In the years of the “Reconstruction” and the “Economic Miracle”, the newfound status of Palermo as the administrative and political “capital” of Sicily, albeit in relation to Regional Autonomy, also corresponds to the widespread desire to resume that proactive role in relation to the culture of furnishing and interior design that had shown itself to be excellent especially during the Belle Époque. The corporate relaunch of the historic Ducrot furniture factory was one of the most striking aspects of this orientation: it concerned, in fact, the reaffirmation of the company also in the sector of assignments for the furnishing of public and private institutional offices, hotels and public places. A sector, this, for which the choices of the designers of the company’s Technical Office are oriented towards a cautious modernity, often with twentieth-century references. Already in the period between 1944 and 1955 the furniture factory reaffirmed its productive proactivity by carrying out large orders and reactivating the sales network (with warehouses in Rome in Piazza Mignanelli, in Palermo in Via Generale Magliocco, in Genoa in Via Petrarca and in Naples in Via Immacolatella Nuova). Among the naval commissions of this period, in addition to the complete transformation of the cabins and lounges of ships of important shipping companies (such as Italia, Adriatica and Tirrenia), of particular importance are the furnishings designed by the company’s Technical Office between 1951 and 1956 for the motor vessels Città di Tunisi, Città di Napoli, Campania Felix, Franca Costa, Lipari and Sardegna, for the turboship Andrea Doria (1951-1953) and then for the transatlantic liner Leonardo da Vinci, the last major assignment undertaken already in critical business conditions (1958-1960) but in the wake of the formidable success achieved with the furnishings of the transatlantic liner Cristoforo Colombo (1953). The company, although now accustomed to availing itself of the contribution of qualified external designers (among whom, in addition to the names of Luigi Ciarlini and Amedeo Luccichenti with Vincenzo Monaco, are the names of Bruno Munari, Gustavo Puitzer-Finali, Guglielmo Ulrich and, in the Palermo area, of Michele Collura and Antonio Santamaura) and of the collaboration of leading artists (including Edoardo Alfieri, Alberto Burri, Ettore Sessa 1 Corrado Cagli, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Antonio Corpora, Emanuele Luzzatti, Mario Mafai, Edgardo Mannucci, Marcello Mascherini, Fausto Pirandello, Mimmo Rotella, Giuseppe Santomaso, Giulio Turcato, Emilio Vedova and Giovanni Zoncada), will no longer pursue an original cultural policy as in the first three decades of the twentieth century, limiting itself to recording, with polite interpretative taste and measured original proposals, the results of the new orientations of the culture of industrial design. Once the mirage of the Italian “Economic Miracle” had faded, the factory entered a long period of crisis, during which it tried again to win large contracts; but the collapse of its production structure and even more of its distribution structure, now inadequate to take on considerable contracts (also due to the lack of support from credit institutions), would have progressively thwarted any attempt at recovery.
