The 50s saw the triumph of the dresser in Milan: in the homes of the well-to-do it would often, but not always, be an authentic, valuable period piece, while the others, complete with fake wormholes and pre-aged woodwork, would be turned out by workshops in Cerea and other craft centers. The walls would be lined with nineteenth-century maidens herding cows or views of Venice in the manner of Guardi, but also, in the case of bolder spirits, in the homes of the new enterprising and successful professionals, certain modern items such as paintings by Migneco or Fiume or other artists of the day.
My first steps as a reporter in the early 60s took me into homes in the outer suburbs belonging to the parents of alleged murderers or singers who had rocketed to fame: and here, too, the two-room apartments tended to imitate Versailles, packed with massive furniture in baroque style covered with marble and gilding. The standard marriage bed for young couples nearly always had a headboard upholstered in sage-green satin with a big wooden frame decorated with scrolls and whorls.
So Maddalena De Padova’s enthusiasm and recklessness must have been immense: to display plain, undecorated objects in the windows of her Milan store, white furniture, kitchen cabinets as if they were expensive works of art, and made in places that still did not figure in the circle of taste, bearing strange names like Finn Juhl or Poul Kjærholm, meant taking a real risk in those years.
In those days, our most celebrated architects, writing in the many specialist reviews, who wanted to eliminate the velvet drapery and chests of drawers ascribed to the reign of some unspecified Louis were still getting a suspicious reception; while the new generations restlessly emerging in the thrusting society of the boom years had different ideas – of change, of revolution, even in furnishings: simplicity yes, but meaning a mattress thrown on the floor; austerity, yes, but with fruit boxes for bookcases. Then began the brief period of youthful poverty, both political and intellectual, while Alvar Aalto and Saarinen, though splendid like the sun of the future and raising the hackles of the fathers whom young people wanted to overthrow, were still too expensive for the Vietnam marchers and the protestors occupying the universities. Yet it was not just the personal discovery and passion of the grande dame of design: it was an intuition, a presentiment, of that desire for innovation, the urge to democratize the country (at least superficially), even those hopes that would throw open the windows on Italian sunlight, so much brighter than in the Nordic countries, paint the walls white and sweep away mediocre antiques and clutter. She taught us to want homes open to Scandinavian, American and above all Italian design.
Ten years later there was no solid middle-class home without at least an armchair by Eames or a lamp by Castiglioni, chairs by Magistretti or bookshelves by Rams. Then, as we know, everything became fashion, even furniture, hence subject to people’s anxiety to be keep changing so as arrive first and at the same time to be in the swim.
Maddalena immediately went along with the fashion, in fact she started it. Through the American George Nelson she discovered the singular nineteenth-century religious movement of the Shakers, then still unknown to Italy, for whom (as for Maddalena De Padova), frivolous, useless and arbitrary decoration “came from the devil”.
Ladies, enchanted, quickly picked up the modest name, earlier associated with something used for mixing drinks, and still today, when they go to London, they hurry to the Shaker Shop to buy plain pieces of wood at exorbitant prices. Since then the steadily expanding store on the corner of Corso Venezia has kept fashions in home furnishings under control, digging them up, inventing them, displaying them, with the signatures of ever new architects and designers. And meanwhile the pieces that had enchanted the young Maddalena have become classics, just like a George X or Biedermeier, the hallmark of the modern antique has been invented for them and buyers vie for them at art auctions.