How Gio Ponti Shaped the Style of Modern Leisure

Welcome to Origin Story, a series that chronicles the lesser-known histories of designs that have shaped how we live.

Gio Ponti, a designer, a professor, the founder of the seminal design magazine Domus, and a mentor to other creatives, is best known for how he shaped a new form of Italian design in the mid-20th century. He played with color, form, and function in a way that spoke to his country’s aesthetic past, present, and future. But he also created cruise ship interiors, cliffside hotels, and glamorous train cars, along the way shaping a distinct vision of stylish leisure.

A Hotel "Village" in the Woods

In 1938, Ponti worked with Austrian architect and cultural theorist Bernard Rudofsky, also a Domus staffer, to design a "hotel in the woods" built on the rocky slopes of Monte Solaro on the Italian island Capri. They planned for a series of individual rooms, or "cells," connected by winding paths that served as corridors. The design utilized natural materials and fluid lines to blend in with the property’s existing mature trees, with each room getting expansive windows positioned to bring the outdoors inside. 

Ponti described it as creating a place for people "to lead the Capri lifestyle," one in which visitors, for the duration of their stays, could become Caprese, staying both on the island and within it. While the project was never realized, Ponti and Rudofsky’s ideas inspired seaside villas across the country and helped conceive a new style of tourism in which the character of the landscape was as important as the architecture on it.

Italian Design Sets Sail

Beginning in the early 1930s, Ponti began contributing to the design of Italian ocean liners, work he would continue throughout the 20th century. Initially asked to paint a smoking room on a single ship, Ponti later tapped other Italian creatives and companies, like ceramics brand Ginori, furniture designer Nino Zoncada, and Piero Fornasetti, with whom Ponti worked on an Andrea Doria cabin christened the "Zodiac suite," with celestial prints adorning nearly every part of the room.

Ponti’s philosophy of maritime design saw each major space get its own color: a blue bar, a red lounge, a yellow-gold ballroom, with furniture, art, and lighting then chosen to match the same palettes. In addition to making it easy for passengers to learn their way around the ship quickly, Ponti’s maritime interiors dispensed with the ornate styles of the past, instead showing that detailed craftsmanship could still have a place in modernism.

One of Italy’s First Design Hotels

By the mid-20th century, Ponti had turned his attention once more to the seaside. His Parco dei Principi Hotel, which opened in Sorrento in 1962, was a radically transformed historic palazzo that includes 96 rooms decorated with blue-and-white ceramic tiles in angular, graphic patterns that Ponti thought reflected the look of the meeting between the Mediterranean Sea and sky.

The tiles were handcrafted by Ceramica D’Agostino, and ceramic "pebbles" of varying shapes and sizes are embedded in some of the hotel’s walls, turning them into a vertical representation of the seafloor. By stripping away the gilded trim, seen as a traditional symbol of luxury hotels, Ponti showed that the serenity of nature was itself a luxury to be coveted.

A Glamorous Railcar

In the late 1950s, Ponti again looked not just at final destinations but also at means of transportation. He created the electric Arlecchino train (which translates to "Harlequin"), a 1960 railcar that linked Rome, Milan, and Venice. The seats are covered with plush velvet in rich, bold colors like forest green and bright gold, with crisp white accents, and a front car offers a panoramic view of the landscape, turning the trip itself into an attraction as appealing as the eventual destination.

The train made its inaugural run, from Bologna to Venice, during the Rome Olympics, and it was a form of mobile architecture, a moving emblem of Italy’s future. Put into storage in the late 1980s, the once-luxurious cars were untouched for nearly 30 years before a decade-long restoration was begun by Fondazione FS Italiane. The overhaul was recently completed (on time for the train to serve as a venue of the Prada Frames symposium during Milan Design Week 2025). Ponti’s interest in transportation extended beyond trains; he also, in 1953, conceptualized a never-realized car, a Fiat with flat, angular panels and oversize windows.

Top photo of Gio Ponti’s Linea Diamante car design at Grand Basel 2018, courtesy FCA Heritage via Stellantis Media

—

Head back to the July/August 2025 issue homepage