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Exploring Italian Ceramics: Laveno, Gio Ponti and Antonia Campi's Enduring Legacy

  • Nov 7
  • 4 min read

The Industrial Origins of Laveno


Nestled on the eastern shore of Lake Maggiore in Lombardy, Laveno Mombello is an Italian town with an outsized role in the history of design. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this lakeside area became one of the country’s most important centres for ceramic production — a place where industrial discipline met artistic experimentation.


Founded in the 1850s, the Società Ceramica Italiana di Laveno (S.C.I.) grew from a regional manufactory into a national reference point for innovation in form and decoration.

By the late 1920s, its director Guido Andloviz had brought a new stylistic vitality to Laveno — refining both shape and ornament with a distinctly modern sensibility.

At the same time, Gio Ponti, as artistic director of Richard Ginori, was leading a similar transformation at the company’s historic Doccia manufactory in Tuscany, near Florence.

The two manufactories — Richard Ginori in Doccia and the Società Ceramica Italiana di Laveno on Lake Maggiore — stood as counterparts in the evolution of Italian ceramics, united by the same ambition: to fuse artistry and industry into a single modern language.


Lake Maggiore and an allegorical female figure beside a classical vase.
Signage of the Società Ceramica Italiana di Laveno (1898), Lake Maggiore (Italian Ceramics Society). Courtesy MIDeC, Laveno

The Museo Internazionale del Design Ceramico (MIDeC) in Laveno today preserves this dual legacy of art and industry. Its archives reveal how the region’s artisans and designers transformed clay into an expression of Italian modernity — an ongoing dialogue between craftsmanship and experimentation.



Antonia Campi: Redefining the Forms of Function


Among the most radical figures to emerge from Laveno was Antonia Campi (1921–2019), a designer who redefined the possibilities of ceramics. She joined the factory - Società Ceramica Italiana di Laveno - in the 1940s, first creating expressive, sculptural vases and tableware, then transforming even the most utilitarian objects — sanitary ware — into works of design.


Campi saw the bathroom not as a purely functional space but as a modern sanctuary. Her Torena series (1958–59) introduced flowing basins, elongated pedestals, and elegant chromatic contrasts that concealed technical structures within pure form. These objects transformed the vocabulary of utility into one of balance and grace.


Antonia Campi’s Torena series for Società Ceramica Italiana di Laveno, 1958–59 — blue-and-white sanitaryware with organic, mushroom-like lines that contrast with earlier geometric forms.
Antonia Campi, Torena series (1958-59) - Sanitary fixtures that resemble mushrooms. Coloured, organic forms that stood in contrast to the strict geometric lines that had dominated until then.

Alongside her industrial designs, Campi also produced a series of playful, artistic works such as Le Galline — a family of stylised hens that became icons of Italian post-war ceramics. With their whimsical silhouettes, they embody a vision of art and design expressed by the art historian Anty Pansera, in her monograph dedicated to Campi: "After the mechanistic and reductionist rigour of the Bauhaus and after the playful liberation of Memphis, I believe that today design — a discipline born from poetic origins — must above all create formal choices that convey positive signals of harmony and respect for life.”


Antonia Campi, Le Galline ceramic pitcher, 1950s. Stylised rooster-like form in white and green glaze, emblematic of Campi’s playful and sculptural approach to Italian ceramics.
Antonia Campi, “Le Galline” ceramic sculpture (Tea service teapot), ca. 1950s , — Courtesy MIDeC, Laveno

Italian Ceramics and Design Philosophy: Function with Emotion


“Industry is the style of the twentieth century. It is its way of creating. But design must never lose its soul.”— Gio Ponti, Domus, 1949

This belief shaped an entire generation of Italian designers and deeply influenced Antonia Campi. Like Gio Ponti at Richard Ginori, she understood industry not as a constraint but as a new field of creative possibility — a means to bring beauty and refinement into everyday life.

In post-war Italy, this philosophy carried both social and aesthetic significance. Ponti called for a design language that reconciled function and emotion; Campi responded by giving industrial works a fluid, almost sculptural character.


Porcelain vase designed by Gio Ponti for Richard Ginori, Doccia manufactory, Tuscany. The geometric blue-and-gold decoration reflects Ponti’s modern approach to Italian ceramics.
Gio Ponti, Vaso Prospettica Orcino per Richard Ginori

Within the Società Ceramica Italiana di Laveno, Campi worked closely with engineers and artisans, merging technical precision with artistic freedom. The result was not standardisation, but what might be described as crafted modernity — an aesthetic where empathy and utility coexist.


This vision — shared by Ponti and Campi, is now echoed by contemporary makers working in the same area such as Lucia Zamberletti.


Lucia Zamberletti: A Contemporary Voice Inspired by Laveno’s Legacy


“With an instinctive, even raw approach, I began making ceramic pieces; later I felt the need to understand the tradition, the culture of the material — to grasp the present of this medium, which has become central in both the artistic and design worlds. The discovery of figures such as Antonia Campi, geographically close to me, but also Beatrice Wood, Betty Woodman, Rose Cabat, Lucie Rie, Helen Koenig Scavini…”— Lucia Zamberletti, interview for Avant Crafts Journal

Italian handmade ceramics by Lucia Zamberletti belonging to the Mushroom collection
Lucia Zamberletti, Mushroom collection

For Lucia Zamberletti, who works in Varese, a city nestled in the same Lombard region and only a short distance from Laveno, the encounter with Antonia Campi was a revelation. Studying Campi’s expressive forms and her ability to transform everyday objects into sculptural gestures led Zamberletti to explore clay not only as material but as memory — a bridge between hand, thought, and territory.


Her process begins with instinct but is grounded in reflection: a dialogue between the immediacy of making and the depth of tradition. She approaches form as emotion — a way to speak through matter.

That dialogue finds expression in her ongoing “Funghi” (Mushroom Collection), a series born from her childhood memories of nature.


“I love Funghi — I still remember picking mushrooms with my father. They can be crooked or incomplete, yet their beauty lies in that imperfection, which for me is the true uniqueness of nature.”— Lucia Zamberletti, interview for Avant Crafts Journal

Since 2018, she has shaped over a hundred variations — each one different, hand-modelled, and imperfectly alive. The Funghi pieces, with their organic silhouettes and textured surfaces, extend Campi’s legacy into a more intimate, instinctive realm — where imperfection itself becomes a form of truth.


Legacy


In the mid-century, Antonia Campi turned industrial design into sculpture, proving that utility could possess grace.  Today, a new generation of designers is revisiting that heritage in their own language. Among them, Lucia Zamberletti brings this sensibility into a more intimate, instinctive realm, where imperfection becomes an expression of nature’s singular beauty.

These designers reveal the enduring truth of Italian craftsmanship: that innovation does not replace tradition, but renews it.



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