Sabattini Italy - Lino Sabattini - Centrepiece - Palma servant - Silverplated - Tray

Tray for Sabattini Silverware 2001.
Silver-colored metal. Stamped on the front 'Palma Servitore 2001/2003 Sabattini Italy Collection' and with a base marking Sabattini Italy, measurements 58.5 cm x 21 x 3.

Lino Sabattini was born in Correggio (Reggio Emilia) on September 23, 1925. At just fourteen he found work in Como in a shop selling banal objects made of brass. It is not a random choice. Soon he came across a number of Domus, Gio Ponti’s magazine. It became his textbook, his Bible, his correspondence school. In the brass shop he earned a living, but he also learned the metalworking techniques.

In an old mill by the lake he meets Rolando Hettner, a stateless German who shapes beautiful ceramics, paints, and reads many books. The man from the old mill becomes the exhilarating experience of his leisure time, a master of existential tensions who encourages artistic solutions that break with convention. Sabattini, now in his thirties, leaves Blevio to move to Milan where he sets up, in a basement, a small workshop with the essential tools of his trade. His ties with Domus intensify. He also now knows young architects, Gio Ponti’s students and apprentices. One of them brings the master a few metal objects created by the young craftsman. One day Ponti appears at his door. He looks, touches, and gives him an idea to develop. Three days pass and Sabattini finishes the work. Ponti is thrilled. Thus begins a friendship marked by key milestones: Milan Triennials, Venice Biennials, publications in the world's leading magazines, solo shows in Italy and abroad. In 1956 Sabattini creates a sensation with the prototype of the Como service at the Paris exhibition “Formes et idées d’Italia.” From 1958 to 1963 he works in Paris and Milan for the famous house Christofle, futilely trying to sweep away aging, soulless productions.

In 1964 he moves to Bregnano, a small town between Como and Milan. He becomes an entrepreneur of his ideas, of his sensibility, of that very distinctiveness that found no space in the contemporary production world. Thus begins his solitary venture realized in Sabattini Silversmithing, where he creates the most luminous and graceful forms in silver."