Golem, Teatro La Pergola, Firenze

Emanuele Luzzati was an award-winning Italian stage designer, illustrator, and animator. Over the course of his prolific career, Luzzati created more than four hundred stage designs, as well as cartoons, ceramics, posters, and even interior decorations for passenger ships. Luzzati was born in Genoa, where he lived until his teens when his family left Italy for Switzerland under the enforcement of Mussolini’s antisemitic racial laws. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, later returning to Italy in 1947 to pursue a career in theater design. Luzzati often collaborated with other artists, creating colorful, whimsical, fantastical set designs for both classical and contemporary avant-garde productions. He was equally celebrated for his illustrations, having worked on editions of Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Voltaire’s Candide, among others. In 2001, his legacy was honored with the inauguration of the Luzzati Museum in his hometown of Genoa.