A Journey Through Fragments: Lake Como Design Festival 2025

With its neoclassical villas, Rationalist landmarks, and waterside gardens as backdrop, the Lake Como Design Festival transforms the city and its lake into a stage where history and contemporary creativity enter into dialogue.

Now in its seventh edition, running September 14–21 2025, the festival embraces the theme Fragments, a meditation on rupture as a catalyst for rebirth.

According to artistic director Lorenzo Butti, fragmentation should not be seen as a mere symptom of rupture. In a world that risks dissolving into sameness, it can also become a form of resistance, an affirmation of complexity and multiplicity. The festival responds to this tension with a program that weaves exhibitions, site-specific installations, itineraries, and talks across the city’s historic core and its villas overlooking the lake.

At Villa del Grumello, the exhibition Fragments of Memory becomes the festival’s beating heart. Works by Amini, paying tribute to Bruno Munari with a series of carpets inspired by his celebrated Macchine Inutili, Eredi Marelli, presenting a new selection of iconic Italian design, WonderGlass, with a collection of glass works exploring transparency as a metaphor for memory, and others intertwine with archival materials and new projects.

This dialogue between past and present continues in the Contemporary Design Selection curated by Giovanna Massoni, which unfolds along the Chilometro della Conoscenza. Designers from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe present works that reclaim discarded stone, storm-felled wood, or industrial waste, turning remains into statements about resilience and care. The exhibition brings together works and research that explore fragmentation not as a loss, but as a creative foundation. Each piece becomes a reflection on time, identity, and the scars that mark people, materials, and territories. Here, ZPSTUDIO rediscovers the Etruscan bucchero technique, firing clay dipped in charcoal to create ceremonial forms that seem to re-emerge from a common past, and Lebanto creates compositions of joints, colours, oxidations and mirrors that reflect an image of the human condition

The legacy of Aldo Rossi finds resonance in the former Church of San Pietro in Atrio, where Architecture in Fragments traces his fascination with the incomplete, from the “Analogous City” to unrealized projects that remain strikingly relevant. The exhibition coincides with the premiere of Aldo Rossi Design, a documentary by Francesca Molteni and Mattia Colombo.

Meanwhile, the newly inaugurated Archivio Design Ico Parisi hosts a long-awaited solo show of the Como-born designer. The paintings of his series Crolli edificanti confront the collapse of certainties in modern life, a collapse that paradoxically yields creative freedom.

The theme reverberates through other venues. In Giardino Bellini, a delicate show of Alvaro Molteni’s drawings discloses decades of private sketching. Villa Sucota’s boathouse hosts Voices on Water, part of a broader exploration of Alpine lakes as both unifiers and boundaries. The Antica Nevera becomes the setting for Fragments of History, Virginia Guiotto’s photographs of Como’s layered urban surfaces, while Studio Moscatelli excavates invisible memories in The Disappeared Como at the Roman Baths. Borgovico33, in contrast, stages Lobby Nomade, a rethinking of communal spaces where design is measured by its ability to bring people together.

Como’s Rationalist heritage also comes into sharp focus. Guided tours reveal Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio and the Asilo Sant’Elia, where a project called Piccoli Razionalisti involved more than a thousand schoolchildren in rediscovering modernist architecture. Even here, fragments of history become instruments for education and imagination.

At the Serra del Grumello, the festival gathers voices around conversations on migration, landscape, and the changing identity of the city. As night falls, the greenhouse turns into a café and lounge, extending the festival’s spirit into an atmosphere of conviviality.

Lake Como Design Festival reveals the city not as a postcard, but as a living archive where fragments of memory are reassembled into new narratives.