GLOCAL

Antonio Marras's Sardinia, Dolce & Gabbana's Sicily, Franco Moschino's postcards from cities all over Italy, Cesare Fabbri's Florence, Gianni Versace's neo-baroque Magna Graecia. Between the 1970s and the 1990s Italian stilisti often designed clothing and other items that, moving between nostalgia and biting satire, explicitly played with the stereotypes of a national-popular Italian spirit.

But it was not just a matter of holy icons and souvenirs appropriated to exploit the characteristics of the country's regions in order to promote Italian fashion on the international scene: it was also an effort to revive extraordinary local artisan traditions and make them global.

A way of affirming and at the same time preserving the many regional idioms that permeate and define Italian knowhow, always poised between handicraft and industry.