The Grand Illusion

 At Milan Design Week, the online gallery Artemest has taken over Palazzo Donizetti, a grandly frescoed nineteenth-century residence whose elliptical staircase alone is worth the detour, and invited a constellation of international designers to do what designers at such events always do: make rooms feel as though someone extraordinary might actually live in them.

The result, which Artemest has titled L'Appartamento, is less a trade showcase than a carefully staged argument for Italian craft — furniture, ceramics, homewares, all made by artisans scattered across the peninsula, arranged into spaces that flirt with fiction. The conceit this year borrows from the eighteenth-century Grand Tour: five studios, each assigned one of Italy's totemic cities — Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Palermo — and asked to translate its particular genius into a single room.