I clearly remember one day, many years ago, when Aldo came to see me in my office in Crusinallo. At one point he took a small metal cylinder out of his jacket pocket. At first sight there was no way it could have been a household object - but it was actually a pen! A pen designed in the same way as his coffee pot “La conica” (1984) but, with the same harsh yet playful lines which distinguished such an important Alessi design, seemed to me to take on its own natural identity as a writing implement. At that time we weren’t able to engineer or produce this type of object, so I put Rossi’s prototype in my desk drawer, until now, when the project has finally been brought to life as part of our work with the Japanese firm Mitsubishi, our industrial partner in this field. The project, designed in collaboration with Claude Zuber, his assistant at that time, is presented in the two original forms of Rossi’s coffee pots: the cone and the dome.

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