Danese × Barilla

Announced September 19, 1969, in the Danese showroom in piazza San Fedele, Ustica was shown on a single white plinth beside two unopened packets of Barilla Spaghetti n. 5, which is exactly what it holds. Pietro Barilla had written to Bruno Danese the previous winter after a reader's letter in the Gazzetta di Parma complained that no two households agreed on what a portion was. Danese passed the letter to Enzo Mari, who was finishing the Pago-Pago vase and had ABS tooling on his mind.

Mari kept the pack. The body is the Barilla box made solid: a tall square-section tube in blue ABS, matched by Barilla's printers in Parma to the carton. On top he put the Timor pivot. A round white melamine disc turns on a steel pin inside a square white melamine cap, clicking through five positions: closed, then one, two, three or four people. Beneath it the cap has a single opening at the front. Turn the disc, tip the box, let the chosen hole fill, stop. Mari refused printed numbers and used raised dots, on the grounds that a cook with wet hands reads with the thumb.

Erberto Carboni, consulted on the graphics, asked for only one thing to survive from the carton: the window. It became a narrow strip of clear SAN up the front, so the level of pasta is always visible and the shopping list writes itself. He then set the oval smaller than anyone in Parma wanted, 24 millimetres wide, and low on the face. The 'danese milano' mark is moulded into the base and nowhere else. Domus gave it half a page in November, mostly white.

The apertures were calibrated not to the 80 grams Barilla's test kitchen recommended but to 100 grams per person, after Mari weighed what was actually eaten at his own table in Milan on four consecutive Sundays. Barilla's marketing department objected in writing. Mari's figure stayed, and the four-person hole became known in the showroom as 'la domenica'.