ITALIAN MANUFACTURING AS AN ECOSYSTEM OF EXPERTISE

“Italian manufacturing is often described in terms of style or aesthetics. In practice, its strength lies elsewhere: in the structure of its production system. Rather than large, vertically integrated companies doing everything under one roof, much of Italian industry is built on networks of highly specialised manufacturers, each focused on a single material or process and refining it across generations.

These are companies that know one thing deeply. Metal turning, timber bending, marble carving, glass blowing, ceramic slip-casting, leather cutting, weaving, polishing, finishing. Knowledge is cumulative, embodied, sometimes difficult to formalise, and passed on through continuous practice. Mastery is not an abstract value; it is the ability to solve problems in a specific material with efficiency, sensitivity and judgement.

Because expertise is distributed, collaboration becomes the normal mode of production. A single product often passes through many hands, each responsible for one step that they know exceptionally well. Rather than diluting responsibility, this reinforces quality: every participant is accountable for a clearly defined task, and the final result is the sum of multiple forms of excellence. Design, in this context, is not only the creation of form, but also the orchestration of competences.

Geography plays a decisive role. In Italy, production is often concentrated in areas where companies working on related processes are located close to one another. Woodworking in Friuli, furniture and upholstery in Brianza, ceramics in Faenza, lighting in Veneto, textiles in Biella and Prato. Proximity shortens communication, accelerates prototyping and allows informal exchanges of knowledge to happen naturally. It is common for a designer to visit several factories in a single day, moving between steps of the same project within a small radius.

Historically, this concentration of skills enabled the rapid industrialisation of the North. Small and medium-sized firms could modernise without abandoning craft knowledge, and industry could grow not by replacing workshops, but by connecting them. Technology entered incrementally: first as mechanisation of existing processes, then as digital control layered onto established material intelligence. The result is a hybrid model in which craft and industry are not opposites, but parts of the same continuum.

This system also shapes the identity of objects. Products emerging from this network tend to embody the precision of industry together with the sensitivity of manual expertise. Tolerances are tight, but surfaces still carry traces of how they were made; components fit perfectly, but materials retain their character. Quality is not added at the end as finish; it is built step by step through the competence of each contributor.

Italian manufacturing works, at its best, as an ecosystem rather than a hierarchy. Its value lies less in a single factory than in the density of relationships between many of them. Specialisation does not isolate; it connects. Each company becomes indispensable not because it does everything, but because it does one thing exceptionally well, in dialogue with others who do the same.”

– Mike Simonelli

February 2023