“La Casa Bella” (1928-1932) e il concetto di “modernità” nell’arredo e nelle arti decorative contemporanee

The concept of “modernity” seems a leitmotiv that recurs with surprising insistence in the titles and in the pages of “La Casa Bella”, a magazine founded in January 1928 to examine problems related to “arts and furnishing industries” and to present the latest trends in the field of furniture and architecture. The transformations of meaning that this term has taken over the years into the magazine can be retraced through reviews, articles on new architectures and reports on manufactures or individual artistic personalities, that represented the standard of modernity. In the first issues of the magazine, realized under the direction of the founder Guido Marangoni, the “modern” was often contaminated by traditional forms and models, but as time went on, the modern ideal slowly began to prefer the geoemetric and rigorous lines of Art Déco, Novecento and Rationalism, extensively discussed in the magazine’s issues published during the direction of Arrigo Bonfiglioli.