Emanuele Luzzati, better known as set designer and illustrator, was a master in every field of applied art; during his career he collaborated with directors, internationally renowned architects and writers and made more than five hundred sets for Prose, Opera and Dance for major Italian and foreign theaters. 
Fundamentals have been the collaborations with the London Festival Ballet, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Chicago Opera House and the Vienna State Opera.

Emanuele Luzzati was born in Genoa in 1921. In 1940, because of the racial laws, he moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, where he graduated from the École des Beaux Arts.
In 1945 he returned to Italy and repeated his first Swiss exhibition at the Teatro Augustus of Genoa and at the Teatro Litta in Milan. In 1947 he created the masks, the sets and the costumes for Lea Lebovitz staged text by Fersen. The show was a great success, this gives him the doors of the official theater.
In 1950 Luzzati, commissioned by Gassman, drew the masks and the costumes for “Peer Gyni” by Henrik Ibsen and at the same time, began working with the architect Pulitzer as a designer for tapestry and fabric at the firm M.I.T.A. in Nervi, which led him to collaborate with Zoncada ships: the Andrea Doria, the Marco Polo, the Ausonia, the Leonardo da Vinci, the Michelangelo. In 1951 Luzzati knew Bartholomeo Tortarolo, known as “White”, and began working as a ceramist in the furnace of Pozzo Garitta in Albisola. In 1955 he got the first prize for ceramics in Cannes and in 1957 he helds a group exhibition with Stefano d'Amico, Lucio Fontana and Aligi Sassu in the Rotta gallery.
In 1972 Luzzati he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in Graphic Experimental section, and in 1975 he founded the Teatro della Tosse in Genoa with Aldo Trionfo and Tonino Conte.
In the same year he created with Giulio Gianini animated films, “The Thieving Magpie” and “Pulcinella”, and became a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) and of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
In 1975 he made the sketches for the sets of the play “Il coturno e la ciabatta”, based on the text of Alberto Savinio directed by Paolo Poli with which will work even later.
In 1992 the University of Genoa awarded him an honorary degree in Architecture and the following year the Union of the Theatres of Europe organized the exhibition "Emanuele Luzzati designer" that is served as the first headquarters at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. In 1995 he received the Ubu prize for the best Italian stage design of the year for the sets of “Pinocchio”. The following year, Palazzo Ducale, in Genoa, staged a retrospective exhibition of his work. In 1997 Luzzati created “The Magic Flute Park" for children in S. Margherita Ligure and realized the nativity scene in Piazza Carlo Felice in Turin.

In 2001 in Genoa, in the charming sixteenth headquarters built by Galeazzo Alessi, it has been opened "Luzzati Porta Siberia", the Museum dedicated to his entire work as a set designer and illustrator (the Museum closed in 2019). In 2001, the city of Prague dedicated to him two exhibitions: one on the scene and one on the illustration.

Thanks to his personal style, his expressive and direct language that is related to the world of childhood, he has become one of the most beloved and admired artists of our time.
He died in Genoa the 26 January 2007.

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Mr. Luzzati, what is imagination?
“To think that a chair is not something
you sit on; put a hat on it,
and it can turn into a man"

Luzzati i miei primi settant'anni
R. Niri, Il Lavoro, 11 giugno 1991