‘We’ve never liked design schemes that are too obviously in tone with their surroundings,’ says Tiziana Martinelli of the home she shares with her partner, Paolo Cortopassi. We’re looking at a bright-orange ‘Living Tower’ – actually two of them, set side by side. One of Verner Panton’s most flamboyant creations, this four-level seating unit, with its Barbarella vibe, would attract attention even in a white cube. But here, resting on the time-weathered cotto tiles of a Tuscan farmhouse, beneath ancient beams, it seems like a visitor from another planet.
Tiziana and Paolo met in their student days. They had taken on the same summer job, picking grapes in the Montecarlo wine zone east of Lucca. His family owned a modest corte – a rural worker’s house – on the outskirts of the city. The tenants, he recalls, owned a bull that they rented out by the hour for the impregnation of local cows. By the time he and Tiziana met it was empty and offered what any hard-up student couple craves – free accommodation. From the start, the need to economise went hand in hand with a desire to preserve the weathered floors, cement washbasins and other features the couple found when they moved in. None of the rooms was large, but there was no good reason to knock walls down. The chestnut ceiling beams were cleaned and the venerable electrical wiring renewed – though back in the mid-1980s, before it became a vintage hipster essential, replacement braided cable was difficult to source. Pretty soon, the question arose of how to furnish this three-storey house.
Family heirlooms offered one solution, but only a few of the pieces Tiziana and Paolo could assemble seemed right for the space. Instead, they kept an eye out for sales in local furniture stores, held to offload stock that wasn’t going anywhere. As often as not, this was because fashions had moved on. At the time, few Italians were still interested in the bright, provocative, ironic style associated with socially aware Radical Design collectives of the late 1960s and early 1970s like Archizoom or Superstudio, and thereafter by solo designers such as Ettore Sottsass and Gae Aulenti. But from the moment they first encountered these pieces in the Lucca furniture store Spazio Mariani, Tiziana says, ‘it was love at first sight’. And in those days, with the pendulum swinging towards clean lines and minimalism, Radical Design was being marked down in the bargain corner.
Lighting soon became a key interest. One of the first pieces they acquired was a floor-standing ‘Pileo’ lamp by Gae Aulenti for Artemide. Later, in a 1985 issue of Domus, they were devouring an article about the Paris house of the gallerist Yves Gastou. ‘There was this “Cometa” lamp by Ettore Sottsass,’ Paolo recounts, ‘that looked oddly familiar. We realised it was on display in a shop just around the corner from here, so we raced over.’ Colour-graded to mimic a transition from white to red heat, this undulating Perspex column from 1971 has never been reissued and today regularly features in 20th-century-design auctions. In 1985, it was considered affordable – but still, Tiziana and Paolo had to pay in two instalments.
They began collecting catalogues and buying up back copies of Italian design magazines from the 1960s and 1970s so that they could identify promising items in stores or in flea markets, like the one that lines the banks of Milan’s Naviglio Grande canal once a month. Occasionally, they would be gazumped by one of the handful of collectors passionate or longsighted enough to plough the same design furrow. Collectors like Fulvio Ferrari, who went on to found the Carlo Mollino house museum in Turin. One day they discovered that a shop in the town of Piombino had a model they’d been coveting for years – the extraordinary ‘Programma’ lamp, a rectangular wall-mounted metal affair resembling an early Donald Judd sculpture (in fact, it was designed around 1970 by Gianfranco Fini for a short-lived Rome firm, New Lamp). ‘As soon as we got confirmation, I got in the car and drove there as fast as I could,’ Paolo recalls.
Gradually, it dawned on the couple that what had begun as a need for a chair to sit on, a table to eat off and some illumination to brighten Tuscan winter nights was becoming first an obsession and, later, a potential source of income. In the mid-1990s, the couple began to sell selected pieces via a stall they rented at the biannual Mercanteinfiera furniture and antique fair in Parma, one of the few that made space for what Italians call modernariato – mid- to late 20th-century vintage design. With much of their collection in storage, the house outside Lucca became, for several years, an informal by-appointment gallery that was also a showcase for their design aesthetic. Now it is simply their home once more, one in which the most significant pieces from their private collection are displayed. But even these, Tiziana explains, need to make a case for themselves, following what she calls ‘a logic of contrasts... We love how these colourful, revolutionary works look in this humble setting.’
Tiziana and Paolo’s love of the more offbeat byways of Italian design is about more than the thrill of the chase. They find the stories these objects tell just as magnetic. We bond over a shared affection for Lapo Binazzi, a Radical Designer who progressed from creating huge inflatable sculptures in protest against the Vietnam War to nightclub interiors. He still works out of a bottega in Florence’s Santa Croce district. Paolo points to the fact that many of Italy’s great design partnerships were born not in cities but in semi-rural districts and gives the example of Bitossi, a small maiolica factory founded in the village of Montelupo Fiorentino in 1920s: ‘In the 1950s,’ he recounts, ‘the owner would open the factory at weekends to his workers, and anyone else interested, to follow their creative instincts. That’s where Sottsass learned to make ceramics – by playing with clay.’
Ceramics have become a more recent focus. ‘Early on, the kitchen was plastered in old advertising posters,’ Tiziana says. ‘And there was a time when we were very big on vintage appliances,’ Paolo adds. ‘We’d find old hairdryers and toasters from the 1950s at the back of retail storerooms.’ When you live with a collection, they believe, it’s vital to avoid it becoming an unchanging museum. Tiziana sums it up with a wonderful, not-quite-translatable Italian phrase: ‘E’ importante non quotidianizzare lo sguardo.’ It’s important not to let your gaze become ‘everyday-ified’.
A version of this article originally appeared in the August 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Subscribe today
