To truly go beyond, one must possess an attentive and discerning eye. An eye capable of both grasping the details – because it is in the small and almost invisible that often nestles the highest concentration of beauty – and perceiving the harmonious coherence of the whole.

This visual flexibility is what sets Paola Lenti apart, and it finds its purest expression in Paola Lenti Milano, the brand’s new flagship exhibition space in Milan. Designed as a bioecological architecture, it mirrors the company’s aesthetic sensibility and ethical commitment.

Oltre lo Sguardo serves as Paola Lenti’s manifesto, marking the definitive opening of a new destination in Milan, inspired by the key principles of culture, design, well-being, and hospitality that have guided the brand since its inception thirty years ago.

At Paola Lenti Milano, indoor and outdoor products harmonize with diverse plant species across six distinct ecosystems, fostering an unparalleled urban biodiversity.

During Milano Design Week 2024, visitors are guided through sensory experiences, immersed in botanical and chromatic journeys that evoke olfactory sensations, play with light, notes of colour, and showcase furnishings characterized by delicate elegance and occasional whimsy—a hallmark of Paola Lenti’s unique storytelling approach.

Within the showroom, a dedicated space spanning over 300 square meters mimics the ambiance of a contemporary dwelling. Wide windows offer glimpses of lush gardens, inviting exploration and discovery. Carefully curated colour palettes, vintage furnishings, and meticulous attention to details create an atmosphere of sophistication and refinement.

Looking ahead, plans for a bistro and boutique hotel underscore the brand’s commitment to hospitality and well-being. These additions will further enrich the visitor experience, providing opportunities to explore broader themes of culture and sustainability amidst verdant surroundings.

Meanwhile, the building, still in its original state and subject to renovation in the future, will host the solo exhibition of Oki Sato «Nendo: Whispers of Nature» – a fitting exploration of the intricate relationship between humanity and the natural world, aligned with Paola Lenti’s core values.

© Paola Lenti srl

L'articolo «Oltre lo Sguardo» : What Lies Beyond the Gaze proviene da Paola Lenti.

On the hills of Como, where the city offers a view of the lake from above, there is a social tailoring workshop where accessories are sewn – bags, backpacks, but also dresses, trousers, and blazers – and stories and relationships of people who came from afar, fleeing poverty and war, are sewn up. “Torn” stories that need care, attention, listening: in need, in fact, to be re-sewn.

CouLture Migrante – this is the name of the tailoring atelier – does it with needle and thread, with machines running fast on offcuts and remnants to give shape to accessories entirely crafted by hand, unique because different from one another. And meanwhile, it reconstructs broken identities and restores their dignity through work.

video © Maurizio Natta

Some of these stories intertwined with Paola Lenti company’s that, since its inception, has set itself the goal of combining business and ethics and to pursue a virtuous model that would enhance quality but even before people. A model that would preserve the environment, reduce waste, and give value to what others would discard.

This vision has a lot in common with that of the social atelier in Como, established in 2019 with the aim of promoting qualified vocational training for people at risk of social exclusion, such as migrants, and accompanying them on a path preparatory to professional integration, teaching them to produce high-quality tailoring products from recycled fabrics from the local chain of Como. Here is the common thread connecting the two realities: a thread that sews and gives new life to fabrics and stories.

The collaboration with CouLture Migrante started in 2022 when Paola Lenti proposed to Fernando and Humberto Campana – the Brazilian designers famous for their creations crafted with poor or waste materials – to conceive together a collection that would exclusively use the processing remnants of the company. The desire was to give life to a project based on sustainability and respect for the environment but also ethics, inclusion, and, not last, social responsibility. During the design phases, the idea arose to entrust the crafting of the textile components of the collection – named Metamorfosi – to people in situations of marginality but with experience in sewing and tailoring. Hence, Paola Lenti looked for a local craftsmanship reality that would commit to the same values shared with the designers and with which to “weave” an unprecedented alliance. And the thread led to Como.

Victoria and Saly Samba, hailing from Ghana and Senegal respectively, have been warmly embraced by the company. Guided by skilled tailors and artisans nurtured in the workshops of Meda, they embarked on a six-month training journey, aspiring to achieve professional independence. During that period, they acquainted themselves with the intricacies of fabrics, yarns, and cords, unveiling their unforeseen possibilities. Through a simple crochet technique, the core of a cord, when opened up and “ruffled,” transforms into a textile seaweed, imparting a unique character to the seating series envisioned by the Campana Brothers. A collection that also bears the imprint of diverse cultures, vibrant and overflowing with colours.

Today, the collaboration with CouLture Migrante is enhanced by further meaning. Paola Lenti has asked the atelier to produce the “Backpack CM” – the flagship product of the atelier’s accessories collection – exclusively using the materials of the company. Fabrics with different colours, weight, and thickness, originally aimed to upholster outdoor and indoor furnishings, have been transformed this way into unique accessories, not only because they are different from one another. Also, in this case, the “raw material” consists of the remnants of previous processing, while the hands that shape the backpacks are those of the people that CouLture Migrante has welcomed, trained, and then employed in their own atelier.

The first backpacks tailored by CouLture Migrante will be gifted to architects, designers, and journalists of the sector on the occasion of an event that will take place in the flagship store Paola Lenti in Miami during the next edition of Art Basel Miami. Saly Samba and Victoria are giving the finishing touches to the pieces departing for Florida, while Chieck – called Zé – from Gambia, employed by CouLture Migrante and now a true master in the tailoring art, makes the remnants slide quickly under the needle of the sewing machine, to a rhythm that resonates like music. Actually today, also life stories are being re-sewn: his own, Saly Samba’s, employed part-time at Paola Lenti, and Victoria’s, that will soon be employed in the tailoring department of a silk factory in Como. It is another circle that closes; or rather, it opens to generate shared value.

L'articolo Paola Lenti and CouLture Migrante: Together to Mend Fabrics and Stories proviene da Paola Lenti.

When Paola Lenti and Francesco Rota met for the first time, they were little more than teenagers. It was the end of the 1990s: The company founded by Paola at that time was still a small reality. Francesco had recently completed his degree in architecture at the Art Center College of Design in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland. It’s been 25 years, and the partnership of that time is stronger today than ever.

To celebrate this anniversary, we asked them to revisit together the milestones that have marked these 25 years of professional understanding while getting comfortable on a sofa, one of the products that have defined the success of this long-lasting collaboration. However, both of them preferred to sit on the floor. This gave birth to an informal, two-part narrative, which was summarized in an interview revealing a strong affinity of thought. Their bond is founded on mutual respect and freedom, as well as a shared vision of work: a ‘serious amusement‘, as they both like to describe it.

This brings us back to their first ‘official’ encounter. It was 1998 when they began to think together about a project that would enhance and give three-dimensional shape to felt, the material that had been used for the production of rugs already for some years.

The understanding between the two was immediate and at once translated into the essential and linear features of the Atollo sofa and Linea, the indoor chaise longue that over the years has become one of the most iconic products in the collection.

Thus began a collaboration that gave shape and function to furniture elements characterized by an unconventional design and originating from a strong propensity to research and innovation.

Some years later, new territories are being explored. The challenge is then to design outdoor upholsteries that are as welcoming and pleasant to the touch as those traditionally used in the interiors. The research focused on polypropylene, a light and waterproof fiber. While she was studying the materials, he was working on the forms: The success of Linea was renewed with Wave, the first of a long and articulated series of products designed specifically for outdoor life.

The rest is the story of a creative partnership punctuated by dozens of furnishings, innovative and original, that thanks to their understated elegance have survived unscathed over time – seats, tables, side tables, cabinets and complements such as Frame, Cove, Ami, Smile, Harbour, just to name a few –, many of which have been awarded prestigious accolades. In the meantime, the two “teenagers” have kept the same enthusiasm they had 25 years ago and still enjoy sitting on the floor.

Due sopra il divano

Author Anna Vullo 
Director Maurizio Natta 
Filmed by Maurizio Natta, Fabrizio Polla Mattiot, Gianlorenzo Bernabò 
Editor Mattia Cutaia 
Colorist Michele Ricossa 
Audio Editor Matteo Fusi 
Soundtrack Universal Music Publishing Ricordi srl 
© 2023 Paola Lenti srl, all rights reserved

L'articolo Due sopra il divano proviene da Paola Lenti.

Alessandra Malfatti fell in love with “grand feu enamelling” during an exposition of Paolo De Poli, a renowned Paduan enameller who worked with Gio Ponti. She was seduced by its dazzling colours, the reflections, and the shimmering luminosity of the enamelled surfaces.

Since then, she has nurtured the dream to learn to work with fire to reproduce that magic. For the mystery of enamel is generated by the fire: letting melt powder of coloured glass on metal surfaces in kilns at extremely high temperatures.

Graphic designer, already used to designing little objects, Malfatti enrolled in an art school. There, she met two excellent masters, Graziano Visintin and Maria Rosa Franzin, and she specializes with Ennio Cestonaro, a polyhedric artist and an expert in enamel.

The path is marked. Driven by the desire to develop her expressive style, she establishes a laboratory on the outskirts of Padua, purchases the first kilns, and begins chromatic research to select the best glazes.

«The absolute seduction of enamel lies precisely in the colour» Malfatti explains. «In the nuances, shades, and combinations that can be achieved».

This is what binds her to Paola Lenti. They started by imagining surfaces that can be combined with the company’s collections: movable backdrops, bookshelves, and table tops.

A complex technique that originated in the Mediterranean between the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC. and is now used by very few artists worldwide.

Alessandra Malfatti chose copper as a support material; her inspiration comes from nature in all of its changing forms and innumerable shades. Another common ground: the family lexicon shared with Paola Lenti.

From the observation of the luxuriant vegetation of the Padua Botanical Garden – Alessandra Malfatti’s place of the heart – an installation of philodendron leaves in enamelled copper arises which, suspended from the ceiling, restores the atmosphere of a tropical forest.

Colours and veins derive from a skilful stratification of the enamels, while the movement of the leaves is forged manually when the copper comes out of the kiln and when the material is still ductile. Finally, fire puts its indelible mark on it, since different temperatures and firing times can produce signs, chiaroscuro and transparencies that are different each time. This is the mystery that Malfatti had sensed in De Poli’s works.

Experimentation goes on. “I am conducting several experiments with the idea of creating a sort of fantastic herbarium in various shades, from green to earth,” the Paduan artist declares. “Currently, these are tiny plates that are always made of enamelled copper and have simple symbols that may represent a leaf or a cactus. They might evolve into furniture, items, or something else in the future”.

To give depth to the images, Malfatti uses both transparent and opaque enamels. «It is precisely this feeling of depth, which is produced through the colour and which varies according to the light, that makes each piece precious».

Face to face
with Alessandra Malfatti, Padova

Interview by Anna Vullo
Director Maurizio Natta
Cinematographer Fabrizio Polla Mattiot @ateliermistral
Filmed by Maurizio Natta, Fabrizio Polla Mattiot @ateliermistral, Gianlorenzo Bernabò di Negro
Audio post production Top Digital
Soundtrack Universal Music Publishing Ricordi Srl

L'articolo Face to face with Alessandra Malfatti proviene da Paola Lenti.

To meet Nicolò Morales we went to Caltagirone, in the heart of south-eastern Sicily, where the landscape unfolds in an ups and downs of hills and mountains.

A harsh land of contrasts and chiaroscuro. This is where Morales lives and works, the protagonist of the second episode of Face to face, a series of video interviews conceived to unveil how the unique pieces of the Paola Lenti collections are brought to life.

Morales is a master ceramist, the rebellious son of a tradition that every year attracts thousands of tourists to the city. His creations inevitably draw inspiration from classical canons, but from a very young age, with his first experiences in the workshop, he felt the urgency to find his own path: in a stubborn and opposite direction.

Intolerant of standard productions and colours, he travels the countryside and collects soils and minerals. Manganese, copper, cobalt oxide: the basis of the shades offered by the territory that he then grounds and fires, like an alchemist.

For Paola Lenti, the master ceramist from Caltagirone produces tables, side tables and movable backdrops in hand-painted ceramic, with a technique that leaves colours deliberately fluid, creating this way shades that change depending on the light. Unique pieces whose value lies in the extra-ordinary beauty, as well as in the unmistakable craftsmanship.

«Paola Lenti was looking for unusual finishes» explains Morales while kneading clay in his workshop. « I showed her what I was experimenting with and it immediately created a connection, a symbiosis of ideas. Obviously, we look in the same direction».

«For those who, like me, grew up immersed in tradition it is not easy to innovate», he adds at the end of the interview. «Paradoxically, when you depart from it you are considered a subversive. And I am happily subversive».

Face to face
with Nicolò Morales, Caltagirone

Interview by Anna Vullo
Director Maurizio Natta
Cinematographer Fabrizio Polla Mattiot @ateliermistral
Filmed by Maurizio Natta, Fabrizio Polla Mattiot @ateliermistral, Gianlorenzo Bernabò di Negro
Audio post production Top Digital
Soundtrack Universal Music Publishing Ricordi Srl

L'articolo Face to face with Nicolò Morales proviene da Paola Lenti.

What has always distinguished Paola Lenti is research. Not only in its specific realm – yarns, fabrics, colours – in which it has established itself as an avant-garde company, but also in the field of other materials, provided they have a story to tell. It is these stories that Paola Lenti seeks out, along with the skills, the passion, the beauty they bring with them and the manual dexterity handed down from one generation to the next. As it is in her DNA. 

From these stories, exclusive collaborations with artists-artisans selected throughout the country arose, in line with a philosophy that has chosen to favor the excellence of Made in Italy. Over the years, the collections have been enhanced with new families of products designed to dialogue with the company’s furnishings and colours, in tune with a harmonious and yet heterogeneous living concept. Different materials – ceramics, lava, metal and glass – have brought to life products, which are exclusive because they are made with ancient techniques and crafted, painted and finished by hand. Unique pieces that have contributed to making Paola Lenti brand unmistakable all over the world.

Marella Ferrera is the protagonist of the first episode. She is Sicilian and heir to a tailor’s shop that has been a point of reference for Catania high society since the 1960s: grand evening gowns, elaborately embroidered wedding dresses; suggestions that recall the atmospheres of the well-known Italian novel Il Gattopardo together with nonconformist proposals, such as the synthetic fur collars that anticipate the 1968 eagerness to sweep away bourgeois conventions.

Marella was in search of her own personal path. In the nineties she makes her debut in Rome in the haute couture with the idea of narrating Sicily through traditional materials such as lava stone and ceramics. She reinterprets, experiments, deconstructs: a stylistic approach that will later allow her to tune in with the vision of Paola Lenti.

The meeting takes place in Sicily, where Marella Ferrera has returned to continue the narration of her origins by observing them up close. Paola Lenti asks her to use lava to dress living spaces. Together, they try to melt fragments of glass directly on the stone, with effects that evoke the colours of the sea, the shades of green of the gardens, the lava flows of Etna. Sciara is brought to life, a luminous and very resistant material that today covers the surfaces of tables, side tables and partition walls in the company’s collections. The study of local ceramic floorings has instead given rise to a collection of embroidered rugs that reveal the signs of the dominations of the island. The yarns are Paola Lenti’s technical ones, the workforce is a family heritage. They are Marella’s aunts, the same ones who once embroidered trousseaus and corsets in her mother’s tailor shop.

Face to face
with Marella Ferrera, Catania

Interview by Anna Vullo
Direction by Maurizio Natta
Filming by Gianlorenzo Bernabò di Negro, Maurizio Natta, Fabrizio Polla Mattiot
Editing by Fabrizio Polla Mattiot
Soundtrack Universal Music Publishing Ricordi Srl

L'articolo Face to face with Marella Ferrera proviene da Paola Lenti.

Be responsible. Do not waste. Reuse. Find a way to give new life to thousands of offcuts, fabric and cord remnants, selvages, processing leftovers. A multicolored wealth of yarns and materials that are still performing – still alive – normally destined for landfills. What to do with it? Paola Lenti began to ask herself the question a few years ago, while pondering over the profound meaning of sustainability, a term now overused. How can we be sustainable, this was the exact question, when every year we produce more than 10 tons of leftovers, the disposal of which requires energy, people, machinery? Furthermore, why define them as waste or treat them as such, when they could turn into something unexpected?

Following the thread of this thought, Paola Lenti metaphorically began to fill drawers: in practice, dozens of boxes of different materials meticulously catalogued by color, type of fabric, size. A memory archive, a piece of company history.

In order for that thought to take shape, however, a new sign was needed, capable of revealing the essence of the material by changing – somehow shaking up – its original appearance. Brazilian brothers Fernando and Humberto Campana, renowned all over the world for their iconic pieces produced with waste materials, could have been the ideal partners.
Different in style – nonconformists, out-of-the-box -, but at the same time close to Paola Lenti for the philosophy that has guided their design career: the urgency of identifying a way of producing that combines ethics and aesthetics, the importance of creating from existing materials. Furthermore, the common sensibility for colour, more instinctive in the case of Campana, the result of a long chromatic research for Paola Lenti. Finally – no less pivotal – a shared vision of social responsibility: the awareness that there can be no ethics without inclusion and that, therefore, it is necessary to look for talents even among disadvantaged people; give them the deserved value, make them flourish. So that talent is not wasted either.

Paola Lenti sent to Brazil boxes full of textile remnants to explain to the brothers Campana the potentialities of this project. The answer: “This is a treasure”. A series of remote meetings led to the partnership. Humberto Campana designed shapes and volumes of the first prototypes; Paola Lenti shared her knowledge of the materials and her innate sense of colour, the brand hallmark. A team of artisans in the Meda factory got to work to bring the two thoughts together.

Test after test, matter regenerated and acquired a new form. Rope, Paola Lenti first high tech yarn for the outdoors, revealed the versatility of polypropylene, the material, of which it is composed. Naturally opening up, Rope cords have brought to life “flowers”, as soft as puffs in infinite shades, and expanses of “seaweeds”, silky to the touch, with which seats have been covered, inviting you to rest and play. With other fabric remnants, a rug has been designed with a patchwork effect; with still others the soft tubulars, similar to tentacles, which serve as backrests. The products finished, Humberto Campana commented:

Metamorfosi, this is the name of the new collection designed by Campana, draws inspiration from the natural world and its mutations. Morpho, Centopeia, Alicia, are organisms inhabiting our earth and our seas. The observer, though, is free to interpret appearance and shapes. The border with a work of art is very thin: they are unique pieces that arouse wonder.

Victoria and Saly Samba have been involved in the production of the prototypes from the social tailor’s shop CouLture Migrante in Como that uses itself discontinued fabrics for its products and offers job opportunities to migrant men and women at risk of social exclusion. This is the sign that includes: the people, Paola Lenti and Campana ideas. And all comes full circle.

L'articolo The seduction of Metamorphosis proviene da Paola Lenti.

Creating culture through design also means combining tradition with the present, recovering those signs from the past that still have a potential for expression. It is another way to highlight a sustainable attitude: bring a project back to life and restore its values, making it somehow timeless.

The new Jardín collection by Paola Lenti originates from these premises.

It is a tribute to Cuban-born designer Clara Porset, who lived in Mexico, and to some of her furniture, which is still modern today. Refined, cosmopolitan, politically engaged, after studying in New York and Paris, Porset moved to Mexico City where she became a close collaborator of Luis Barragán, one of the most famous architects in the country.

Paola Lenti, through her unmistakable style and a contemporary annotation, has interpreted some pieces designed by Porset for the Pierre Marqués hotel in Acapulco – an example of avant-garde architecture at that time – and later exhibited at the 11^th Triennale di Milano.

The original wicker weaves have been updated with the exclusive Twiggy technical yarn, a high performing outdoor material, which is long lasting, waterproof and 100% recyclable. The result is a collection of lounge chairs and sun beds with rounded shapes and the appearance of garden furniture from times gone by, along with technical characteristics originating from the most advanced research. “I discovered Clara Porset while carrying out a research on Luis Barragán and his extraordinary sense of colour – Paola Lenti explains -.

An investigation made possible thanks to the precious collaboration of Professor Jorge Vadillo López, founder and curator of the Archivo Clara Porset at CIDI Centro de Investigaciones de Diseño Industrial of the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM).

Clara Porset arrived in Mexico in the Thirties, after having married the painter and “muralist” Xavier Guerrero, and found a country in full swing: the works of exponents of the intelligentsia and of the artistic avant-garde like Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Tina Modotti crossed the boundaries drawing attention abroad. Mexico City was the epicenter of an eventful and lively cultural life.

The designer alternated intellectual encounters and her work as an architect with long trips to rural areas, to learn their traditions and transpose them into her projects. For the design of the seating furniture that made her internationally famous, she drew inspiration from the butaque, a low lounge chair, comfortable and inclined, conceived for relaxation.

Considered as a pioneer of design, Porset has designed furniture for hotels, villas and gardens, reinterpreting with a contemporary style local materials such as wood and wicker. She restored dignity to poor materials and grasped the poetry that can be hidden in a peasant chair, to raise it to the rank of an object of design. 

A timeless design, serving those who use it.

L'articolo Clara Porset: Authorial Design proviene da Paola Lenti.

Guerrilla gardeners plant flowers “clandestinely” in degraded places.
Mona Caron, somehow, does the same with her brush. The aim is the same as well: make the beauty flourish where there is none. Rundown districts, proletarian suburbs, anonymous skyscrapers.
However, Mona Caron, contrary to the guerrilla gardeners, sows her seeds of beauty rising from the ground and pointing straight towards the sky, because the peculiarity of his monumental works is to literally climb on the facades of the buildings, “blossoming” where the view begins to get lost against the horizon. With a magnificent visual impact.

Growing up in the woods of Switzerland, American by adoption, Mona Caron is the antithesis of the mannered artist. Her “uniform” is limited to sneakers and wide trousers, her hair tucked underneath the helmet, essential to safely create the gigantic murals that made her famous internationally.
The subject is symbolic: ordinary flowers and weeds growing spontaneously in the cities, breaking through the cracks in concrete walls. A tribute to resistance, or resilience, to use a rather misused but very current term, of those that “have no place in this world – the artist explains -, that are not part of plans, and nonetheless go on fighting and pushing to emerge”.

The series of the hurban weeds, as Mona Caron calls them, started on the walls of San Francisco, where the artist lives, and then crossed the borders of the United States and “invaded” the skyscrapers of San Paolo or gray suburban apartment blocks in Portugal and Sweden.

“I look for clandestine plant life in the city streets. When I find a particularly heroic specimen growing through a fissure, I paint it big, at a scale inversely proportional to the attention and regard it gets. Against the hardest cement, against all odds, we too can find our fissure, and keep pushing. That’s the way change happens”.

To create her murals, Mona Caron often collaborates with Brazilian Mauro Neri, her life partner, and many other artists-activists. Where she makes flowers bloom, they restore body and dignity to the invisible – homeless, indigenous, seasonal workers – portraying them in the little big daily battles. Making them feel represented.

L'articolo The artist Mona Caron: ”A flower can grow from concrete” proviene da Paola Lenti.

A pronounced talent for design leads Nathalie Seiller Dejean first to graduate from the École Nationale Supérieure Des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and then to work as an illustrator for Le Monde and other newspapers.

It is a pair of shoes, painted for a friend, which changes her creative destiny. Indeed a famous Parisian shop notices them by chance and asks her to work with them. From that point on Dejean begins fantasizing about the idea of distinctive accessories and, reworking lace and precious materials from the past, discovered at local markets, she creates jewelry and accessories for hair that enchant designers and art galleries

“I was in all the Swiss cantons and in their markets, searching for these wonders,” explains Seiller Dejean, who, inspired by “rediscovered” nature, cuts and shapes by hand rough or already braided straw, transforming it into dream-like tiaras with a rustic charm, extremely rich in detail. “Wheat, symbol of universal prosperity, is equally celebrated in history by kings and peasants: it is no accident that the goddess of agriculture, Ceres, is depicted with a crown of wheat.”

To make them even more luminous, the golden brilliance of these jewels, ancient in essence but with a contemporary lightness, is obtained by dying them with tea: all natural, done in a completely homemade manner by the artist herself.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

L'articolo The Poetry of Braiding proviene da Paola Lenti.

Giancarlo Morelli, star chef and owner of the eponymous restaurant and the Bulk Bar & Mixology a Milano, finds inspiration for his cuisine in the landscape and its colours.
In this respect, he and Paola Lenti are alike: the enchantment of nature shines through the collection of the company based in Meda as well and colour has always been its hallmark. “A Paola Lenti armchair can look alike my interpretation of a vegetable terrine, that I named Millefiori just like the pouf” says the chef lightheartedly.

To reproduce that essential bond with nature that both cultivate and embed in their projects, Morelli asked Paola Lenti to redesign the terrace of his Milanese restaurant-bar and to create the fairytale atmosphere of a forest in tune with the flow of seasons.
This way, among glazed tables and relaxing seatings, guests will savour not only the chef’s dishes, but also the spring atmosphere conveyed by the bright greens, the warmth of the summer carried by the blue and yellow shades, the coming fall with its red and burgundy hues, down to the muffled severity of the winter – grey, ice, snow.

Morelli, of Bergamo origins and with an international experience, inherited his passion for cooking from his mother and “from the female community who took turns in the kitchen at home”.
The bond with the land comes instead from the grandfather and the father, both farmers, although the baptism in the kitchen took place at sea, immediately after graduating from the hotel school, when Morelli, very young, left the steep horizons of his valleys to take off. Paying his duties on American transatlantic liners and an imperative in mind: to smell, to observe and prove himself.

On his return, Morelli is a chef with a discerning palate, he perfects himself at the French school and in 1993, opens his first restaurant, the Pomiroeu in Seregno. Others will follow – in Sardinia and Milan – confirming its success, culminating in 2009 with the recognition of the prestigious Michelin Guide.

Committed to a waste-free cuisine, respectful of nature, two equally essential principles in Paola Lenti’s work, Morelli prefers a balanced cuisine, based on raw material and color: a quality one.
The artistic partnership with Paola Lenti produces a special alchemy: “My cuisine and its furniture are ingredients that come the heart – assures the chef – It’s hard to forget them”.

L'articolo Paola Lenti and the chef Giancarlo Morelli <br>«An alchemy of taste and colours» proviene da Paola Lenti.

In his last book, La Pianta del mondo (Editori Laterza), scientist Stefano Mancuso recalls how plants play a fundamental role in regulating climate and in the absorption of carbon dioxide, and how, while representing 85% of living organisms on planet earth, they have often been sidelined. And yet they constitute the nervous system on which the entire world in which we live is constructed, and many, so many stories begin precisely with one of them. Stories of ideals and freedom, of progress and science. But also of unparalleled notes.

The trees of music? They are red spruce.

A Stradivarius soundboard can be made only with red spruce. The famous Italian luthier built 14 violas and violins, starting with a single model. It seems that the perfect conduction of sound in this plant is due to the resiniferous micro-channels that run all along its trunk. There is more: a good tonewood requires trees with a diameter of at least sixty centimeters (between one hundred fifty and two hundred years old), and with the correct density, a characteristic obtained only through slow growth, under stabile climatic conditions at a certain altitude.

Not coincidentally, one of the secrets of great eighteenth-century violin making would seem to reside precisely in the especially slow growth of spruce trees, due to the so-called Little Ice Age, which occurred between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Music today has changed. There is the sound of the wind that, with rising temperatures, has struck down thousands of spruce trees. The 2018 storm in Trentino also damaged the forest from which wood for musical instruments has always been obtained. Not that spruce is the only wood used to build a violin. Mancuso enumerates sycamore maple, ebony, rosewood and boxwood. But he specifies: it is only from spruce that a divine sound can emerge. Anyone who has tried to play a Stradivarius knows this.

L'articolo Lymph & sounds proviene da Paola Lenti.

In the garden, especially in my garden, we welcome emotions, exaggerations, endeavours, spirited life, fears, hopes, joy, surprise – the unexpected thus becomes part of everyday life. Welcome to my tiny meadows of spontaneous snowdrops, grown by themselves without obvious composition, and year after year, bloom after bloom, gift us with the most beautiful and repeated joy.

And how would you consider the small “natural” forest of Dove-trees that sprung up near the now-adult trees close to the stream , or the many Cornus kousa that have grown a little almost everywhere in the garden? Just as the tiny, scented, and robust Daphne boula plants, them sown and grown without human interference. All together they give us the theoretic certainty of continuity. A future full of life, an easy and natural becoming.

When the garden lives naturally, growing out of harm’s way, rejuvenating itself, it can become a resilient entity, independent from man, that will face difficulties like diseases with great confidence: The important thing is to grow a robust garden in which hope becomes certainty and the future, whether it rains or not, whether there be frost or not, or whether there be there be fungus or grasshoppers, it will be happy, serene and peaceful.

A pair of sharp shears to cut off withered flowers or revive tired shapes, a little of the spade and hoe to push back invading weeds (always lurking), and a rake to create some rich and intelligent mulching, are the primary tools for a garden that grows independently and “spontaneously”.

This is a welcoming garden, a safe home for small creatures that can live and grow there: lizards and salamanders, birds and toads, hedgehogs, and tiny country mice. It is a welcoming and lush garden, with a diverse circle of friends, who are genuine and spirited travel companions. Great and lasting benefits will come from not having abused our microcosm with treatments and poisons and not having suffocated her with anxious and dangerous cures. The fact that it is intensely inhabited is the right reward – a garden is not only a place for plants.

 From:

Paolo Pejrone, Un giardino semplice. Storie di felici accoglienze e armoniose convivenze, Einaudi, 2016.

L'articolo A simple garden proviene da Paola Lenti.