The design production of Salvatore Caronia Roberti (Palermo 1887 – 1970) in the field of furnishings and decorative arts is still little investigated today; this despite the fact that Caronia Roberti has long been considered the most authoritative exponent in Sicily of the so-called “School of Basile”. From the beginning of the Thirties, Caronia’s academic vocation assumes more and more complex values, avoiding what generically traditionalist had guided her emancipation from the modernist “manner”. The difficult synthesis between the desire to achieve unitary forms with austere plastic solidity, the underlying aspiration to an architecture of a higher cultural level and, ultimately, the composite ethosmonumentalist, who manifested himself with full control and determination in the 1930s, would also characterize all of his subsequent design production up to the 1960s. The ideal of “new classicism” pursued by Caronia Roberti (and theorized in her volume Introduction to the study of Architectural Composition, published in Palermo only in 1949) assumes, in its best applications, the value of the ordering parameter of a design logic aimed at perfect balance between the whole and the individual components, both on a formal and functional level. His creations of furniture and interior arrangements cover a time span that goes from late modernism, to Déco, to the twentieth century; but it was only in the Thirties that his collaborative relationships with artists and companies in the Decorative Arts sector took on particular connotations, also attributable to his maturation of an original design line marked by perceptive instances that reform his classicist vocation.
