Now at its third edition, the “Italian Design Day in the World” will be held in Brazil in the week from 18 to 23 March 2019. The “Italian Design Day in the World” is an initiative promoted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation as part of the campaign to promote the Italian culture in the world and highlights the important role of “Made in Italy” design as the “ambassador” of Italy’s tangible and intangible culture. In Brazil, the event is coordinated by the Italian Embassy in Brasilia and organised by the diplomatic and consular network and the Italian Cultural Institute. The guest star of this edition is design specialist Chiara Alessi: a journalist, essayist, visiting professor at the Milan Polytechnic and curator of the last edition of the “Design Museum” at the Triennale di Milano. Official “Ambassador” of Italian design in Brazil 2019, Chiara will open the Brazilian event with the lecture entitle “Touring Italian Design in Ten Stories”, in which she illustrates Italian design from an interdisciplinary perspective, guiding the audience in a journey across ten Italian success stories on the border between design and other spheres of knowledge, such as communication, innovation and technology.
“The story of the origin and of the future of Italian design can be relayed through the narrative of some of our Country’s paradigmatic adventures,” said Alessi. He continued: “From the family’s background story of the birth of the famous Moka Bialetti, to the global success of the Sacco lounge chair by Zanotta, to the spicy anecdotes behind the creation of some of the most famous icons of Made in Italy labels, but also their failures, Italian design is above all a best-selling novel, peopled with characters, locations and atmospheres unreproducible anywhere else in the world.”
In Rio, Alessi will hold two meetings: at the Dipartimento di Artes&Design of PUC-Rio at 1 p.m. on 18 March and at the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial-ESDI of the State University of Rio de Janeiro at 10:30 a.m. on 19 March. After Rio de Janeiro, Chiara Alessi will go to Belo Horizonte, where she will be hosted at Casa Fiat della Cultura at 7:30 p.m. on 20 March. On 21 March, she will move on to the Italian Embassy in Brasilia for a talk scheduled at 4 p.m. The tour will wind up at Recife with a lecture scheduled at 10 a.m. at the Federal University of Pernambuco on 22 March.
In addition to the lectures by Chiara Alessi, for the Brazilian programme of the “Italian Design Day in the World”, the Italian Cultural Institute presents the Open Day Design, a whole day entirely dedicated to students interested in attending a design course in Italy. The programme is intensely rich of events, including presentations, workshops, conferences, a session of CineDesign, and several information stands which will offer the opportunity of meeting directly with the representatives of the schools and universities involved. The Open Day Design will count on the participation of the Embassy’s Director of Education, Patrizia Magnasco, who will illustrate the Italian university system as well as important Italian design schools and universities, including the University of Bologna, the Alma Business School, the Istituto Europeo del Design, NABA, Istituto Marangoni, and the Domus Academy.
