While I was working in Milan

In 2019 I went to Milan, to work in the industrial “Isao Hosoe Design Studio”. My mentor was Lorenzo de Bartolomeis, who soon realized that what gave me the most pleasure in design was to create with my own hands, to prototype what my head was trying to express. One of the projects that he challenged me to do was a revival of the “Posacenere”, an ashtray designed by Isao Hosoe in partnership with Kartell. The ashtray was made of plastic and, like most of Isao's works, it referred to the shapes of the female body. Lorenzo's idea was to recreate the ashtray in ceramics, so I immeadiately made the molds for the two sizes of ashtrays in the studio’s small workshop.

In August, Lorenzo invited me to spend a few days at Sergio Ricceri's ceramics studio, in Impruneta, Tuscany, near Florence. I went there and learnt from a great Italian ceramics master. His job fascinated me right from the beginning. He even collected mud near his house and made his own clay. Sergio's studio was the ground floor of his own house. A wonderful place, with a beautiful chaos, and a beautiful dog as well!

And it was in this beautiful place that we made the ashtray revival. We tried out various techniques and gave life to this wonderful piece that was somehow left behind. And it turned out great! There was still time to try out Sergio's potter's wheel, an old-fashioned pedal wheel. It was a spectacular experience where I saw with my own eyes a ceramics studio being a ceramics studio and where I was sure that this was really my dream job!

Grazie Isao, grazie Sergio, grazie Lorenzo :)