In a Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Meet the Mutti tomato tin, a cooking classic in Italy and beyond
Carlo Ratti on the Mutti tomato tin
'La calle se llenó de tomates.' Or, 'The street filled with tomatoes.' Thus begins one of the Odes by the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. And so begins our own late-summer day, in the small town of Montechiarugolo – a community of 10,000 people some 20km from Parma, right in the heart of Italy’s Food Valley, the stretch of Emilia-Romagna behind your favourite Parmesan cheese, Parma ham and balsamic vinegar.
Here, the streets are indeed covered in red, as if Neruda’s poetry had become matter. We are at the headquarters of Mutti, a leading producer of premium tomato products. It is a place I know well, having worked on the company’s masterplan for several years.
In Montechiarugolo, summer itself is a concentrate. Everything has to happen within a few short weeks, during which the town becomes a magnet, drawing trucks loaded with red from across the region. They pour their tomatoes into vast water-filled tanks, where the transformation process begins: sorting, peeling, canning. What our grandmothers used to do in the countryside, multiplied to infinity by mechanical and human arms alike. And then, voilà: a gleaming red-and-gold tin.
Mutti introduced its Polpa, finely chopped, tomatoes in 1971
The design of that tin is rather retro. The two gilded lions, the symbol of the company, set against an intense red background, guarding the gold medal that Mutti won at the International Industry and Agriculture Exhibition in Rome in 1911. The whole thing is embellished with a touch of white and graphics reminiscent of the mid-20th century. The abundance of gilding would probably not look out of place on one of the shelves of the White House, following the revamp promoted by its current occupant.
The tin, though, has something undeniably pop about it: Andy Warhol could have adopted it for an Italian variation of the Campbell’s Soup tin.
Then there is the tube. In 1951, when refrigerators were still a luxury, Ugo Mutti (1893–1980) had the ingenious idea of packaging tomato concentrate like toothpaste. He sealed it with a cap that doubled as a sewing thimble.
Carlo Ratti has designed the Mutti Canteen in Parma, revealed two years ago
Mutti’s packaging, like other objects we have encountered this summer, tells us something more general. Think of Thorstein Veblen, the early-20th-century American sociologist who theorised the idea of conspicuous consumption. The things we surround ourselves with tell the story of who we are and what we value. So even a tin of tomatoes can become a statement. Design becomes a semiotic system, in which a container is also a sign.
Among these signs is summer itself. That tin will accompany us through the coming winter months. From next week, when this summer column will have closed its doors, and the annual 'sexual orgy of pulp and juices' – to borrow the Italian novelist Cesare Pavese’s definition – will be no more than a distant memory, the Mutti tin will keep summer alive. Summer in a can.
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.