People often ask me what my favorite object is; the one I'm most fond of among the many products I have designed. I never hesitate to acknowledge that the "Girotondo" project, behind its baffling simplicity, arose from a series of reflections that turned it into an object-manifesto and, in a nutshell, held the idea of how subsequent products would be developed. Guido Venturini and I presented Alberto Alessi a book of about fifty sketches covering various typologies of table- and kitchenware. They were all elementary forms, each with the recurring theme of the perforated little man applied to them. Behind this icon was the express desire to skip outright the lessons of the masters of design and find out how, in a completely different way, an object could communicate with and represent the new world of commodities and consumption that came to characterize the 1990s. More than twenty years since the release of the legendary "Girotondo," which has broken all sales records, the icon of the little man has maintained his characteristic modernity fresh and cool. In scaling it down to "Mini Girotondo", it becomes even more graceful, inspiring on one hand the playful feeling of a "doll house", while on the other it generating new functions and rituals. Stefano Giovannoni