At Cersaie, Ragno styles the set dedicated to Young Frankenstein for the Milleluci exhibition.

The Boom and Woodchalet collections, strongly tactile and able to evoke the atmosphere of a home fully lived, reinterpret with a modern approach the display dedicated to Mel Brooks’s masterpiece
 

Italian spectators of the National Broadcast, predecessor of the current RAI, in the spring of 1974, may remember a variety show which, from March to May, featured two Italian television stars: Raffaella Carrà and Mina. The variety show had a fascinating name, able to immediately evoke catwalks, long dress trains and spotlights: Milleluci, Italian for “a thousand lights”.

While there were only eight episodes of the show on TV, ten were the sets inspired by the TV programme, all on display at Cersaie in hall 30, which bears the same name, and which closed on September 29 with a great success with the public and critics.

Angelo dall’Aglio and Davide Vercelli, designers and curators of the exhibition, say they have shifted the original Milleluci music theme in a more complex and articulated cinematographic mood.

The ten sets are linked with the same number of international cult movies, reproduced on a small scale by the exhibition thanks to the clever - and slightly ironic - use of totally contemporary materials, furnishings and accessories, part of our everyday life.

In the display, two Ragno collections found a very unexpected place, despite being perfectly in line with the personal and domestic atmosphere which is part of their inspiration.

The display, which is a reproduction of the scene where Frankenstein, in the 1974 masterpiece directed by Mel Brooks, is having dinner at the house of the blind priest played by Gene Hackman, is framed on the sides by two walls covered by a wide pattern of Piombo colour tiles of the Boom collection.

The superficial texture in concrete-effect, contaminated by micro insert tiles in terracotta, resin and stone fragments, is perfect to communicate to the visitors of the exhibition that feeling of a home fully lived, damaged by time and by the succession of gestures which is a main part of the film’s scenic design, edited by the director together with Gene Wilder.

Besides, the colour and tactile variations of the 75 x 75 rectified tiles show a rare ability, specifically requested by the designers of the exhibition, to play with light and draw life, depth and visual communication from it.

On the floor, Boom finds a perfect response in the substantial and strongly veined surface of the wood-effect stoneware of the Woodchalet collection. The 15 x 90 cm size, chosen in the Brown variant, on the small scale of the cinematographic set, reproduces the memory of an ancient wooden house, a bit run-down but, because of this, even more fascinating and communicative.