 1950s and 1960s led to the creation of companies like Cassina, Zanotta, and Artemide: the industrial workshop turned craft into philosophy. The architect-designer emerged as a figure of public interest, developing a democratic ideal of modernity and making beauty available to all. By the 1980s that ideal had turned into a global brand, with Made in Italy shifting from ethos to logo, its humanistic values smothered by the cult of image. The dissident voices of the 1970s — Archizoom, Superstudio, Global Tools — had already expressed warnings about this shift, describing how design's aestheticization might become a more subtle means of control. Their dystopias, once primarily theoretical, now feel eerily prescient.

“Design demands observation. You need to understand how people use things — not how they say they use them.”

– Achille Castiglioni

In today's global marketplace, Made in Italy is no longer a place but a feeling. What is still Italian is the narrative — the mythology of craftsmanship, sensuality, and taste. This is an important question: can the concept of authenticity survive in a design system that is globalized? This is not simply an economic question, it is epistemological. This blurs the line between craft and industrial production, and origin becomes moot. The brand power is in the symbolic capital, not its empirical truth. 

Meanwhile, a younger cadre of Italian architects and designers are reanimating the concept of Made in Italy through research and critically-informed design. They are not nostalgic design thinkers; they are archeological thinkers. Rather than re-visioning the myths of postwar modernity, they are excavating layers of sediment of forgotten narratives, collections, personal archives, and stories within the Italian regions to reassemble a more grounded and plural identity of Italian.

Among them is Marco Ripa, whose practice operates at the intersection of sculpture, design, and territorial reflection. His recent engagement with the legacy of little-known Marche-based architect Innocenzo Prezzavento is an embodiment of this attitude: a way of making design that is contextualized to place but is unitive, complete, and offers poetic dialogue with history. What started as an effort to frame Marco's individual works within a significant architectural context developed into a cultural excavation. The union of Marco Ripa and Prezzavento's archive produced Triangolo: a project for a table system designed in 1971 that has just now been made reality.

The Triangolo project goes beyond the simple act of re-edition. It doesn't seek to revive a style, but seeks to reactivate a thought. Prezzavento's work, stored in an archive amusingly lacking finished buildings, and made up of unrealized visions, captures a radical understanding of design as the unfinished dialogue between imagination and matter. 

By bringing Triangolo into production, Ripa doesn’t merely pay homage to a predecessor. He interrogates the temporality of design itself. What does it mean for an object, imagined in the utopian conditions of the early 1970s — that architecture sought to simply integrate with the landscape, collapse hierarchies and humanize modernism — to receive a material form today?

The response is found, in part, in architecture by Prezzavento. The Casa nella collina in Acquasanta Terme, and the Casa sulla collina in Valle Senzana, both from the same decade, and both in the province of Ascoli Piceno, exhibit a poetics of continuity between natural and built environments. For instance, in the former, concrete slabs and glazed voids appear to grow naturally from the slope of the earth, rendering the hill into a lively section. In the latter the line between architecture and topography completely disappears, as the hanging gardens and hovering planes create an suspended world.

Simone Lorusso: Your recent collaboration around the work of Innocenzo Prezzavento feels like a rediscovery, almost an act of design archaeology. How did this project begin?

Marco Ripa: Look, it all started almost by accident, with a drawing found in a dusty archive in Prezzavento. It was 1971, yet the project felt like it spoke to today: modular, free, built on a logic of composition that makes you forget the traditional hierarchy of the table. It wasn’t nostalgia; it was a call to action. I saw it and realized I wasn’t meant to simply remake it — I was meant to bring it to life for the very first time. From there, a silent collaboration began, separated by decades, between me and a thought that had never found its physical form.

SL: Your studio in the Marche region is deeply tied to place; to its landscape, its labor culture, its distance from the big cities. How does that geography shape your way of designing?

MR: If my studio were in Milan, I’d probably be making different objects: smarter, more tuned to the market. But I live in the hills, where the seasons still matter. The pace here is slower, but also more genuine. Every piece I create is a response to this place: handmade, solid, rooted. I’m not interested in chasing trends; I’d rather build forms that still have something to say twenty years from now. In a world of “instant design,” my work is a way of taking a stand.

SL: In an age obsessed with novelty, your work suggests a slower, more reflective approach to making. Is slowness itself becoming a political act in design?

MR: Absolutely. Today, real luxury is time. Working slowly, for me, isn’t inefficiency. It’s resistance. Resistance to planned obsolescence, to disposable aesthetics, to the idea that everything must be new just to sell. When I make a piece, I want it to carry weight, not only physically but symbolically. Slowness means attention, connection, permanence. It’s a political act because it goes against the system’s frantic acceleration. It means saying: I’ll take the time that’s needed.

SL: If the 20th-century Made in Italy was about excellence and industry, what do you think the 21st-century version should stand for?

MR: Made in Italy today can no longer be just an aesthetic label. It has to reclaim an ethic. It must speak of care, of territory, of honest processes. There’s no need to replicate the myth of “Italian beauty” — it needs to be redefined, putting real sustainability, true craftsmanship, and local stories that resist global marketing at the center. To me, the new Made in Italy is made of dirty hands, not sparkling showrooms. It’s a cultural gesture, not a logo to stick on top.

The partnership between Ripa and Prezzavento reopens a key issue for Made in Italy: can attention to localized, hidden histories provide a counter-narrative to the homogenization of global design culture? The project represents a quiet political act, in reclaiming authorship from corporate myth-making and steering it to a cultural responsibility.

If the Made in Italy of the 20th century was shaped by industry optimism and aesthetic excellence, in the 21st century we may risk defining it by ethics — the ability to give shape to care, to slowness, to truth. Ripa and other similar artists are aiming to create just that: a design practice that isn’t afraid to look back to move forward.

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Words: Simone Lorusso
Photo: Matteo Bianchessi