Elio Martinelli Biography
Elio Martinelli was born on 19 November 1922, the only child of Plinio and his wife Emilia, one of the most famous milliners in the city of Lucca, who probably passed on his artistic streak to him. After a childhood and adolescence spent in Lucca with those companions who would later become his lifelong friends, he began his scenography studies in Florence where he graduated. Having taken over the family business after the premature loss of his father, he realized that his interests were different and more oriented towards creativity. He therefore began a collaboration with a company from Lucca for which he took care of the interior design for public places. Dissatisfied with the type of lighting fixtures available at the time (we were in the immediate post-war period), he began to design and produce his own lamps to include in his projects. Thus Martinelli Luce was born, in a basement located in Piazza Bernardini in Lucca, which was accessed via a trap door and a ladder and where, with difficulty, the few tools necessary for a small production had been installed. “Laboratory” Elio called it and many of his ideas were developed here. Courageous Elio Martinelli and those who had believed in him, the workers and a friend who had lent him the little money needed to leave, given that the banks had denied him credit. In the meantime, in 1949 he married Anna, his life partner and muse, and together they began to travel first through Italy and then Europe, participating in the most important trade fairs of that period, but it was with the first edition of the Eurodomus in Genoa in 1966 and the meeting with Giò Ponti that Elio Martinelli and his company acquired international prominence. In his professional life Elio Martinelli designed many lamps and to create some of these he had to study new methacrylate molding techniques. We are in the 60s, the era of the emergence of innovative and revolutionary plastic materials and the most representative lamps of its production were made in plastic material. Attention to technology and innovation has always characterized Elio Martinelli's interest, not only for the materials from which the lamps were made, but also for the use of new light sources. Since the 1970s, the classic light bulb has been increasingly replaced by halogen and metal halide lamps which lead to a real revolution in the lighting of commercial spaces. We are at the beginning of the 80s when Elio Martinelli designs his first technical devices collected in a specific catalog called "Systems". It was precisely in these years that his daughter Emiliana joined the company, initially interested mainly in the graphic part and then moving on to design. Thus we reach the 90s, Martinelli Luce has a consolidated role in the panorama of the industries producing lighting fixtures and given the difficulties of the internal market it projects itself even more abroad and towards the lighting of large commercial spaces also with productions dedicated to contract. Elio Martinelli passed away on 21 October 2004 after an illness which in recent years had forced him to often stay away from that creature to whom all his thoughts were directed.
