One of the designers most attentive to the search for “thingness” has been Enzo Mari: there is nothing superfluous or gratuitously decorative in his designs, each of which has its own precise, almost Calvinist logic in its striving for the essence of the type under examination, as in this case the gesture, borrowed from a mechanical workshop, of turning a butterfly screw and tightening it to the point of crushing a nut. - Alberto Alessi.

"The project consists in decanting, in eliminating everything that is useless or false." Enzo Mari

Archetypal and presenting an essential design, the Farfalla (Butterfly) nutcracker is an example of that process of painstaking elimination of the superfluous that has always accompanied Enzo Mari's meta-project research. An object, defined in a few precise lines, capable of summarising the reasons that brought it into being. Designed at the end of the 1990s and never realised, its production in 2021 pays tribute to one of the masters of Italian design.