Anna G.

"I remembered when as a child my grandmother would open the wine bottle at the table, it had always seemed like a beautiful performance, a kind of ritual ballet: the head turning, the arms rising and falling [...] I decided then to create an anthropomorphic object. I drew a ballerina." This is how Alessandro Mendini recounts the birth of the Anna G corkscrew. It was Alberto Alessi who noticed, while observing the design, the resemblance to a designer friend of Mendini's: "It is evident that subliminally I had portrayed Anna," the author acknowledged, "she had been the inspiration."

A best seller since it was first produced in 1994, the Anna G. corkscrew is a tongue-in-cheek homage to a real woman. Her smiling face has become something of a cult figure over the years, giving birth (so to speak) to a rich family of objects for the table and kitchen in a wide range of materials.