Fornasetti’s surreal vision of Milan transforms a Michelin kitchen

The Duomo Sommerso panel arrives like a vision rendered in ink and watercolour, a dream of Milan’s cathedral submerged in turquoise waters with fish suspended in the impossible sky. Piero Fornasetti sketched this image in the early 1950s, a moment when his imagination saw the city’s Gothic spires reflected and reimagined, stripped of gravity and plausibility. Decades later, the work found its home in the Saletta Duomo, a private dining room at Seta by Antonio Guida, where Chef Guida holds two Michelin stars and a vision of cooking that speaks to craft and intention.

The panel becomes the room’s breathing centre, its layered architectural details and supernatural palette of turquoise and cream drawing the eye upward and inward at once. Above the banquettes, Fornasetti’s surreal Milan unfolds across the wall, while below, on the table itself, the Cortili series continues the dialogue. These decorative plates, conceived by Fornasetti in the 1950s, depict imaginary courtyards and impossible architecture, each one a portal into spaces that never were but ought to have been. The porcelain glows with the same poetic unreality as the panel behind them, bringing the artist’s hand and mind directly into conversation with the food.

The collaboration extends beyond decoration into the menu itself, where a risotto designed for this room speaks to the union of culinary and visual art. Here, surrounded by Fornasetti’s architectural fantasies, diners sit inside the artist’s imagination, where the boundaries between looking and tasting, between the plate as canvas and the plate as vessel, dissolve entirely. The restaurant sits within Mandarin Oriental Milan, accessed through the hotel on Via Andegari.

Imagery courtesy of Fornasetti (@fornasetti).