Milan, cathedral square. 1955. Summer. Daytime exterior.
Maddalena and Fernando are little more than twenty years old. They are in an Alfa Romeo 1900. It is Maddalena’s car. A sports tourer. The new jewel turned out that year by the factory at Portello. In a newsreel screening in those days at the cinemas, Gina Lollobrigida was seen driving one at the “Rally del Cinema”. Also two beauty queens, in the contest for Abruzzo and Molise, had their photos taken in an Alfa 1900. Fernando drives a Lancia Aprilia; the first Italian car with a 6-cylinder engine. That summer they left it parked in the garage. The Alfa pulls up at a traffic light in the cathedral square. In the trunk there are two suitcases in light-colored leather. Two weeks’ vacation in Liguria: swimming costumes, light clothes, linen and cotton. It’s hot and the windows are down. Maddalena looks at the already half-empty city. The traffic light is red.
“Fernando…”
He turns to look at her smiling. He does not even murmur a simple “Yes?”
He knows her, he knows that way of attracting his attention is the beginning of a rush of thoughts and ideas that nothing and no one can stop.
“Fernando, instead of Rapallo why don’t we go north, to Copenhagen? You remember that wonderful Scandinavian furniture we saw at the Triennale? And that bowl of light-colored wood, perfect... you remember?


Is that how it happened Maddalena?
Maddalena De Padova laughs. She is moved by that memory of 50 years ago. Practically the start of everything, the unfolding of something already written long before in the life of a little girl 9 years old who came home from school one day and told her mother:
“I’m not going back again.”
“Not going where, Maddalena?”
“Not going back to school”
“Why not, for goodness sake?
“Because I don’t learn anything, because I don’t like the teacher and he doesn’t teach me anything I don’t know already.”
“Then, my dear, if you won’t go back I’ll send you to boarding school.”
“And I really never did go back,” Maddalena recounts today. “They sent me to a boarding school in Milan, run by Benedictine nuns, where I found myself sharing a room with Gae Aulenti. And they never succeeded in making me set foot again in that other school, where I felt I was wasting my time.”

And naturally it was like that again on that afternoon in 1955. Did Fernando take you to Copenhagen?
“He didn’t even try to make me change my mind. Why should he have? We loved traveling together, without any hurry, stopping to eat a slice of cake or rest in a meadow. But above all we had begun to discover new things and fall in love with them. And there is nothing so wonderful as doing things with the person you love. Having a goal, overcoming all the difficulties and reaching it together.
It’s been like that, too, with Vico Magistretti, who entered your life many years after the death of your husband.
I’ve had the luck to work with my life’s companions. My husband died when he was still young. We shared a goal. Those were the years of reconstruction, everything was still waiting to be done, invented, understood. We were moving in a new world, strange to us. But we were both very curious and continually overwhelmed by all the new things. And then, when you’re very young, you believe in people, without screens, without doubts. And if you get together with someone cleverer than you, you learn a lot but you also realize your limitations. Fernando’s work was in skiing facilities, chairlifts, hotels and sport. I met him out skiing. But I said immediately I did not want to live in the mountains. So we moved to Milan. We leased a small shop in via Montenapoleone that sold English china, Wedgwood and other makes, Tumble Twist carpets and wrought iron. Small: 60 square meters on three floors. But what a lot of enthusiasm we had. And then Fernando had a poetic vein, he understood me and he followed me.
Vico and I met when our professional lives were already set firm. It was a chance meeting between people with the same interests: art, cinema, architecture, graphics. We enjoyed going together to see exhibitions, shows, projects under construction. It was with him that I began to produce furniture, De Padova’s second lease of life. But that was many years later…


Can we go back to that morning in the cathedral square in 1955?
A change of plans. From Rapallo to Copenhagen in 48 hours. Excited by everything we were seeing for the first time, but chilled to the bone because it was bitterly cold and we hadn’t even packed a sweater in our luggage (laughs).
The North was light, space, simplicity, which, as Vico always says, is the most difficult thing in the world. The white walls of the houses made them even brighter, the light-colored floors... We were used to the monumental style, to those dark Milanese houses with ancient furniture made of dark wood, heavy curtains on the windows... This was really another world. Modernity at that time dwelt there. It was on that trip that I first saw works by Bojesen, Finn Juhn, Hans Wegner, Borge Møgensen, Poul Kjærholm, fabrics and carpets by Unika Vaev. Over the years I got to know them, I went to their homes, their studios, I understood their way of life...
This means Danish design came to Italy starting from the cathedral square? It was a sort of initiatory journey?
That’s true. I’ve discovered everything in my life by traveling. In Copenhagen we bought a bookcase by Finn Juhl, a beautiful table and a sofa that we had shipped to Milan in a container. In the autumn we put them on display at our store in via Montenapoleone. They were the first to arrive in Italy. A revolution and also a risk, but there was such a deep desire for change in those years. The urge to wipe out the past, the war, to have fun. And so homes, the way people lived, also changed.

And how did you choose the objects, Maddalena?
The way I always did. I chose things that appealed to me. I was as if electrified by certain pieces of furniture, their lines, their diversity. I think I had an instinctive aesthetic sense, I knew nothing of architecture, of design: let’s say that I just knew when something was ugly…

Barzio, Valsassina, 1940. Autumn. Interior daytime.
A room in the house in the mountains furnished with pieces of twentieth century furniture, Maddalena is sitting at a writing desk, a girl of a ten. The book in front of her has been open for over an hour now at the same page. The door opens and her mother comes in.
“How are you getting on, Maddalena?”
“I can’t study, I can’t do anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like this room, mommy.”
“But what’s that got to do with studying? You don’t like the room, you don’t like the jumper I made you, and the hat...”
Mommy goes out of the room while Maddalena keeps repeating: “They’re ugly mommy...”
Left alone in the room Maddalena looks around. Then unexpectedly she gets up and goes over to the only thing she considers attractive: a white and brown ceramic vase.
She goes out in the garden and begins to collect some maple leaves to fill the vase with.
Back in the room she puts the vase on her desk, in front of the books: “There. I can concentrate now”.

De Padova born out of the sheer instinct of a girl?
This episode suggests the way I remember things. It’s uncanny, isn’t it? I can access memory through the remembrance of ugly things and beautiful things. But instinct would not have been enough without an almost maniacal desire for getting to the bottom of things. I wanted to know, I wanted to understand. Instinct without knowledge risks exhaustion. You have to hang out with people who know more than you, with people that explain things to you... no one learns things all on his own. It was the encounters, with objects and people, that made the history of De Padova: Finn Juhl, George Nelson, Castiglioni... and the connections, as my friend Eames used to say.
We were talking about that summer in 1955 and your return to Milan… and the containers that arrived from the north, in autumn, with all this new furniture to be sold. In that quite unsuitable space in via Montenapoleone. But the most amusing thing was when the manufacturers and the Danish architects came calling. They would arrive at the store and say:
“Where are your department stores Mrs. De Padova?”
And I:
“This is my department store.”
And they would look around bewildered: these 60 square meters? They couldn’t believe it. In Denmark they already had important stores like Den Permanente and Illums Bolighus. They couldn’t understand how I managed to sell with such a limited display space. I had invented those shop windows as if they were the rooms in a house, seeking connections between things, suggesting a way to combine furniture, carpets and fabrics. Long afterwards I discovered that in New York, Erwine and Estelle Laverne, whose firm we later did business with in the 70s, had begun to lay out their showroom on 57th Street with the same idea, by combining a few pieces of furniture with the works of artist friends. All the same, we needed more space so we leased a premises of 500 square meters on the Navigli (Milan’s inner circle of canals).
And how did Milan respond to this new way of designing window displays?
Oh, it was an incredible success. Above all with architects wanting new ideas for their clients. We matched a desire for change that was in the air. I remember, for example, everyone liked a chair by Poul Kjærholm. But in general all those pieces of furniture, because they were simple and practical, suggested a carefree yet authentic way of life. And then they were very happy years. We had a lot of fun. We used to go dancing in the evenings. Fernando, my husband, was very sociable. We went to a night spot where Peppino di Capri used to sing. We were a good-looking couple and Di Capri often came over and sang to me. These are memories of an unrepeatable period, but not just because we were young. When we were in our twenties the country happened to be still in its adolescence. And those who then had the chance to travel, with inquiring minds and the ability to see, set off with an advantage.
In those years that were so full, Maddalena and Fernando also had two children: Valeria and Luca. It’s hard to imagine you being a mother. Did you ever think of giving up all the rest and being a housewife?
No, never. I always wanted to be independent. In fact it was always a fixation. I never thought for one moment of staying at home. And this is something I owe in part to my mother. She stayed at home, true, but she was certainly no housewife. She didn’t like it, that was clear. And I never imagined myself as a housewife. Not even as a little girl. Never.