Milan Design Week starts in a few days' time and will as usual offer plenty of fashion and design appointments around. If you plan to be in Milan and are on the lookout for something unusual with an architectural twist, join the Porta Venezia in Design Liberty heritage tours (11th e 12th April; with an info point based in Via Malpighi 7).
The itinerary includes many buildings from the Venezia Library (previous Dumont Cinema) to Casa Campanini with its polychrome glass doors, fresco friezes and wrought iron decorations.
Among the hightlights there will be Casa Galimberti (Via Malpighi 1), decorated with a beautiful enamelled ceramic façade, and the Albergo Diurno Venezia (under Piazza Oberdan), that once featured bath tubs and shower areas, changing rooms, sitting rooms, a barber shop, a spa, a post office, a bank, a florist, a magazine stall and a travel agency.
As a further Liberty-related inspiration and to create a geographical contrast with the above-mentioned event in Milan, I'm posting here this illustration for the Magazzini Mele.
After buying the Palazzo della Borghesia in Naples, brothers Emiddio and Alfonso Mele, inspired by La Fayette and Bon Marché (they visited them during their trips in Paris in the 1880s), turned the building in 1889 into the "Grandi Magazzini Mele" (Mele Department Stores).
The largest shopping mall in Naples (2,000 square metres), the department stores sold between 1889 and 1930 men, women and children's wear, accessories (including perfumes), fabrics, interior design pieces and wines.
Elegance, taste and style were the keywords and the Mele lifestyle was promoted also through posters and postcards illustrated by famous artists (including Achille Beltrame, Luigi Caldanzano, Leonetto Cappiello, S. De Stefano, Marcello Dudovich, Franz Laskoff, Gian Emilio Malerba, Achille Luciano Mauzan, Aldo Mazza, Leopoldo Metlicovitz, Enrico Sacchetti, Aleardo Terzi and Aleardo Villa). Enjoy!
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