Italia! investigates a very different view of this renowned Italian lakeside town, with a visit to a dizzying sculpture in Piazza Camerlata, in Como
What do you envisage when you think of the Italian Lakes? It probably isn’t a design movement called Italian Rationalism, but the town of Como, on the lake of the same name, gave birth to this new style in the 1920s. Rationalism embraced classical order and proportion, along with encouraging the use of industrial materials and designing for practicality. Mario Radice and Cesare Cattaneo, part of the Gruppo di Como, which formed around this aesthetic, collaborated on this striking and bold sculpture. The Camerlata Fountain may not look very practical, but it also has the amusingly mundane task of increasing the visibility of a traffic island.