Italy has a strange relationship with stereotypes. Like walls, they both limit and define it. Not that Italians — clever as they are — passively accept this status, but quite the opposite. The history of creativity in our country, from the Middle Ages onwards, has always played on this tension: escaping the stereotype only to reaffirm it, and in the process, evolving and changing. It’s a very natural process. In their own small way, within the micro-universe of their singular lives, all Italians perform their own stereotypes only to, like actors in a comedy, turn to the audience and wink. After all, there’s a reason why all stereotypes became stereotypes — is the word just another way to say “certainty”? One of them, perhaps the most accepted and most true, is that despite their cleverness and occasional carelessness, Italians are born and raised surrounded by beauty. Whether it’s a landscape, the town’s church, a certain book, or even an old, half-forgotten piece of furniture in grandma’s attic found on a tedious afternoon (Sunday lunch, yet another stereotype), beauty surrounds them and never ceases to surprise. As they grow up and learn, Italians often discover that beauty lives in their homes, too. Not in the “fine things in terrible taste” Gozzano once described, but in those objects that, during and after the economic boom which saw our country rise from the rubble, promised with their very existence a better future. A kettle from a wedding registry some thirty years ago, a lamp that seems both futuristic and vintage, chairs and bedside tables, round sofas, the pouf from our childhood bedroom, a moka pot. We’re surrounded by these stories and barely notice them — yet another truthful Italian stereotype.

For Design Week 2025, nss magazine’s Digital Cover “Italian Stereotypes” sets out to reflect on just this. Borrowing from Pirandello a cast of characters in search of an author (minus the paper skies tearing down dramatically), we wanted to tell the story of Italian design not through its creators, but by exploring the modern archetypes of its consumers. Imaginary interviews that investigate today’s stereotypes by first passing through the periphery of their tastes. What do they love? Where do they live? How do they think? But above all — what design object hides in their home?