9 unique realities, 9 companies will tell their story, their production and their know-how through material and its processing, through technique and applied creativity.

This is the essence of 'novebotteghe_convergenze materiche', the concept devised by gumdesign for Milano Home, which represents one of the new projects launched by the trade fair to promote among shops and interior designers the excellence of craftsmanship and the most innovative materials, and also to provide new ideas and opportunities for collaboration.

The concept was originally born with La Casa di Pietra, an independent project concerning savoir-faire, the territory and crafting sensibility throughout Italy. It included around 50 crafting businesses - namely the companies forming the backbone of this project and coming from every Italian region - and about 300 objects that tell the story of 'beautiful Italian design'. A selection of these collections will be exhibited in novebotteghe and will describe the interaction between designer and craftsman, between tradition and innovation, which is the 'engine' of the new Italian entrepreneurship. An exhibition project that extends and expands to outline the reality of the 'Renaissance workshop' - in everyday and contemporary world - as a place of interaction and contamination between design languages, where tradition and innovation meet, and where experimentation with materials and research for new processes take place.

At Milano Home, Novebotteghe will be hosted in pavilion number 2, which is named Elements and is dedicated to the knowledge and innovation of materials, for the creation of unique and original products in glass, ceramic, steel, wood, stone. Here are the protagonists of this section:

Cusenza Marmi, which is headquartered in Valderice and works local stone by virtue of rare manual and digital skills, restoring Sicilian Baroque and offering precious stone inlays; Daniele Paoletti, who founded 0.0 Flat Floor in the city of Teramo, a unique metalworking workshop where you can observe 'caresses' on the material, as well as invisible welds and metals treated with particular sensitivity by those who - once upon a time - used to restore vintage Jaguars; Greencorks, based in Sandrigo, which has managed to create a true virtuous circuit of circular economy for the recovery and reuse of cork, aimed at applying the material to innovative and useful proposals for designers; Intrecci Toscani, with its weaving workshop in the Pisan countryside, which collects the tops of olive branches pruned by farmers and gives them life with marvellous creations; Nerosicilia, which from the hinterland of Ragusa has turned Sicilian lava stone into a business, providing solutions to international designers that led to the implementation of high quality projects all over the world; Offiseria, based in Rome, which has created a new brand dedicated to design where the material is at the centre of the project, with continuous experimentation on stone, metal, Corian, wood and collaborations with numerous nationally renowned designers; Pimar, an excellence from Apulia, which is known for working Lecce stone with rare sensitivity, creating precious architecture and interiors all over the world and supporting internationally renowned designers with products that express the soul of the territory; Stefano Parrini, a master of leather, who started from Mugello in Tuscany to project himself into the world thanks to his typical artefacts, which are made entirely by hand with great craftsmanship, collaborating with universities and designers to pass down the ancient art of saddlery and leather processing.

It is precisely the theme of contamination that gave rise to a close collaboration between gumdesign and Savema Spa, an Italian excellence based in Pietrasanta: a new challenge that uses the methodological process of La casa di Pietra by applying it to marble surfaces contaminated by other materials. This new and unexpected use explodes with all its expressive force in the central installation - made of natural iron - which is ready to host, as in a sequence of pages, three-dimensional surfaces that are innovative in their use, function and application of the material. Arabescato Corchia marble meets vegetable-tanned leather, cork, inlaid wood, acid-etched metal, woven willow, and defines a new trajectory that stems - just like all the other 'actors' - from a vision that runs at pace with the contemporary world.