La Trienniale di Milano

After exploring the Porta Nuova district, we headed over to the Trienniale Design Museum, inside the Palace of Art building on the edge of Parco Sempione. It's dedicated to capturing the essence of Italian design, with a focus on the relationship between art and industry. The museum includes exhibits on architecture, urban design, media arts, music, and more.

There, we enjoyed a curator-led tour of the exhibit, "Italian Design Beyond the Crisis," which featured different approaches to production during each of three decades: the 1930s, 1970s, and 2000s. 

These three periods were chosen to illustrate that years of economic decline tend to stimulate design creativity.
It emphasized how design opens up multiple worlds to us, and how everyday items can be beautifully designed to deliver emotion as well as utility. I liked this chair because it reminded me of the Bowdoin sun:

And these are former detergent bottles, turned into vases/growing kits:

The last room of the exhibit had floor-to-ceiling glass shelves housing all of the various design artifacts from these decades (with a mirrored ceiling; if you look closely you can see me capturing this photo from the ground below).
It became clear through the museum, as well as everything else we've seen on this trip, that even contemporary Italian artists are truly Renaissance people, moving freely between art, design, and storytelling in a variety of media.