Alessi, the "Dream Factory":

The road that led us from being a small artisan concern working with metal to become the most well known "Italian design factory" in the world, has been a long one. Alessi was founded in 1921 at Omegna on Lake Orta by my grandfather Giovanni. He was a skilful metalwork turner and descendant of an ancient family of craftsmen from the Strona valley, in Northwestern Italy just a stone's throw from Switzerland. In the twenties and thirties Giovanni Alessi crafted small hand-made objects in copper, brass and nickel silver which were then plated in nickel, chrome and silver.

These objects, for the table and for the home, would later become part of the collective memory of generations of Italians.

Design, in the sense in which the word is understood today, made its debut at the end of the thirties with my father Carlo. Trained as an industrial designer in Novara, he created most of the items in the catalogue between 1935 and 1945, the year of his final project: the "BombeL" tea and coffee service, one of the archetypes of the first era of Italian design. In the1950s, he and his brother Ettore opened up Alessi to collaboration with external designers including Mazzeri and Vitale, creators of certain projects still in production today such as the "870" shaker of 1957.

Then, beginning in the 1970s, our identity changed radically: from a normal factory with a standard production line we gradually turned into a research laboratory in the field of the applied arts, calling on the collaboration of practically all the best talents on the international design scene. Convinced that design is one of the most typical forms of art and poetry of our times, we have developed the role of art mediator which has led us to work with hundreds of designers, such as Ron Arad, Mario Botta, Andrea Branzi, Achille Castiglioni, Riccardo Dalisi, D'Urbino and Lomazzi, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Stefano Giovannoni, Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Enzo Mari, Alberto Meda, Richard Meier, Alessandro Mendini, Massimo Morozzi, Jasper Morrison, Marc Newson, Aldo Rossi, Richard Sapper, Massimo Scolari, Ettore Sottsass, Philippe Starck, Oscar Tusquets, Robert Venturi, Guido Venturini and Marco Zanuso.