Alluminio!

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Pictured, some classic examples of Italian mid-twentieth-century cast aluminium design and manufacture: two Bialetti Moka Express coffee makers and a Bencini Koroll 24S camera, all constructed out of solid cast aluminium, just like the classic radiator grille of the original Alfa Romeo Spider. There's a beautiful echo of Art Deco about these designs, and the Bialetti coffee makers are still in production, decades on. The fact though, is that both designs do hail from the 1930s and the rise of Mussolini's Fascists, whose triumphal design aesthetic can be seen, writ large in railway stations of the era, such as Firenze [Florence]. Fascism and WWII notwithstanding, the thirties design aesthetic still stands proud in my eyes: a modernist, cinematic vision of the future present: Vorticism and Futurism embodied in the mundane artefacts of daily life...

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