1933年成立于意大利东北部的海港城市翠斯提(Trieste)的illycaffe，是咖啡界高品质的领航者。每一天，光在意大利就卖出300万杯illy咖啡，全球则卖出惊人的600多万杯。

illy对推动艺术文化不遗余力，在全球知名的“威尼斯双年展”中(La Biennale di Venezia)，经常看到她的身影，并以各种方式不断推动着当代艺术和试验艺术的发展，支持艺术家举办展览，以及在纽约PS1当代艺术中心建立的意大利工作室、伦敦的中央圣•马丁学院(St.Martin’s College)等等。

一直以来，illy咖啡与艺术的关联那样密不可分，其典藏的限量版的咖啡杯让人爱不释手。illy公司邀请许多富有天赋的艺术家们在咖啡杯和盘上勾画出自己的创意灵感，喝咖啡的过程变得如此妙不可言：除了芬芳、美味，还多了视觉、触觉和心灵的全新艺术体验。

illy咖啡杯的历史

creation of a classic

The story of the illy collections began one spring day in 1990. The designer, Matteo Thun, then a teacher at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and art director for a Swiss company manufacturing plastic watches, received a thick brief from Trieste. Inside there were scores of pages where Ernesto Illy had, in the finest detail, defined the characteristics of the ideal cup for savoring illy espresso: the type of china, the volume, diameter, thickness, quality of the brim where the lips touch the cup, the special base for heat retention and the curve of the handle for the best grip. Thun was commissioned to design the shape of that espresso cup.

The shape, as Thun said later, was all in that meticulous, scientific description which left nothing to chance. It was almost inevitable then, that it was not just an espresso cup that came into being, but the espresso cup, an archetype which, besides containing espresso, could also carry messages and narrate stories.

In 1992, the first decorated illy collection was launched, and over the years the illy collections have been decorated with people, animals, symbols, letters, numbers, photos and rhymes spilling over onto the saucers and the larger surfaces of the mugs and cappuccino cups.

In 1994, decorated cappuccino cups were introduced and Luca Trazzi became the first artist to embellish the saucer in addition to the cup. The collection coffee mug was introduced in 2002 with the first collection created by James Rosenquist, the designer of the illy logo.

（1992年，illy公司邀请知名建筑及艺术大师 Matteo Thun设计了第一套白色illy咖啡杯，这套杯具的设计数据图纸厚达70页。独特的造型：薄边，人体工程学的把手，提升的杯盘易于堆存。今天，此项专利设计已成为全球70多个国家中illy咖啡的标志）

illy咖啡杯的艺术世界

a world of art on a cup

iIly Collection is the name given to sets of truly special coffee cups designed to elevate and enhance the illy coffee experience. Since the concept was first introduced in 1992, an international who's who of artists have graced illy cups with their original designs. Americans Jeff Koons, James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg, David Byrne, Louise Bourgeois; Italians Marco Lodola, Sandro Chia, Michelangelo Pistoletto and the legendary filmmakers, Federico Fellini and Francis Ford Coppola are among those who have been inspired by illy.

Drinking coffee in a designer cup involves not only the senses of taste and smell, but also touch and sight. And through sight, it involves the mind.

You can focus on the round surface, raise your eyes to the person opposite you, or reflect on what the shapes, colors and words mean: the cups always bring a message, a question or a brief moment of rapture.

Prized by collectors the world over, the illy collections are signed, numbered and produced in limited editions. An average of three collections are produced each year, with occasional very limited runs of special cups marking significant events.

Part I: illy典藏限量版咖啡杯欣赏

Arts and Crafts
Various artists
1992

It is 1992 and Matteo Thun’s white cup is ready.

The first illy collection is called Arts and Crafts: the creativity of art and the craft of those producing the best blend for espresso. Brought together by a passion for beautiful and well-made things, and the idea of introducing art into small everyday items.

The china surfaces embrace the works of Maurizio Cargnelli, Paolo Cervi Kervisher, Cosimo Fusco, Francesco Illy, Luca Missoni and Matteo Thun.

A graphic designer, a painter, a sculptor, a photographer, a stylist and an architect anticipate what is to become one of the features of all illycaffè initiatives in the world of contemporary art: interdisciplinary research and the multiplicity of perspectives.

Each leaves their own unmistakable mark: many colorful fingerprints, a naked woman, a tangle of colorful sculptures, a pattern of ties, some signs and mysterious planets alluding to coffee.

（第一套illy典藏杯，由画家、摄影师、形象艺术家、设计师、雕刻家们为它们赋予了新颖的主题：柔线条、抽象艺术、人体、指纹。）

Arts and Crafts—Creativity has no limits
Various artists
1993

For the second series of Arts and Crafts, illycaffè once again brings together different artists.

The designer Paolo Rossetti gives the cup an earful and transforms it into an object capable of listening to us as we look at it.

Copywriter Annamaria Testa also regards the cup as an invitation for the senses: to look at, touch, caress, kiss and desire.

A photographer, Franco Fontana, opens up a landscape on the small surface, where your gaze is lost between earth and sky.

Other artists, other signs: numbers for the designer, Giorgio Galli; imaginative ideograms for another designer, Beatrice Santiccioli, and finally, urban graffiti for Francesco Illy, the photographer.

Ginger and Fred
Fellini
1993

A limited edition, sold out some time ago, was made of the cup celebrating the Tuttofellini exhibition put on in New York in 1993, sponsored by illycaffè.

“They’re a way of looking the film in the eye, an attempt to fix something, even something tiny, barely significant, but which I feel has something to do with the film anyway, that hints at it…. all this rampant, inexhaustible, graphic junk, which would appeal to a psychiatrist, may be a sort of clue, a thread, at the end of which I find myself in the fully lit studio, on the first day of shooting….”, wrote director Fellini, also a great humorist and cartoonist, about his huge production of drawings.

This cup shows his self-portrait, unmistakable with his ever-present scarf, while Ginger and Fred dance under his guidance.

Italian Faces
Sandro Chia
1993

Italian Faces is the first illy collection designed by one artist, Sandro Chia, one of the forerunners of the Transavant-garde. A discourse which is unraveled from cup to cup.

Man is the linking theme and stars in all Chia’s work, from the 70s till today.

For the illy collection he painted a gallery of faces, one for each Italian city: Venice, Siena, Milan, Trieste, Florence and Rome, which were then joined by a seventh cup, Pompeii, a very limited and therefore valuable item.

The artist, who has traveled the world and lives between Rome, Montalcino and New York, represents Italy through faces which stare at the coffee drinker and play a intense, albeit brief, game of exchanging glances.

（描绘出意大利6个著名城市脸谱:：弗罗伦萨、米兰、罗马、西恩那、威尼斯、翠斯提。）

Italian Faces
Sandro Chia
1993

（庞培城——“脸谱”典藏杯套系中的第7个杯子，限量发售，属典藏珍品。）

Arms, Legs, Feet, Parts
Andrea Manetti
1994

On the first illy collection cappuccino cup, by the Milanese artist Andrea Manetti, the female body is hacked to pieces with ironic ease.

“ti sovvien della nostra estasi antica?"
"questo caffè è macchiato (di bleu)!"
"noli me tangere!"
"ma cosa ti hanno fatto, moos brugger?"
"illy, k'illy, don't be s'illy"
"un insetto geloso tormentava il collo di madame rorsschach..."

The lengthy titles of each cup do not reveal the mystery and only partly help as you search for an impossible meaning in the arms, feet and faces; they do however whet your curiosity and invite you to play.

So do the quotations from sixteenth to eighteenth century Italian painting, such as the hands holding flowers or offering sheets of paper, ever ready to vanish between blotches of color, or perhaps it is coffee.

Trazzine
Luca Trazzi
1994

Two illy collections, the design of the first Francis Francis! coffee machine and one of the three concepts for the Espressamente Italian-style coffee shop chain: illycaffè and Luca Trazzi have been collaborating for over ten years.

The coffee break inspires the Veneto architect with cheerful thoughts and playful images. His ‘Trazzine’ cups display monsters and animals circling round on a background of blue sea or dark night: a goldfish, two yellow crocodiles chasing each other, a turtle on an exotic beach, a modern Lucifer amongst post-modern cogs and wheels, a blazing dragon setting the saucer on fire and two ladybirds balanced on a white twig.

White, yellow, red and green: a few colors from childhood and the round shapes of cartoons to win a smile from you as you have a break, sipping an espresso.