Illustration

Building Bridges is Olimpia Zagnoli’s tribute to Gio Ponti—a volume conceived as an extension of the exhibition of the same name, inaugurated in early 2025 at the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm.

In this project, Zagnoli—one of the most influential illustrators and designers on the international scene—explores the encounter between her unmistakable style, marked by vibrant colors and soft forms, and the rational yet poetic aesthetic of Ponti, a pivotal figure in 20th-century Italian design.

The book features 32 previously unpublished illustrations that create a visual dialogue between the artist’s iconic female figures and the modernist architecture of the celebrated architect. It is also a deeply personal homage: Zagnoli lives in a building designed by Ponti himself.

The work stands as a refined celebration of mid-20th-century Milan, reimagined through the irony, lightness, and graphic sensitivity that define the artist’s unique perspective.

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Illustrations by Olimpia Zagnoli
Texts by Giovanni Bellucci, Francesco Di Lella, Olimpia Zagnoli
Book design Bunker

13.5 × 19 cm
80 pages
Hardcover
Italian/English

Isbn 978-88-98030-81-1
First edition April 2025

Marcello is part of the IBBY Italy Choice 2025 selection, in the picture book section. 

Marcello is a gigantic man who lives in Rimini and works as a wrestler. Initially, we follow him through his daily routine: intense training sessions, huge meals of traditional Romagnola flatbreads (piadina), and swims in the sea.

The seemingly consistent and linear image of the character becomes complicated when we discover that his profession is not driven by a true passion, but rather a choice dictated by the body he was born with. Marcello’s greatest desire would have been to play the guitar, a dream he gave up early on because his muscles, too large, prevented him from holding the instrument.

It is this frustration that transformed him into the man he is today: a macho figure who is actually hiding wounds and disappointments behind a mask. The fragile balance that supports the wrestler’s life is shattered when he falls in love with Luisa, the person who referees his matches. He is struck by her presence during a match and becomes distracted, taking a hit that knocks him unconscious.

At the end, Marcello, who had uncritically assumed a role shaped for him by social conventions, takes the first step toward freeing himself from this painful condition.

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Text and illustrations Ruben Rovati
Book design Bunker

20 × 28.5 cm
32 pages
Hardcover
Italian

Isbn 978-88-98030-80-4
First edition April 2025

Line-which can take many directions, flow along winding rivers, fall into the mysterious depths of existence, and then re-emerge and overcome mountains and bodies of water-is a metaphor for life, in the form of a short, intense visual narrative.

Linea saw the light of day in 1999. Conceived, written, designed and printed by Alessandro Zanella under the Ampersand banner – the publishing house under which he published his own volumes – in sixty copies drawn with the press, dedicated to his daughters Anita and Francesca, as the author himself reveals at the end of the tale.

A delightful and light edition, symbolic in its narrative, vibrant in its essentiality. Essentiality that is anything but simple: “simplicity is the most complicated thing in the world,” Vico Magistretti reminds us, and indeed this work, so fluid, so clean, is the result of a long gestation and a slow and careful production.

Today Lazy Dog is pleased and proud to present a new anastatic edition in 499 numbered copies, which traces in every way the first publication, including the two ‘pop-ups’ inside. Only a dust jacket, designed by Bunker, has been added, which together with the introductory text constitute the only interventions not present in the original.

The intent is to restore intact the spirit that generated this fine volume, ideally destined for the smiles of many more little boys and girls.

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Texts, illustrations and original design by Alessandro Zanella
Adaptation Paolo Galvani
Cover Design Bunker
Printing Trifolio
16 × 23.8 cm
32 pages
Glued Leporello
Hardback with cloth spine and dust jacket

Anastatic edition in 499 numbered copies
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-67-5
First edition April 2024

Alfazoo is not a conventional zoo. It houses the world’s most unusual animals: wild vowels and consonants nearing extinction. 

This ABC turns letters into animals simply by adding a pair of eyes and a mouth to each shape, in a graphic game that invites young readers to play with the letters to invent their own beastly alphabet. 

With its freshness and modern design, it is hard to believe that this book by Italian designer Alfredo De Santis was first published in 1968 by Emme Edizioni, the visionary publishing house that brought to the Italian market avant-garde children’s titles by authors such as Leo Lionni, Iela and Enzo Mari, Tomi Ungerer, Yutaka Sugita, Bruno Munari, Luigi Veronesi, Maurice Sendak, Emanuele Luzzati, and Bob Gill. 

A timeless design lesson to read forms and symbols through a different visual lens.

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Illustrations by Alfredo de Santis
Text by Marta Sironi
Book design Bunker
(from original design by Emme Edizioni)

21 × 21 cm
48 pages
Hardcover
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-57-6
First edition February 2023

“It was a kind of music. Six months later I found an album of oriental paper, and I started to draw a kind of landscape score. I tried to find this music of forms, I looked for my Patagonia from the Patagonia I had crossed”.
– Lorenzo Mattotti

This is not the first time that Mattotti has felt the need to make an illustrated travelogue, he had already done so in 2014, collecting a series of drawings documenting his discovery of Vietnam in a precious travel book, later published by Louis Vuitton. On Patagonia, however, the artist does not want to make a full-fledged reportage, as he had done for the eastern country; what interests him about this place is only one aspect: its boundless and virgin nature, not its inhabitants and their stories that had so fascinated storytellers such as Bruce Chatwin and Louis Sepulveda. For Mattotti, Patagonia is first and foremost a place of the mind and that is why he strips it of colour to represent it, synthesising its forms, making it almost abstract to succeed in giving us back a sensation before an image, the sensation that every man feels when he finds himself in an extreme land, in a land at the end of the world.

Edited by Melania Gazzotti, the book presents all the 24 black and white plates contained in the Nepalese paper notebook where Mattotti copied his travel notes, together with a selection of colour drawings made by the artist in a classic Moleskine® notebook while he was in Patagonia. Both notebooks are unpublished and were made between 2003 and 2004.

The world’s best-known Italian illustrator, a never-before-seen exhibition and a book to collect: Patagonia by Lorenzo Mattotti promises to be a not-to-be-missed event for all lovers of contemporary illustration and beyond.

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Edited by Melania Gazzotti
Texts by Lorenzo Mattotti, Melania Gazzotti, Jorge Zentner
Book design by Bunker

28 × 15 cm
116 pages
Swiss-style hardback
Italian/English/French/Spanish
Isbn 978-88-98030-28-6
First published October 2020