Giancarlo Mattioli

Giancarlo Mattioli, born in 1933, is an Italian designer who rose to fame in the 1950s and 1960s. He studied architecture in Florence and founded the "Città Nuova" Urban Architects Group in 1961 with Pierluigi Cervellati, Umberto Maccaferri, Franco Morelli, Gianpaolo Mazzucato and Mario Zaffagnini. In 1965, with the Urban Architects Group "Città Nuova", he participated in the Studio Artemide Domus di Milano competition, in which they wanted to discover new ways of conceiving luminaires as light objects. The project entered was a lamp inspired by the shape of a jellyfish. The project was successful and the lamp was produced from 1967 under the name Nesso, becoming a symbolic icon of those years.

Mattioli was a designer of modern classics, never stopping to think outside the box. Among other things, he is the technical author of the historic urban plans of the city of Bologna from the late 1960s. He collaborated on the historic centre plan, the slope plan, the industrial district plan, the 1985-86 master plan and the new railway junction. He died in 2018 at the age of 85.