Director Paolo Sorrentino Enlisted for Salone del Mobile Installation During Milan Design Week

As Milan prepares to host thousands of global visitors this April for Milan Design Week 2025 and the coinciding Salone Del Mobile furniture fair, Salone has announced that world-renowned director Paolo Sorrentino is one of this year’s special guests.

Known for productions like HBO’s The Young Pope (2016) and 2021 Venice Film Festival Grand Jury Prize winner The Hand of God (2021), Sorrentino has unveiled the plans for his meditative installation called “La dolce attesa,” which will be set up at the entrance to Pavilions 22-24. On the theme, Sorrentino said “One of life’s greatest misfortunes is waiting. We talk about waiting for a report, for a medical response. When we await our fate, all we can do is wait. When our future depends on a doctor, on a laboratory, we just have to hang on in there.”

“Our waiting room aspires to be something else. It doesn’t force you to sit still, but lets you go. A little trip, like children, on reassuring rides,” he continued. According to Salone, Sorrentino is tapping set designer Margherita Palli, who has designed for more than sixty shows in Italy and around the world, for the project.

President of the Salone del Mobile Maria Porro said “With La dolce attesa, he invites us to live an experience that affects us all closely.” She continued “This installation is not just a space, but a narrative made up of images, sounds and breaths, reminding us that waiting is a universal feeling. It is so in Sorrentino’s chosen setting − a hospital waiting room; as well as in any other context in which waiting is the measure by which we relate to the world, in our homes, at work, in an airport, wherever destiny takes us.”

Stay tuned to Hypebeast for updates on the forthcoming Salone Del Mobile fair and the wider activations set to take place across the city during Milan Design Week 2025.