Casa Italia: When Design Learns to Feel
Tanguy
At Galerie Bonaparte, Italian design reveals its sensual intelligence.
Paris has a rare gift: the ability to reinvent Italy, courtyard after courtyard, address after address. At the back of 20 rue Bonaparte, a door opens onto another era and onto a certain idea of taste.
Here, actress and producer Virginia Valsecchi, a passionate advocate for art, has inaugurated Galerie Bonaparte: a space devoted not to nostalgia, but to desire. The very impulse that shaped the golden age of Italian design.
Her inaugural exhibition, Casa Italia (1930–1960), is far more than a stroll among iconic furniture. It’s an immersion into the emotional intelligence of a country that, after the war, learned to turn necessity into beauty, and function into poetry.
Co-curated with Justine Despretz, a 20th-century design specialist, the selection brings together legendary names: Gio Ponti, Osvaldo Borsani, Fontana Arte, Paolo Buffa and exquisite rarities where every line and texture tells a story about how to inhabit the world.
Here, a chair is never just a chair.
It’s a manifesto. A gesture. A way of being.
In postwar Italy, designers weren’t simply furnishing interiors. They were reinventing everyday life. Between futurism, rationalism, and metaphysical echoes, they developed a sensual language where form embraces the body, proportion becomes emotion, and modernity breathes.
Under Ponti’s hand, a mirror becomes a promise. In Buffa’s woodwork, geometric rigor meets grace. And in the ceramic base of a lamp by Guido Gambone, one reads the tactile mastery of a country that turned craftsmanship into freedom.
To wander through Casa Italia is to walk through an Italian home of the 1950s: golden afternoon light, a trace of jazz on the radio, a whisper of dolce vita. And yet, the scenography remains profoundly Parisian: restrained, precise, elegant.
It’s this tension between warmth and control that makes the exhibition so irresistible.
This isn’t about vintage or design fetishism, but about essence. The meeting point between object and body, between utility and beauty.
Conceived as a seasonal gallery, Galerie Bonaparte reinvents itself with each exhibition.
“Each show must feel like a rendezvous,” says Virginia. And this one truly is.
Before the doors close on November 27, let yourself be drawn into this Italian interlude, a space where design becomes both memory and emotion, form and desire.
Casa Italia, Galerie Bonaparte
20 rue Bonaparte, 75006 Paris
October 15–26: free entry
October 27–November 27: by appointment
