
The Taste of Italy
Victoria’s Heide Museum of Modern Art celebrates the nation that has shaped modern design more than any other.
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On a spring morning in 1933, the doors of Milan’s newly built Palazzo dell’Arte opened in what would become one of the most consequential moments in the history of modern design. Here, at Italy’s fifth major Triennale and the first to be held in the city it calls home to this day, visitors looked on as a new direction for Italy’s design culture was laid out before them—one of unabashed confidence, playfulness, and above all, good taste.
Italian design has displayed an uncanny, timeless ability to charm and inflame the senses ever since. The Vespa, first designed in 1946, remains an enduring symbol of cool despite remaining unchanged for almost eight decades. The famed Arco lamp, first conceived in 1962, has spawned countless replicas. Even the Memphis movement seems to be making a comeback. Cheap, “design-led” Italian appliances are as popular as ever in the 2020s, but the designs conceived in Italy between 1930 and 1990 remain the most powerful symbols of the country’s reputation for melding innovation and craftsmanship.
A new exhibition now open in Victoria’s Heide Museum of Modern Art traverses both the Australian continent and the Apennine peninsula to chart these six decades of eminent design, featuring some of the nation’s most celebrated architects, designers and pieces along the way.
To accurately capture the ingenuity and consistent dynamism Italian designers displayed over the decades, the exhibition focuses mostly on household items. As visitors explore each setting, they’re invited to enter spaces that act as lived-in time capsules— at once both micro museums and dynamic explorations of how the examples on display have come to shape tastes through to the modern day.
“When we curated the exhibition,” head curator Kendrah Morgan tells us, “we had in mind the words of the celebrated Italian designer Achille Castiglioni: ‘Design shouldn’t be trendy. Good design should last over time, until it wears out.’”
Over 180 objects from more than 50 designers will be on display across the Heide’s main gallery and modern wing, all entirely unique in their design language but bonded in their shared sense of timelessness. Beginning with the works first shown at those historic Triennials in the 1930s, the exhibition ventures through the works of post-war architect-designers like Gio Ponti and Carlo Mollino.

Individual, groundbreaking works like Ponti’s own Superleggera chair will be on display, as will landmark works of automotive design like a Vespa GS 150 and a 1957 Fiat Nuova 500 (framed, suitably, by a screen showing a clip from Audrey Hepburn classic Roman Holiday). A special gallery will also be dedicated to the works of visionary designer and architect Gaetano Pesce, who died in April this year.
From there, viewers take in the mid-century pop and plastic movements, finishing their voyage by exploring the disruptive, playful postmodernism of Ettore Sottsass and his Memphis Group throughout the 1980s. All of this is subtly road mapped through the exhibition design of Melbourne-based Studio Peter King, who drew from Italian architecture and classic interior design motifs to create a consistent dialogue between the individual works.
Uniquely for an exhibition of its kind, the curators realised the show presented an opportunity to showcase the relationship between Italy and the place that became an adoptive home for so many of its expatriates after the wastage of the Second World War. “Australia has a rich history of postwar immigration and an extensive Italian community, many members of which maintain a strong interest and pride in Italy’s cultural achievements, including design,” Morgan tells us. Indeed, rather than importing pieces from Europe, everything you’ll see in the museum has been sourced from collections— and in some cases, living rooms— across Australia.
“As we developed the project, we met an extensive network of passionate collectors and researchers who shared their connections, and we’ve been hugely impressed by the amount of fabulous and, in some instances very rare, pieces that we found locally through word-of-mouth,” says Morgan.
“Many of the collectors we met use their treasured objects on a daily basis and were kind enough to invite us into their homes to see the pieces in context. We are very grateful that they have generously agreed to live without them for several months so we can share these stories with the broader public.”

Each movement captures an entirely unique place in time, yet all share a sense of playful, purposeful radicalism that can only come from a country perpetually devoted to pushing boundaries. “These visual languages remained appealing due to the dynamic interrelationship of artistic experimentation, improvisation, technical innovation and superb quality,” says Morgan. “This is what people think of when they think ‘Made in Italy’”. BRAD NASH
Molto Bello: Icons of Modern Italian Design runs through March 23rd, 2025, at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Victoria; heide.com.au
Top image:Ettore Sottsass for Memphis Milan Carlton Room Divider 1981 wood, thermosetting laminate, metal, plastic 196 × 189.7 × 40.2 cm (overall) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with the assistance of the National Gallery Women’s Association 1985 © Estate of Ettore Sottsas
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