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Paolo Sorrentino special guest at Salone del Mobile.Milano 2025
Text by
Paolo Sorrentino, Filmaker - Ph. Michael Avedon
Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino has designed an installation for the 2025 edition of the Salone, dedicated to a universal feeling: waiting, a journey, stunning and mesmerising
Entitled La dolce attesa, the filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino's project-installation for the 2025 Salone is a timeless space, an invisible bridge between present and future, where desire is intertwined with the fear of meeting one’s destiny. A void to be filled or an opportunity to be seized. Because, as the Oscarwinning director states, "Waiting is agony. The sweet anticipation is a journey. A stunning and mesmerising one." A middle ground where everything is still possible, where everything can − or could − be sweeter.
True to Sorrentino's visionary approach, La dolce attesa, set up at the entrance to Pavilions 22-24 can be seen as a metaphor for existence; it will offer an opportunity to stop and catch one’s breath in order to find beauty in slow-moving time, teaching us the value of patience. A metaphor for living, in which everything is suspended yet, paradoxically, everything happens.
Paolo Sorrentino had this to say: “One of life's greatest misfortunes is waiting. We talk about waiting for a report, for a medical response. When we await our fate, all we can do is wait. When our future depends on a doctor, on a laboratory, we just have to hang on in there. In a state of distress. Perhaps, then, we should rethink the way we wait. Thus, perhaps, waiting can become less painful. Because it becomes something else. Our waiting room aspires to be something else. It doesn't force you to sit still, but lets you go. A little trip, like children, on reassuring rides."
All the time slots for the installation are currently filled. Booking has now closed.
Paolo Sorrentino. La dolce attesa, Sketch Salone del Mobile.Milano 2025 - Margherita Palli
"Opening the doors of the Salone del Mobile to Paolo Sorrentino is a profound emotion," said Maria Porro, President of the Salone del Mobile.Milano. "With La dolce attesa, he invites us to live an experience that affects us all closely. Sorrentino is the director of emotional suspense, he is the narrator of ordinary lives made extraordinary through his unique approach, capable of exploring human beings with depth and lightness, together. This installation is not just a space, but a narrative made up of images, sounds and breaths, reminding us that waiting is a universal feeling. It is so in Sorrentino’s chosen setting − a hospital waiting room; as well as in any other context in which waiting is the measure by which we relate to the world, in our homes, at work, in an airport, wherever destiny takes us."
For La dolce attesa, Paolo Sorrentino has chosen to bring in Margherita Palli, a set designer with a forty-year career that began with her lengthy collaboration with director Luca Ronconi, for whom she created the sets for more than sixty shows in Italy and around the world, from the Venice Biennale to the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, and La Scala to the Teatro di Roma. A recipient of many awards, and a sixtime winner of the UBU Prize, Margherita Palli has designed sets for the directors Liliana Cavani, Mario Martone, Alexander Sokurov, and choreographers Yang Jiang and Daniel Ezralow, as well as for Ronconi. The costumes, which are also by Margherita Palli, were created by the tailoring workshop of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. The actors and actresses of the "Luca Ronconi" course at the Scuola del Piccolo Teatro di Milano also participate in the installation.
To this end, Paolo Sorrentino has entrusted Max Casacci with creating a sound fabric that would mark its flow, mastering by Luca Cordero (CoffeeMusic) performed at Andromeda Studio Torino.
Paolo Sorrentino. La dolce attesa Fiera Milano, Rho – Pad. 22-24 Salone del Mobile.Milano 2025 ©Margherita Palli
