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Masters & Makers Italia

@mastersandmakers.it

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An independent portrait of Italy, seen differently. Masters, makers & places of singular character. Exploring craft, culture & creativity.
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In the 1990s, Karl Lagerfeld brought THE MUSE Claudia Schiffer to Santa Caterina for Chanel, shooting part of the story inside the hotel’s Suite Al Pino. At the height of the supermodel era, Lagerfeld set one of fashion’s most recognisable faces against something no studio can reproduce: the light and ease of the Amalfi Coast. Then fashion gave way to cinema. The hotel’s interiors appear in the Italian series “È arrivata la felicità”, and its terrace became part of the mythology of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Accounts differ on how much of the Amalfi footage survived the final cut, which only makes the story more cinematic: a scene can disappear while the legend of the place remains. None of this was new to the coast. Decades earlier, Rossellini, Ingrid Bergman, Anna Magnani, Humphrey Bogart and Gina Lollobrigida had already made Amalfi a place that lives twice, once as a real landscape and once as an imagined one. Perhaps that is the true story of Santa Caterina. It never had to invent a fantasy for the camera. Fashion and cinema simply recognised the one already there. _ @hotel_santa_caterina On slide 6, Photo: @carssun #italia #amalficoast #hotelsantacaterina #karllagerfeld #fashionicon taken in Hotel Santa Caterina, Amalfi by @mastersandmakers.it
22
15 days ago
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Legend says the Sirens once sang from these rocks off Positano, luring sailors who could never leave. Centuries later, Li Galli found a new way to hold people close: through the artists who arrived and could not imagine living anywhere else. The first was Léonide Massine. In the 1920s, the Russian choreographer saw in these three islands the promise of a creative haven, a place where young dancers, musicians and artists from around the world might gather and make work together. Inside the ancient Saracen tower he laid a floor of Siberian pine, and on the rocks above the sea he raised an open-air theatre, which stood until a Mediterranean storm claimed it in the 1960s. To design his villa, he called on Le Corbusier. Inspired by the instinctive, sun-bleached architecture of Capri, the architect created rooms that seem to have grown out of the stone itself, as organic and quiet as lichen on a cliff. Decades later, Rudolf Nureyev arrived and filled the island with his own intensity. He had Ottoman majolica brought in by the crate, choosing each tile himself, until Le Corbusier’s spare rooms glowed like a sultan’s chambers. Kilims, handmade lamps and bold blues, greens and oranges turned the villa into a portrait of its owner. He dreamed of founding a ballet school here, and spoke of Li Galli as “my island and the home of my whole life.” On Massine’s pine boards, a second legend of dance took his steps. In September 1992, knowing he would not return, he left for the last time and kissed the rocks goodbye. Today the island belongs to Sorrento hotelier Giovanni Russo, the latest to answer its call. The Sirens were said to sing from these rocks, and no sailor who heard them could ever leave. Li Galli still sings, only differently. A choreographer heard it and built a stage above the sea. An architect heard it and shaped walls from the rock. A dancer heard it and made it the home of his whole life. None of them ever truly left. They are still here, in the tower, in the stone, in the boards beneath your feet. Masters & Makers features Italy and its slow art of excellence. _ Photos: @moggi_studio #ligalli #privateisland #rudolfnureyev #italy #interiors taken in L'isola Delle Sirene - Li Galli by @mastersandmakers.it
8
9 days ago
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Masters & Makers tells the stories of those who safeguard knowledge rooted in Italian tradition and transform it through a deeply personal vision. Born in Pietrasanta, @massimiliano_pelletti grew up among sculpture workshops and ancient classical and religious models. It was a natural education, one that shaped his aesthetic taste and sensibility. For him, engaging with this heritage means staying true to a gesture he learned by watching his grandfather’s hands, in a place where sculpture has never been an abstract idea but a craft made of dust, tools and time. That tradition gave him a language, a grammar: the plaster model, the direct relationship with stone, the patience of work built blow by blow. But he never wanted to be a mere heir. He set out to make that alphabet speak a new language, working with stones no one had sculpted this way before: imperfect materials full of concretions, fractures and cavities, and therefore potential surprises. He doesn’t choose them despite their imperfections. He chooses them for those imperfections. In his practice, the stone itself becomes the mediator. Pelletti may suggest a form, but the material always has the last word, in an ongoing dialogue between sculptor and stone. The final result is never entirely predictable, and it is precisely this uncertainty that keeps his work alive and contemporary. In a society that struggles to accept what it cannot control, his sculptures are born from a dialogue with the unforeseen, with the limits of the material, and from a wish to celebrate the beauty that also lives in fragility. For Pelletti, making this heritage his own means not betraying it, but translating it: carrying the classical gesture into a contemporary aesthetic, with all its uncertainty and all its poetry. Special word of thanks to Massimiliano for sharing his extraordinary vision, and Sara for the great contribution on this interview and featured story. _ @massimiliano_pelletti Photo: @nicola.gnesi_studio #massimilianopelletti #pietrasanta #italiancraftsmanship #contemporarysculptures taken in Pietrasanta, Italy by @mastersandmakers.it
57
3 days ago
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On the western shore of Lake Como, @villasolacabiati has been shaped by more than two centuries of taste, craftsmanship and history. Once known to Giuseppe Parini as La Quiete, the villa was conceived as a place of retreat, yet its rooms have witnessed aristocratic life, revolution, Napoleon, war and the work of successive generations of artists and artisans. Its character lies in the balance between richness and restraint. Pale blue shutters reflect the tones of the lake, formal gardens frame the architecture, while frescoes, stucco and decorative details reveal the hand of the makers who defined its interiors. Above the entrance, the inscription Villulae Quietem speaks to the villa’s enduring ideal: tranquillity. What makes Villa Sola Cabiati remarkable, however, is not simply what has been preserved, but the continuity of its atmosphere, a place where every generation has added something, while allowing the original sense of quiet to remain. _ @valentinadesantisss @comosegreta Photos: @ghtlakecomo #italy #villasolacabiati #lakecomo #heritage #artinspiration taken in Lake Como, Italy by @mastersandmakers.it
2
a day ago
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There is an Italy you won’t find on postcards or on a clickbait article. An alley where a woman has hung out her washing for fifty years. A workshop with its shutter half-drawn, where wood is still carved as it was taught from father to son. A palazzo whose door no one opens anymore. A village where, at dusk, the only sound is the wind. Places like these do not disappear overnight. They fade slowly, almost imperceptibly, when we stop looking. The poet @francoarminio has spent his life walking through Italy’s forgotten villages. At the heart of his work is an idea as simple as it is radical: before funding, before plans, before restoration, a place must first be seen. Seen with attention, curiosity and affection, the way we look at something we are afraid to lose. Because looking is the first act of care. What we continue to see, we have a chance to preserve. Arminio speaks of a new kind of inhabitant: someone who can belong without standing still. Someone who leaves, encounters the world, and returns carrying a different gaze able to see what what was always there as if for the first time. This is where Masters & Makers begins. In the details we choose to notice and in the stories we choose to uncover always driven by a clear intention behind. And perhaps the only question that matters is: What did you see differently today? _ #italy #seeing #places #heritage #lookdifferently by @mastersandmakers.it
10
2 days ago
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It happened on an ordinary afternoon, between one search and the next. We were tracing the map of Italian excellence meanwhile shaping Masters & Makers Italia, name after name, when a photograph interrupted everything. A single frame that refused to let us go. It belonged to @alf.abbate, a Neapolitan photographer whose work is a patient act of attention, capable of revealing the most intimate side of his city. We reached out to him and together, we walked a path through the soul of a city that has never learned to be ordinary. A door half open onto frescoed skies, light pooling on ancient tiles like a secret about to be told. A lamp glowing before painted columns and a marble god, where beauty was imagined so fiercely it became real. Then the arch, and the sudden rush of sea, sky and Vesuvius crowned in cloud, the view this city has been keeping for nearly three thousand years. Back into shadow, into a library where books outlive their readers and marble faces guard what time forgot. And at last, two people on a bench, talking as if the world could wait. It can. Here, it always has. This is Naples: splendour and silence, illusion and truth, eternity held within a single afternoon. Alfonso, thank you for seeing beyond the familiar, for capturing not the Naples we expect, but the one that reveals herself only to those who know how to look. In a world always hurrying elsewhere, beauty remains exactly like this: unfiltered, suspended for a moment of eternity. _ #napoli #naples #italia #heritage #greatbeauty taken in Napoli, Italy by @mastersandmakers.it
58
4 days ago
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Some houses enter the history of architecture. Others enter the collective imagination. Casa Malaparte belongs to both. On Punta Massullo, a rocky promontory on Capri’s eastern edge, a Pompeian-red volume rises from the cliff as if it had always been there, suspended between stone, sea and sky. Curzio Malaparte acquired the site in the late 1930s and shaped the house as a self-portrait. He called it Casa come me: a house like me. Its architecture is a way of seeing. A wide, tapering staircase climbs over the roof to an open terrace with no railing, where the building simply ends and the horizon begins. Outside, the red holds its ground against limestone, maquis and blue water. Inside, every piece was conceived for this house alone, so nothing feels added and everything feels intentional. The house doesn’t sit in the landscape; it frames it. It points you toward the Faraglioni, orchestrates your approach, plays with scale, and turns arriving into part of the experience. A house that composes images this well was bound to find the camera. In 1963, Jean-Luc Godard made its roof and staircase the stage of Le Mépris, and the villa became more than architecture: it became a character. Fashion followed its gaze. Karl Lagerfeld photographed it, Saint Laurent and Louis Vuitton staged campaigns there, and in June 2024 Simon Porte Jacquemus brought his fifteenth-anniversary show to the rooftop. Casa Malaparte confirms something we find again and again across Italy: the most enduring beauty begins as one person’s vision and ends up belonging to everyone who looks. The house is an open window onto the sea, the light, and centuries of Mediterranean imagination. But a window shows only as much as the eye is ready to see, and knowledge is what lets us in: who shaped a place, why a line falls where it does, what a colour is answering to. Architects, artisans, writers, filmmakers, photographers and designers have long come here to educate their eye, and they still do. Beauty waits. Seeing is the work of a lifetime. _ @casamalaparte @malapartedesign Photo: @francoishalard #casamalaparte #capri #italianarchitecture #curziomalaparte #lemepris taken in Capri, Italy by @mastersandmakers.it
8
5 days ago
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For Guadagnino, collecting is not an act of possession. It is an act of composition. Objects are found, cast, placed in relation to one another, given a role and sometimes released to begin another life. A collection is rarely defined by what it contains. More revealing is the distance between things: why one object is placed beside another, why a certain material returns, why something anonymous can hold the same weight as a recognised masterpiece. In Luca Guadagnino’s world, objects seem to operate this way less as trophies than as a vocabulary. Furniture, ceramics, artworks and found things move through different contexts: from private rooms to imagined interiors, from lived experience to cinema. Their meaning is not fixed, rather it evolves according to what surrounds them. Collecting, then, becomes an act of editing. To select, choosing not what is most valuable but what is most necessary. To juxtapose, allowing the old and the new, the precious and the humble, to speak across their differences. To create tension, because harmony without friction quickly becomes decoration. To remove, perhaps the hardest gesture of all, trusting that absence can say as much as presence. To allow one object to alter the reading of another, so that neither is ever seen entirely alone again. It is not so far from directing. Both practices construct meaning through relationships. Neither begins with the isolated object, but with the world that can be built around it. _ @studiolucaguadagnino Photos: @mikaelolsson_, @giulioghirardistudio, @yannis_drakoulidis, @valeriesadoun #lucaguadagnino #interiors #collecting #design #italiancreativity by @mastersandmakers.it
0
8 days ago
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What if an island could become a print? In 1965, Emilio Pucci transformed Vivara, a small volcanic island in the Gulf of Naples, into one of his most enduring designs. Seen from above, its crescent shape became a composition of curves, color and rhythm, less a literal landscape than a memory of one. Pucci’s work often begins with this passage from place to pattern. Born in Naples and later closely associated with Capri, he absorbed the Mediterranean not as scenery, but as structure: light, coastline, movement, water, heat. In Vivara, these elements are translated into a graphic system in which geography becomes line, atmosphere becomes color, and the island survives as a visual memory rather than an image. The fascination lies in the transformation. From landscape to motif, from motif to textile, from textile to the moving body. With each passage, the island becomes less literal and more alive, its contours continually reshaped through drape, gesture and movement. In this sense, Vivara is more than an emblematic Pucci print. It is an exercise in transforming place into form, preserving not the image of an island, but its rhythm, atmosphere and memory. A fragment of the Mediterranean made portable, and carried into the world through design. _ @emiliopucci Emilio Pucci Archive, Florence Vogue Italia, September 1990 #emiliopucci #vivara #gulfofnaples #italia #mastersandmakers by @mastersandmakers.it
6
19 days ago
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A grandmother’s colours, a grandson’s eye, and a cliff that never changed. In the 1950s, Wanda Schwartz left Denmark for Sorrento, for love. With her husband Giovanni Cacace, she ran the Minerva, a bar-restaurant that became part of the town’s dolce vita, perched above Marina Grande. Decades later, their grandson Marco De Luca bought the house back. @marcodeluca_private_ trained as a set designer, first in Florence, then at Domus Academy in Milan, and it shows in how he thinks about rooms: not as spaces to furnish, but as scenes to direct. Each opens onto the sea in a different key: lime, turquoise, yellow. And underneath it all, red and blue, the colours he tied as a boy to his Danish grandmother. The collection reads like an autobiography written in objects. Ponti and Sottsass, Memphis and Gaetano Pesce, a Schifano, a Pistoletto, set beside ex-votos, coral, antique globes and model ships. None of it is fixed. He speaks of a living house, one that shifts with his travels and with the moods of the volcano across the water. Some of it he makes himself. His ceramics are hand-painted in Vietri and marked with a small blue heart, now the house’s quiet emblem. Lisa Corti, an admirer, designed linens and tableware for its tables. Breakfast is served in the kitchen. The staff, he says, are his extended family. The result is not a hotel pretending to be a home, but a home that has learned, generously, to receive. 📍 La Minervetta, Sorrento _ @la_minervetta @marcodeluca_ #laminervetta #sorrento #italiandesign #italia #excellence taken in Maison La Minervetta by @mastersandmakers.it
8
11 days ago
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In 1931, as the world’s navies raced toward steel and speed, Italy built a ship that looked back two centuries. She was born on the Gulf of Naples, in the shipyards of Castellammare di Stabia, where knowledge lived in hands before it lived in drawings. Francesco Rotundi gave her the shape of an eighteenth-century ship of the line: a black hull, three masts, a forest of rigging. She was out of time by design, made not for war but for patience. Almost a century later she still teaches the sea as it was always taught: by hand, by eye, by trust. Her motto belongs to Leonardo: Non chi comincia, ma quel che persevera. Not the one who begins, but the one who perseveres. It is a line that could hang above any workbench, any loom, any forge where knowledge is handed down rather than written. She has carried that line across the world: five continents between 2023 and 2025, then the Atlantic again this year. Everywhere she went, she carried the same quiet idea of Italy: things made by hand, made to last, made to be looked at twice. The voyage closes as a return. Before Naples, the Vespucci stopped at Castellammare di Stabia, the shipyard where she was built in 1931, a gesture that turns the itinerary into a statement of origin. Until 25 September she is moored at Molo Beverello (Naples), set against Vesuvius and the Gulf: the ship back in the landscape that shaped her, and the object back in its place of making. Photos: Tour Vespucci _ @tourvespucci @meraviglia__italiana #amerigovespucci #meraviglia #italia #leonardodavinci #excellence taken in Naples, Italy by @mastersandmakers.it
15
12 days ago
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Before destination branding had a name, Italy was already mastering the art of turning a place into desire. In the late 19th century, as railways and steamships opened new routes across Europe and beyond, the great hotels faced a new question: how do you make a traveller remember you? The answer was a small piece of printed paper. Hotel porters would paste labels directly onto guests’ trunks with gum. At first, they were largely functional advertisements often monochromatic illustrations of the hotel itself. But around the turn of the century, something changed. The building began to disappear. In its place came mountains, palms, monuments, exotic landscapes and saturated colour. The label was no longer simply saying: I stayed here. It was selling the feeling of being there. And Naples became one of the centres of this new visual language. Founded in 1842, the Neapolitan printing house Richter & Co. became a major producer of hotel labels, sending its work across Europe and the Middle East. Its artist Mario Borgoni, later appointed director in 1906, brought the elegance of the Italian Liberty style to these miniature advertisements. Some of his designs were essentially travel posters reduced to the size of a suitcase label. By the early 20th century, the trunk itself had become something else: a record of a life in motion. Cairo. Paris. Venice. Rome. St. Moritz. Naples. The labels told strangers where you had been, which hotels you knew and, perhaps, something about who you were. By the 1920s and ’30s, luggage labels had entered their golden age. They didn’t simply depict destinations as they were. They helped shape how those destinations were imagined. Long before the social feed, travel was already becoming image, identity and desire. The journey ended. The image travelled on. _ All usage rights: Art of the Luggage Label Credits: Richter & Co., Naples #italia #marioborgoni #visualart #italiandream #naples taken in Naples, Italy by @mastersandmakers.it
1
16 days ago
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