From Museum to Marketplace. Displaying the Italian Lifestyle

This article focuses on the exhibition Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today, which toured to twelve museums across the United States between 1950 and 1953. It addresses the event embracing an interdisciplinary approach to consider the exhibition within a broader framework. Organized under the auspices of the European Recovery Program and sponsored by the Compagnia Nazionale Artigiana, this exhibition proved to be an extraordinary stage for promoting new Italian crafts and design – including items such as furniture, jewelry, textiles, ceramics, glass, metalwork, and small home appliances – together with their artistic, historical, and cultural values. During its tour, museums and, concurrently, department stores displayed newly designed objects alongside outstanding contemporary decorative artworks that merged industrial products with the Italian “fare a regola d’arte” and showed that beauty could apply to mass consumption objects. Drawing on a diverse array of archival sources, this article examines the many circumstances that made the exhibition a true success from both commercial and promotional points of view by marketing the Made-in-Italy brand together with its social, cultural, and aesthetical values. It investigates how museum display strategies made their way into department stores, exploring the links between settings and experiences to showcase Italian industrial and decorative arts production emerging from the new mass-production industries. It attempts to highlight the value of a display strategy that combined commercial and aesthetic aims, to associate the decorative arts and new Italian design production and to promote a home model, shaped by the “Italian way of life.”