One of the more enjoyable parts of being this magazine’s editor in chief is trying to answer or prove some of the cultural phenomena and questions I’ve always wondered about: How did the Belgians become the leading creators of avant-garde visual art? Why did the Koreans start producing so many pop music groups? And how have the Italians — for century after unbroken century — consistently made some of the world’s most influential and enduring interior design?
There are some qualifiable, historic explanations for this, beginning with the country’s long emphasis on artisanal crafts, its bounty of natural resources (stone, wood, cotton) and, more recently, its manufacturing abilities. (There are also my various theories, too half-baked to commit to print.) But whatever the reasons, the fact remains: One cannot talk seriously about modern interior design or architecture without looking first to Italy.
This isn’t to say that the design there is of a single shared aesthetic — though one could certainly argue, as I would, that the Italians have an especial genius for palimpsest decorating, layering multiple eras’ influences atop one another with a confident, even casual élan. (Sometimes that layering is literal; Italians who are renovating an old palazzo can often sound like archaeologists as they detail the process of removing strata of paint and plaster to reveal the frescoes beneath.) In Italian design, nothing is ever truly new, and nothing is ever truly old; history is something to be lived with, not obliterated, and a house is a stage for conversation between the past and the present.
Take, for example, the property featured on our cover. Il Palazzetto, located in a small town south of Padua in the Veneto region, was built in 1627 for a local doctor who later became sick with bubonic plague. In 1924, after centuries of abandonment and neglect, it was bought by the current owner’s grandfather and, 40 years after that, it was given a much-needed revival by the Modernist architect Carlo Scarpa. But Scarpa, too, died before he could finish realizing his plans for Il Palazzetto, and it wasn’t until 2007 that his son, Tobia, a renowned architect and designer in his own right, finally completed his father’s vision. The resulting house — first imagined in the 17th century, reinvented in the 20th and finally finished in the 21st — is at once a remarkable tale of perseverance and a feat of imagination, as well as, by Italian standards, at least, just another spectacular property.
It’s also a reminder to the rest of us that great design isn’t always defined by the new — or, for that matter, by fetishizing the past. Great design, after all, doesn’t just transcend time: It is time itself.
