10 lamps that have made the history of Italian design From the Arco by Achille Castiglioni to the Tolomeo of Michele De Lucchi and Giancarlo Fassina

That of lamps is a very important category for the world of Italian design, which however enjoys a strangely secluded and independent position compared to the others. The lamp, in fact, represents, in the furniture, a paradoxical detail: never negligible but that never becomes a protagonist of its environment and remains rather as secluded as it is visible. In the history of Italian design we have long wondered about the nature of the lamp: designers such as Achille Castiglioni and Richard Sapper explored its practical purposes, making them adjustable, extendable, exquisitely technical; others, on the other hand, such as Vico Magistretti or Gae Aulenti questioned its aesthetics, the unity of the stem and lampshade and rethought its decorative possibilities adapting them to their times, thinking about the future or trying to modernize the past. More generally, it is precisely in the lamps that the transition from nineteenth-century opulence and decorativeness to the innovative practicality of modern style is most strongly felt. Later, the lamp became a statement: an object that declared the aesthetic affiliations of its owner, a witness to his love for modernity. And some of these, if not all, have become immortal classics – so pure and essential in their capacity for innovation that they have become timeless objects.

To better tell the story of these evolutions, here is a list of the 10 lamps that have made the history of Italian design.

1. Gio Ponti – Bilia (1932)

Inspired by the Norwegian work lamp Naska Loris, already in itself an iconic masterpiece of functionality, De Lucchi and Fassina have the intuition to maintain spring operation but to hide it inside the arm of the lamp itself. The result was the elimination of excess elements in the design and a much more elegant final rendering. The particular configuration of the various elements, moreover, allowed numerous solutions that, keeping intact the general aesthetics, transformed the table lamp into a suspension lamp, into a lamp with a clamp or even with a fixed base.