An extraordinary object, from an extraordinary time. Designed in 1985 when the artificiality of printed laminates was fascinating Branzi’s contemporaries. Incorporating raw branches made these  pieces genuinely unsettling. They have the power to stay in the memory, they ask us to consider what we expect of objects and materials.

A reminder of a time before the smart phone and the app when objects were expected to do things, and to show how they did them. Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper Cubo TS 502  from 1963 made a radio that suggested portability and control.

Europe once made televisions, and struggled to tame the cathode ray tube. Nobody did it more seductively than Brionvega. What made the Algol from 1964 interesting was the way it allowed the tv set to escape from a role as a piece of furniture, and leap to the floor to become a stand alone object, looking up at its owner for approval as if it were a pet.

Putrella, a table piece in the form of  a miniature steel I-beam, a kind of love letter to the modern movement. The extraordinary object designed in 1958 reveals another side of Mari so distant from his Autoprogettazione open source furniture. Despite his radicalism Mari knew how to make objects that could offer something out of the ordinary.

Unlike the new Cinquencento that followed it some years later, Fiat’s Multipla from 2000 brought back the essence of a classic format without going down the nostalgia or revivalism route. It adopted a striking new approach to styling that really made it stand out. Domus’s commentator at the time described it as having the look of an impudent bullfrog. It was too much for the target audience, and even my family refused to let me drive one.

I never owned a new Valentine. I have one on a shelf above my desk now, to remind me of Ettore Sottsass’s brilliance. He understood how to turn a piece of office equipment into an artefact that, as he unforgettably put it, could keep poets company on lonely days in the country. Towards the end of his life Sottsass used to get angry about being known only for what he called a ‘failure’. But failure or not, the Valentine predated the equally colourful and domesticated iMac by 30 years.

We know Fronzoni for his work as a graphic designer and an architect, but the black leather briefcase that he designed for Valextra in the 1970s is a quietly impressive object lesson in formal restraint.

When Miuccia Prada took on the family business, Prada was still limited to luxurious leather luggage. Her first step on her path to transforming the language of fashion and building an international business was the apparently iconoclastic step of creating the black nylon backpack, the Vela in 1984.

Amazingly Michele De Luchi was able to find another way of doing what had already been done so many times before, to design in 1987 another version of an adjustable desk lamp. It’s a lineage that began with the Anglepoise.

Italy’s first main frame computer launched in 1959, was the product of a team of engineers lead by the brilliant Mario Tchou, and given form by Ettore Sottsass. As a commercial proposition it was a failure. As a project that treated the computer as a system to be design rather than laboratory architecture it was a breakthrough.

The brilliant transformation of a company manufacturing military aircraft amid the ruins of a traumatised Italy into a supplier of low cost transport in 1946 is one of the inspirational stories of the postwar period. Socially the Vespa’s impact was transformative.

That magazines have outlived the analogue age is a tribute to the legacy of the great age of print. Domus over the years has been given its identity both by its editors and art directors. Lupi gave Domus a distinctive identity from 1986, reflecting his wit, but also his ability to use a magazine to tell a story.

Solari’s roots as a clockmaker in the 18th century point to a company that has continually embraced new technologies and new opportunities to survive. Its long association with Gino Valle reflect an ingrained design sensibility. A mechanical flight board like the Flight Board from 1996 tracking the movements of the masters of the universe as they criss cross the world in the silver hulled jets has been made technically redundant by the LED screen.

So heavy that it to describe it as a portable is seriously over-optimistic, and barely capable of printing a straight line of type, Bellini’s Lexikon 82, manufactured in an Olivetti factory in Scotland was the machine that I wrote my second book. I did my first on a manual, and by comparison the Lexikon seemed like the key to the modern world.

The brilliance of Aldo Rossi when he designed  Alessi’s first wristwatch in 1987 was that he created something that seemed always to have existed. It could be converted from a wrist watch, to become a pocket watch. It had a character that somehow seemed to offer something more than the signature of a celebrated architect.

The wit and imagination of the Castiglioni brothers make this wonderful assembly of found objects designed in 1962: a band saw, a car headlamp, a fishing rod, and a transformer into an utterly convincing  uplighter.

Work by Gio Ponti has to be on any list of Italian design. What distinguishes the Superleggera from so many other of his designs that could be in contention is having a sense of being beyond a specific moment in the history of design.

When Milan’s Piccolo Teatro was established in 1947, it became the place that attracted Milan’s creative community, drawn to its Brechtian stagings, its fascination with the tradition of Commedia dell’Arte. The theatre’s identity was reflected in Massimo Vignelli’s consistent graphic treatment of its publicity material.

Anna Castelli Ferrieri belonged to an age before plastic had come to be regarded as the embodiment of all evil. Her work turned Kartell from a company manufacturing household products such as buckets into a leader in the design world, represented by the Componibili range made from ABS since 1967.

Design is about  engineering skills and about the manufacturing process as well as the creation of form and tactile quality. For Titania, designed in 1989 Alberto Meda began with the former. He injected a sense of poetry into engineering.