The relationship between materials and culture is also found in the research on enamel on copper, a technique also explored by Gio Ponti. For Sottsass, this investigation began in 1958 with an exhibition at the Il Sestante gallery in Milan, but enamel on copper would also be used on the walls of the Bar Belvedere (which was destroyed) at the 1961 Triennale, ‘a folly’, as its creator, the artist and craftsman Franco Bucci, with whom Sottsass collaborated, called it. For the Milan exhibition, Sottsass made a series of enamelled copper roundels. Here too, as with the glass, the starting point is a classical form from the history of art, but Sottsass works with chromatic and geometric contrasts, circles and lines that enhance the copper and exalt it with coloured enamels. The colour ennobles the material, and vice versa. The same technique is applied to a series of small enamelled cylindrical vases resting on wooden pedestals. The decoration is strongly symbolic: ‘mandalas, plates as signs of the elements, as signs of the passions but also of the seasons; elongated vases as symbols of a veneration for the divinity, therefore as menhirs or even circles of sacred stones, but also as ancient columns of ruined temples’, Fulvio and Napoleone Ferrari write in the volume Sottsass smalti 1958 (2010).

Sottsass therefore entrusts objects with a symbolism, which becomes a message and social criticism, in a quest that continues throughout the 1970s, first by adhering to the principles of Radical design, then by founding the Memphis group, the critical platform whose aim is to question the aesthetics, materials and production methods of industrial design at the time. For Sottsass, therefore, the ultimate goal is to give objects a symbolic, emotional and ritualistic depth: the principle behind everything, even his most absurd objects, is that emotion comes before function. Therefore, it is also to Sottsass that we feel we owe the idea of making culture through objects, and objects through culture.