Designer and architect Ettore Sottsass, an eternally impish guru of the Italian cultural scene, was buried Wednesday in his adopted city Milan.
Sottsass, best remembered for Olivetti's iconic Valentine typewriter and some bizarrely shaped furniture perhaps better seen than sat on, died Monday at the age of 90.
''His was a talent that lasted a century. He never ceased to amaze us right up to the last days of his life,'' said Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli, recalling Sottsass's active role in setting up the last major retrospective on his work, which runs in Trieste until March 2.
Entitled I'd Like To Know Why, it features some 300 of his works.
The Innsbruck-born designer left his mark on most of the major design movements of the 20th century and was also an accomplished painter, ceramicist, photographer and theorist - as well as a big-thinking architect whose largest legacy is the futuristic 'New Malpensa' building at the Milan airport.
In the 1980s he founded the highly influential Memphis Group which pushed his idea of setting form over function to new heights.
''For me, design is a way of discussing life, a way of discussing society, politics, eroticism, food - and even design,'' he once wrote.
''Ultimately, it is a way of building a possible figurative utopia, a metaphor for life''.
After hooking up with the 1950s Beat Movement through his long-time partner, the poet and translator Fernanda Pivano, Sottsass spent much of the '60s photographing a changing America and even tried his hand at Pop Art.
He went on to experiment with glass, copper and ceramics - creating a line of heavyweight jewelry it took a strong-necked woman to carry off.
But Sottsass could also bend his inspiration to highly practical work like the first Olivetti mainframe computer and its Synthesis office systems as well as large-scale industrial design, ideal homes and major exhibition spaces.
His Milan studio was working on innovative private residences right up until his death on Monday morning from heart failure.
Sottsass's works dot the world's leading museums of design.
His fuchsia-red Valentine (1969) has pride of place at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
