Riccardo Dalisi was born in Potenza in 1931, but has lived in Naples from earliest childhood. He is an architect, designer, painter, sculptor, poet. He likes to call himself a contamination, contaminated, contaminating. His inexhaustible creativity is summed up in the motto “Designing without thinking” – as he says – was inspired by Wittgenstein and means “thinking freely with the body”, “feeling the emotions flow in the solar plexus.” It has been called an atypical designer because he doesn’t just design objects, he is able to animate them and makes them protagonists of figurative imaginative fables. “Totocchio “, born from the union between Toto and Pinocchio, is his hero in the form of a coffeepot that always takes on new identities. His Lucan food memories are linked to the fresh homemade pasta: the ” strascnar” (dragged) and ” recchietell ” (orecchiette), but also to large loaves of bread you could slice only with a big knife putting them on the shoulder. The foods that he now love the most are coffee – drinking “bitter with so much sugar” – chocolate – which would build homes – and pasta in all forms, especially the spaghetti that really inspire him because they are so elastic they are able to dance.
Interview by: Helga SanitàVideo and editing by: Davide Mancini
Subtitles by: Giulia Origlia, Helga Sanità and Roberta Romanelli
Document by: Giulia Origlia and Fabiola Petrenga
MedEatResearch – Center of Social Research on the Mediterranean Diet of the University of Naples Suor Orsola Benincasa, head by Marino Niola and Elisabetta Moro
Realized: 08-05-2015