Venezia

Venezia is a table designed by Ettore Sottsass for the home he shared with Barbara Radice in Milan. This piece, now part of the Memphis catalog, bears this name because Venice is the city where they met at the 1976 Biennale. A preparatory sketch for what would become the Venezia table can be found in a collection of Sottsass's drawings dating from 1978 to 1980. A prototype of a different shape and size was part of a group exhibition in Linz in 1980. In the introductory text to these "Formal Exercises," Sottsass himself defines furniture like the Venezia table as similar "to monuments in the squares." According to the author, it is a table that "does not bind," that does not produce coordinated pieces. Narration and decoration have independent force, anticipating the great innovation of Memphis.