All’Origine: A Warehouse of Eastern European Ephemera in Imola

In Imola, Italy, Davide Mariani runs All’Origine, a vast warehouse filled with thousands of domestic objects from Eastern Europe, collected over years of travel through Romania and Hungary. Mariani, a former antique dealer, organizes items by color, height, and similarity rather than by traditional cataloging methods. The collection includes books, cutlery, frames, dishes, vases, chairs, rolling pins, cutting boards, bottles, globes, demijohns, wooden crates, drawers, tablecloths, maps, knick-knacks, buttons, photographs, and ladles, mostly produced between the 1940s and 1960s. Mariani notes that while Italy's economic boom led to discarding old items, Eastern Europe preserved them, allowing him to rediscover lost styles. The space, named All’Origine, serves both as a commercial venture—renting objects for photo shoots, films, high-fashion store displays, and Michelin-starred restaurant interiors—and as a quasi-museum reminiscent of Christian Boltanski's installations and the Ettore Guatelli Museum. Clients have requested monochromatic book arrangements (e.g., 150 blue books for a Berlin venue), walls of empty frames, and color-coordinated blown-glass vases. All’Origine is set to return to the Maison&Object fair in Paris. The author, Silvia Camporesi, questions whether the space could enter an art museum context, given its engagement with history, geography, cataloging, material studies, and creativity.