In Lucca, the Made in Italy that conquered America: the exhibition on the postwar creative renaissance

A crucial decade, a cultural and productive renaissance, an all-Italian story that crossed the ocean. From April 5 to June 29, 2025, the Ragghianti Foundation of Lucca is hosting in the San Micheletto Monumental Complex the exhibition Made in Italy. Destinazione America 1945-1954, an exhibition project that recounts, with rigor and passion, the fundamental role of Italian creativity in the reconstruction and revitalization of the country after World War II.

Curated by Paola Cordera and Davide Turrini, and realized with the support of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca, the exhibition follows in the footsteps of Italy at Work, the famous traveling exhibition organized in the United States between 1950 and 1953 to promote the quality of Italian design and craftsmanship. More than seventy years later, Lucca now becomes the starting point of a new journey into beauty and ingenuity, under the patronage of Italian and American institutions, from the Region of Tuscany to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from the U.S. Consulate in Florence to the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy.

Along the exhibition route, visitors will see Venini glass, ceramics by Gio Ponti and Lucio Fontana, footwear by Salvatore Ferragamo, pictorial and sculptural works, set designs, and objects of design, fashion and graphics. An interdisciplinary narrative that reconstructs, through period documents and materials, the flowering of “made in Italy” as a brand recognized and admired worldwide.

"The exhibition Made in Italy. Destinazione America 1945-1954,“ explain curators Cordera and Turrini, ”is part of the research conducted in recent years by the Milan Polytechnic with the project La voce degli oggetti. Italian Design from the Museum to the Home (2021-2023) and by the University of Florence, proposing to reconstruct the context that made these exhibitions possible and to give back to a wide audience the complexity of the institutional, personal and professional networks that, in the postwar period, saw the interaction of politicians, critics, artists, designers, architects, artisans and entrepreneurs, as well as numerous manufactures, some of which are still active today. Conceiving such an exhibition in 2025 - more than seventy years after the liquidation of Italy at Work by the Ministry of Foreign Trade - is an opportunity to evoke a crucial period in the promotion of Italy internationally; to reread, in a contemporary key, the narrative of Made in Italy and its success means giving back a voice to the objects exhibited at the time, which are now kept in museums and private collections. Through paintings, sculptures and graphics; works of applied art and design; design drawings of products and fittings; archival documents and promotional materials, the exhibition itinerary offers an insight into postwar Italian production, highlighting both its elements of continuity with tradition and its capacity for innovation. In addition, the connections between design, craftsmanship and industry are highlighted, enhancing a heritage that is still widespread in Italy today. The curatorial project aims to present the work of the manufactures involved in the American exhibitions through examples that are similar or, in many cases, identical to those selected for the exhibitions in the United States. At the same time, it reconstructs the broader picture of the evaluations made by the Italy at Work selection committee, including contextual and coeval works that may have been considered during the Italian surveys but, for various reasons, were not then chosen or sent to America. What emerges is the image of a New Italy that, while rooted in the past, rethinks itself by alternating between the proposal of unpublished models and the reworking of solutions developed even a decade or two earlier."

The exhibition itinerary is designed to restore the complexity of the original events, evoking their cultural context, organizational context, curatorial choices and arrangements. The structure of the exhibition in the halls of the Ragghianti Foundation is divided into four sections: special attention has been devoted to reconstructing the methods that led to the first U.S. exhibitions, with a specific focus - in the section The House of Italian Craftsmanship. From Florence to New York - on the activities of CADMA and HDI, central institutions in the promotion of Italian craftsmanship, of which Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti was a leading figure. Further insight is offered by the Viaggio in Italia section, which documents the process of preparation for Italy at Work, with particular attention to the manufactures visited by the selection committee during their visits to the country. The section Living Italian Style , on the other hand, explores the interior layouts of the American exhibition, evoking some of its most representative environments such as those of Gio Ponti or Carlo Mollino through design drawings, objects and furnishings, as well as reconstruction of layouts that also include the imaginative works of Piero Fornasetti. Finally, the section New Forms and New Routes explores the directions taken by the production and promotion of Italian design in the United States in the years following Italy at Work, highlighting the continuities and discontinuities of a path that helped define the identity of Made in Italy on the international scene.

The exhibition is also an opportunity to rediscover the importance of the cultural and commercial dialogue between Italy and the United States in an era marked by the Marshall Plan and the Cold War. In those years, entities such as CADMA (Commission Assisting Handicraft Material Distribution), chaired by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, CNA and Handicraft Development Inc. actively promoted the spread of Italian products overseas, organizing exhibitions and showcases in the most prestigious spaces of American distribution, such as Macy’s and Kauffmann.

The installation is signed by Uliva Velo. In support of the exhibition, a rich catalog published by the Ragghianti Foundation includes essays by Paolo Bolpagni, Paola Cordera, Sandra Costa, Davide Turrini and Alessandra Vaccari, as well as texts and insights by scholars such as Antonio Aiello, Ali Filippini, Lucia Mannini and Elisabetta Trincherini. The international scientific committee consists of Raffaele Bedarida, Marianne Lamonaca, Salvador Salort-Pons and Lucia Savi, among others.

Through the works and documents on display, Made in Italy. Destinazione America restores the image of an Italy that knew how to make its know-how a lever of development and prestige. An Italy that knew how to combine tradition and modernity, art and industry, vision and concreteness. An Italy that today, as then, still has much to tell.

In Lucca, the Made in Italy that conquered America: the exhibition on the postwar creative renaissance

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