From the Editor

I became editor-in-chief of AD four years ago and the first issue I did in my new capacity was a June issue. Then, as now, it was dedicated to Italy. My first editor’s letter was about the mysterious and elemental force of Italian design. The current letter is my fourth about Italy. And for a fourth time I pose the question, “What is so special about Italy?” What is so attractive about the country that makes people from all over the world want to go there, want to cook Italian food in their homes, convince them that Italian clothes are the most elegant and to wait half a year for delivery of a sofa from a tiny, family-run factory outside of Milan — just because it says “Made in Italy” on the label? 

Asking myself these questions for a fourth time, I came to the conclusion that I don’t know the answer. I don’t know where Italians get their inborn sense of the beautiful. Why is an ordinary window in a provincial villa like the frame of a great painting? It’s not because of the beautiful landscape! The window itself is also somehow special. Why did Francis Ford Coppola, a descendant of Italian immigrants, made The Godfather, the most Italian movie in the history of film, in America, and then build a hotel in Tuscany that embodies all of our ideas and dreams of the... well, the beautiful? This is all a mystery. And I decided to stop trying to figure it out. What difference does it make how Italians do it? The main thing is that we all have the opportunity to avail ourselves of the fruits of their labors.

Eugenia Mikulina

Editor-in-Chief

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