During the years of reconstruction, the department store La Rinascente became the promoter,
with Gio Ponti’s contribution, of Apem (Artigianato Produzione Esportazione Milano),
a company to support Italian craftsmanship in order to promote its export.
Apem would be short-lived and the intended goal would not be achieved; nevertheless, in
that period Ponti involved several artists and ceramists in the initiative, as well as the best
craftsmen, with whom he made some objects himself.
The essay is a systematization, made from the few available sources functional to the
reconstruction of Apem’s history, placed in the broader Italian context of the Marshall
Plan with related companies such as Cna (Compagnia nazionale artigiana) or Enapi. On
the sidelines, it emerges how La Rinascente, from the immediate postwar period to the
founding of the Compasso d’Oro award in the early 1950s, played a key role in the design
culture of Italian design, marking some fundamental steps.