Lake Como Design Festival 2025: Everything About the Seventh Edition

A week of exhibitions, installations, and itineraries that weave together history and contemporaneity: from the opening of the new Ico Parisi Archive to tours of rationalist architecture, all within a program that places fragmentation at the center as a regenerative language. From September 14 to 21, 2025, the Lake Como Design Festival returns with its seventh edition, bringing to the heart of the city and along the lakeside an engaging and multifaceted design journey. The theme “Fragments” becomes the key to a narrative that unites exhibitions, archives, installations, and special openings, oscillating between memory and rebirth, reconstruction and imagination.


Villa del Grumello, Como - Courtesy of Lake Como Design Festival

Villa del Grumello once again serves as the festival’s epicenter with "Fragments of Memory", an exhibition that transforms the heritage of iconic Italian designers and historic brands into a map of stories and visions: from Enzo Cucchi’s evocative sculptures to Amini’s rugs inspired by Bruno Munari, from Vico Magistretti’s adaptable projects to DEDAR’s fabrics dedicated to Anni Albers. The exhibition also includes a retrospective on Claudia Moreira Salles curated by ETEL, dialogues between Mario Radice and Nanda Vigo, the visual storytelling of Archivio Mantero, the research of Eredi Marelli, as well as works by WonderGlass and images by Dayanita Singh. A mosaic of languages that invites visitors to rediscover the fragment as a bridge between eras and identities.


On the left, Ben Kicic Hand in Glove, ph Nicolas Polli; on the right, Atelier Thomas Serruys Rollmaster, ph courtesy of Athelier Thomas Serruys and Lake Como Design Festival

In the villa’s park, the "Contemporary Design Selection", curated by Giovanna Massoni, returns with projects by designers, architects, and artisans from multiple continents, each invited to reflect on the fragment in its many forms: fragility, memory, regeneration. Along the Kilometer of Knowledge, among gardens and architectures overlooking the water, a constellation of practices emerges: scraps become new forms, forgotten rituals are reimagined as contemporary practices, natural materials are transformed into hybrid languages — reaffirming design’s power as an act of resistance and recomposition.


On the left, ritratto di Aldo Rossi; on the right, ritratto di Ico Parisi

The festival program also includes exhibitions dedicated to key figures of 20th-century Italian culture. Aldo Rossi. "Architecture Through Fragments", curated by Chiara Spangaro with the Aldo Rossi Foundation, will be presented in the former church of San Pietro in Atrio, offering a reading of the fragment in the theoretical and architectural work of the great master. The exhibition will be accompanied by a special evening screening of the documentary Aldo Rossi Design, directed by Francesca Molteni & Mattia Colombo. Ico Parisi will also be in the spotlight with the first solo exhibition inaugurating the new headquarters of the Ico Parisi Design Archive: a presentation of large-format paintings from the series "Crolli edificanti – Tavole di provocazione", works created in the 1970s and 1980s and never before exhibited in Como. Completing the festival’s map, the Studio Visit format once again opens the doors of ateliers, galleries, and archives in the region, while tours of rationalist architecture offer a chance to rediscover Como as a living laboratory of memory and design experimentation. In a present marked by crises, conflicts, and fragmentation, the Lake Como Design Festival chooses fragmentation not as loss, but as an opportunity for renewal: a regenerative act that, through design, bridges memory and future, roots and experimentation.


Como Razionalista - On the left, Canottieri Lario; on the right, Casa del Fascio