The meeting with the students on 10 March 2015, in lecture room S5 of the “Luigi Vanvitelli” Department of Architecture and Industrial Design in Aversa, was a genuinely moving afternoon.

With professor Claudio Gambardella we went back over our own beginnings as young designers, and over a season of real vitality in the design culture of Naples and the Italian south — a culture built almost entirely on self-production.

I showed the students, with some pride, a few objects designed by the great masters — Enzo Mari and Achille Castiglioni — whom I was lucky enough to have as teachers during my degree at the Politecnico di Milano, in the early 1980s. And then the wonderful chairs of Franco Albini, and Gio Ponti’s Superleggera.