At Salone del Mobile 2025, Oscar-winning director Paolo Sorrentino turns waiting into a physical and emotional experience through La dolce attesa. Located in Pavilions 22 and 24, the installation explores waiting not as a pause or void, but as an active condition, one that shapes our perception, emotions, and surroundings. Sorrentino, known for his lyrical storytelling, reframes the waiting room as a space that holds potential instead of anxiety.
DESIGN
Sorrentino doesn’t approach waiting as something passive. He sees it as a shift in awareness, where the body stays still but the mind leans forward. He contrasts this with the impatient version of waiting, the one that triggers foot-tapping, glances at clocks, and tension in the chest. In his vision, waiting slows time just enough to allow transformation. The installation invites visitors to feel that slowness, to inhabit it fully, and to discover the small movements within the stillness.
To help construct this vision, Sorrentino collaborated with scenographer Margherita Palli, who has spent four decades designing for opera, theatre, and exhibitions. When Sorrentino approached her with the idea, he asked for a place that could soften the emotional load of waiting, a space that could hold a kaleidoscope and a hidden heart. Palli, together with Marco Cristini, responded by crafting an ephemeral structure that guides visitors through symbols and signs, similar to how she builds opera sets. She designed the installation not as a clinical enclosure but as an imaginative theatre within the Rho exhibition centre.
Instead of cold white walls and uncomfortable chairs, La dolce attesa offers shell-shaped armchairs that cradle the body. The figures populating this space don’t carry the detached energy of bureaucrats. They smile, offer small gestures of comfort, and suggest that not all waiting leads to distress. Frosted glass elements distort the image of a beating heart, partly hidden but still pulsing. This heart, the only element that could extend life if it keeps beating, becomes the emotional anchor of the piece. It never calls attention to itself directly, yet its presence never disappears.
In a world built on speed and instant gratification, Sorrentino asks us to approach delay with a different mindset. He positions waiting as the moment just before dawn, dark, yes, but full of possibility. Instead of scrolling through a phone screen or counting the minutes, he encourages a gentle drift. The installation recalls the childhood experience of rocking horses, reimagined now as curved seats that rock the adult body into calmness. He doesn’t remove the uncertainty of waiting but surrounds it with softness and sound.
That sound comes from Max Casacci, the musician and founder of Subsonica. Known for transforming everyday noises into compositions, Casacci created a sound environment that responds to and shapes the rhythm of the installation. He didn’t use conventional instruments. Instead, he recorded the sound of wind, forests, the sea, and even the crystalline transparency of glass. The resulting acoustic design expands and contracts like a heartbeat, matching the physical pacing of someone caught in suspense.
Casacci has long explored how to turn natural or urban environments into music. For this project, he brought those ideas into La dolce attesa with a soundscape that doesn’t overwhelm but seeps into the edges of perception. His recent work, including a collaboration with Michelangelo Pistoletto on Watermemories, shows his interest in dissolving the boundary between music and setting. Here, he extends that thinking by letting the sound become the tempo of emotional time.
Together, Sorrentino, Palli, and Casacci present waiting as an experience worth designing for. They don’t promise comfort or resolution, but they offer the tools to face that suspended state with a different perspective. Waiting, in La dolce attesa, becomes not just something we endure, but something we shape and carry, heartbeat by heartbeat.
this was so cool! I got the chance to take part! Wow Sorrentino!