Born in Bologna in 1933, Giancarlo Mattioli was an Italian designer, architect, urban planner, portraitist, man and intellectual who enjoyed great success in the 1950s and 1960s. A student at an art institute, he continued to nurture his passion for pen drawing, which he took from his teachers. He graduated in architecture in Florence and, in 1961, founded the “Città Nuova” Group of Urban Architects together with Pierluigi Cervellati, Umberto Maccaferri, Franco Morelli, Gianpaolo Mazzucato and Mario Zaffagnini.

In 1965, with the “Città Nuova” Group of Urban Architects, he participated in the “Studio Artemide Domus di Milano” competition, with which Artemide and Editrice Domus aimed to discover new ways of conceiving lamps as lighting objects.

The project presented was a lamp inspired by the shape of jellyfish, in which Mattioli and the Group's professionals worked on new ways of obtaining a soft ambient light using a device designed to hide the bulb.

The project was successful, and the lamp was produced from 1967 under the name Nesso; it became a symbolic icon of those years, and enjoyed long-term success, as demonstrated by the fact that it remains part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Designer of modern classics, Mattioli never refrained from thinking outside the box: an intellectual with a genuine civic passion, he was also the technical author of the historic urban plans of the Bologna City Council of the late 1960s.