The perfect festive table: everything revolves around an idea
by Paola Pianzola and Nicoletta Spolini
A tablecloth signed by the guests, a star centrepiece, a precious vintage piece bought at auction. The best way to receive is to set a story.
The value of a handwritten word on linen: this is the starting point for the first of our tables, the other celebrates the decorative centrepiece, perhaps unusual today, but which finds interesting contemporary declinations. The third seeks the value of a history hidden in auction pieces, precious precisely for the memory they preserve. There are three ways of imagining a mise en place, starting with a single idea, around which everything else - plates, glasses, cutlery, decorations - revolves. If we start with the first, we immediately lay a white tablecloth that preserves the calligraphic imprint of the guests who have shared it. An imprint that then becomes embroidery, with that taste for time that leaves a mark, but also of the handmade, of taking care of things because they hold a trace of the people loved. It all begins with the story of a poet and writer who marries a poet, journalist and playwright. We are at the beginning of the 20th century, she is Maria Freschi and he Giuseppe Antonio Borgese. From 1915 to 1947, their home and their table welcomed illustrious guests - to name but a few, Eleonora Duse and Igor Stravinsky, Grazia Deledda and Stefan Zweig, Benedetto Croce and Carlo Carrà, Felice Casorati and Anna Kuliscioff - and each of them, at the end of dinner, signed that white linen tablecloth, always the same. From year to year, the testimony of a generation of intellectuals and conversations is composed.
It is from that idea of a talking fabric that HTSI started to set up an interactive and participatory festive table, presented on the occasion of Tabula Rara, the Milanese event at the Rossana Orlandi Gallery which, until Christmas, proposes a reflection on the ways of living conviviality and is a sort of creative prelude to the festivities. A white linen tablecloth, then, made to measure for HTSI by A:ure (€265), a brand founded by three sisters who salvage production waste from the family textile business. Above, between vintage pewter pieces and Bric, the terracotta bricks designed by Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec for Mutina to create decorative structures, there are two vintage Fornasetti plates from the Specialità Italiane collection (€280 at Galleria Rossana Orlandi), with the recipe for Gnocchi di Patate and Mondeghili. Past and present, memory and future intertwine in as many table settings, each original and different from the others: it is a coherent stitching together of worlds that are temporally distant, yet aesthetically similar, held together by the metaphor of embroidery. The Imperial Peacock by Frank Lloyd Wright by Noritake (square plate 110 euro) is a preview: it is a Japanese artisan brand about to debut on the Italian market and the collection is a tribute to the master of architecture and his iconic Peacock artwork used for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Instead of cutlery, the original first edition, unearthed in the Libreria Antiquaria Pontremoli, of Bruno Munari's book Le Forchette Parlanti (1,900 euro). The Smoke glasses by Joe Colombo (€ 256 a pair) and the smoked roemer wine glasses in mouth-blown and hand-carved crystal, Saint-Louis (€ 480 each). They belong to the Tommy collection and, together with the Noritake plates, also feature on the cover of this issue. In the centre are the Buccellati silverware from the Nature series, in particular the small and medium bowls (4,850 and 7,100 euro) and the centrepiece with lid (34.500 euros) in the shape of a cauliflower, the artisan panettone that Fornasetti, for the sixth year running, has entrusted to the bakery Davide Longoni and has then proposed in a package inspired by the feline imagery of High Fidelity (135 euros), with the original polish of the panettone recipe used to print the plate, once again part of the Italian Specialities series. Among the vintage silver-plated balls from the 1950s, there are two in mouth-blown glass (€21 a pair), decorated and hand-painted with graphite crystals and glitter, made by Dagmara, a Polish handicraft company.
FROM VENETIAN DESERI TO CONTEMPORARY GLASS
Beyond the functional intent, setting an important table means creating a landscape, building a subtle bond between diners by involving them in a game of enchanted amazement. This was the purpose of triumphs, in Venice deseri, elaborate centrepieces composed of various pieces that, since the end of the 18th century, enriched the tables of the most sumptuous banquets. Today, artists Riccardo Monachesi and Cecilia Valli reinterpret this traditional archetype in an ironic and surreal key.
