In a new Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Third up: the condom, the only piece of industrial design that everyone owns, and no one shows off
Carlo Ratti's 'Objectify' explores the condom
In almost every Italian home, there is at least one: forgotten at the bottom of a bedside drawer, long past its expiration date. It may be the only piece of industrial design that everyone owns, and no one puts on display.
We are in Padua, in the second half of the sixteenth century. One of Europe’s most important centres for anatomical research at the time. It was there that a professor named Gabriele Falloppio – yes, the one after whom the fallopian tubes are named – is conducting what may be the first clinical trial in the history of preventive medicine.
The object: a linen sheath soaked in wine, guaiac and mercury, shaped to cover the glans and tied with a little pink ribbon. The pink, Falloppio notes in his De Morbo Gallico, published posthumously in 1564, was chosen to make it 'more attractive to the ladies.' The volunteers numbered eleven hundred. The result: 'I call upon the immortal God as witness that none of them was infected.'
In its original form, the condom was to the bedroom what the diving suit was to the early underwater explorers: an enclosure that guaranteed no watertight seal whatsoever. Innovation, therefore, began almost immediately. First goat intestine. Then, once a miraculous new material arrived from the colonies, drawn from the rubber tree, came latex.
But back to the object. The modern condom is a masterpiece of minimal design: a cylinder of latex just 0.07 millimetres thick, rolled onto itself and sealed inside an aluminium sachet. No other object is so thin, so functional, and so universally embarrassing to buy.
The sachet itself is an exercise in semiotics: it must communicate safety, discretion and a certain eroticism, all within the footprint of a postage stamp. Falloppio had grasped something fundamental: design must seduce before it protects. The pink ribbon of the sixteenth century and the glossy packaging of 2026 answer to the same logic - the logic of desire.
Of course, some will object today. Between the pill, cycle-tracking apps and PrEP therapies, the condom seems to be losing ground, a relic of a more anxious age. And what consolation is it, they might say, for Italian design to claim a five-century-old invention while elsewhere artificial intelligence is being built?
But perhaps that is not the point. If, in the middle of the sixteenth century, without latex and without germ theory, a man in Padua could imagine an object at once so clinical and so seductive, then we can do it again.
And on this warm midsummer night, as the scent of jasmine drifts through the open window and the zampirone mosquito coil burns slowly in the corner of the living room, let us remember that the most discreet of everyday objects was invented by an Italian. With a little pink ribbon. To make a good impression. To make bella figura.
About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti
Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: “Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?” Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.
Carlo Ratti
Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: “Objects should keep us company.” Especially during this scorching summer.