The sun holds a particular place in the Fornasetti universe, and Soli is its plainest statement: a repeat of faces, each drawn with the same fixed expression, radiating across the wall. The motif traces back to work Piero Fornasetti did in the early 1940s, when Gio Ponti asked him to design almanacs on a lunar theme to be given as Christmas gifts.
It has appeared since on porcelain, on fabric and on furniture, and the wallpaper is the most direct version of it. The face is engraved in the archive manner, fine line and no shading, and the rays behind it give each sun a fixed geometry, so the wall reads as ordered rather than scattered. At a distance the effect comes close to a small-scale geometric. The faces are not identical in feeling. Some are watchful and some amused, and that variation is what keeps the repeat human.
The 52 cm repeat matches the roll width exactly, and the third-drop match steps each drop by a third of the repeat so the suns fall on a diagonal grid rather than in rows. That diagonal is what keeps a strongly repeated motif from becoming a wallpaper of dots. It has the confidence for a small room used in the evening: a cloakroom, a bar, a study lined to the ceiling.
