At Salone del Mobile 2025, Paolo Sorrentino invites visitors into a reimagined space where waiting moves beyond routine discomfort. Titled La dolce attesa and housed in Pavilions 22 and 24, the installation recasts the experience of delay as something active, structured, and emotionally charged. Known for his cinematic approach to storytelling, Sorrentino approaches the waiting room not as a holding area, but as a setting shaped by anticipation, attention, and internal motion.
Design Concept
Paolo Sorrentino doesn’t treat waiting as stillness. He approaches it as a mental direction, one where the body pauses, but the mind shifts forward. He draws a line between this version of waiting and the anxious one, marked by restlessness and clock-watching. His concept slows things down to the point where awareness sharpens. Within this tempo, waiting gains value as a stage where change begins.
To bring this idea to life, Sorrentino worked with scenographer Margherita Palli. With decades of experience designing for opera and theatre, Palli understands how to construct environments where emotion guides movement. Alongside Marco Cristini, she designed a space that invites interpretation through materials, forms, and subtle cues. Instead of building a replica of a medical waiting area, she created a visual theatre that holds emotion without explanation.
Interior Experience
The installation replaces the expected clinical setup with soft-edged, shell-like seats. These chairs gently enclose the visitor, offering physical ease rather than rigidity. Staff inside this imagined waiting room do not enforce silence or detachment. Instead, they carry a warmth, through smiles, gestures, and quiet presence, that counters the usual tension of delayed time. Frosted glass forms conceal a central motif: a beating heart. It sits partly obscured, pulsing steadily, never fully visible but impossible to ignore.
Paolo Sorrentino replaces the fixation on time with an invitation to slow perception. He encourages visitors to approach waiting not with urgency, but with curiosity. The installation recalls childhood comfort, when rocking back and forth brought calm without explanation. Here, chairs rock gently, and visitors drift into a softened version of pause, not to escape delay, but to sit more fully within it.
Sound Design
Max Casacci shaped the acoustic environment of La dolce attesa. As founder of the band Subsonica, Casacci built his career on experimental sound practices. For this installation, he left traditional instruments behind and turned to recordings of water, trees, wind, and glass. These sounds combine into a subtle rhythm that responds to the installation’s atmosphere rather than overpowering it. The beat expands and contracts like breath, syncing with the physical and emotional tempo of those passing through the space.
Casacci has long explored how sound can reshape spatial experience. His previous project Watermemories, created with Michelangelo Pistoletto, used environmental audio to reframe water as an acoustic subject. At Salone, Casacci builds on that approach by giving La dolce attesa an auditory depth that moves in parallel with Sorrentino’s visual structure. The result is a sonic layer that does not command attention, but steadily influences the room’s mood.
A Shared Vision
Sorrentino, Palli, and Casacci don’t attempt to erase the discomfort of waiting. Instead, they acknowledge it and offer a space that helps reframe the experience. The installation doesn’t present a solution. It provides a different setting, one that holds pause without dread, and time without pressure. Through design, gesture, and sound, La dolce attesa proposes that waiting doesn’t have to empty time.
