Gabriele De Vecchi was born in Milan in 1938. His father, Piero De Vecchi, founded the Argenteria De Vecchi in 1935 in Milan and was a leading producer of historicist silver during the fascist period of the 1930s. He successfully made the stylistic transition to high modernism as that movement swept Italian craft and design in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Gabriele De Vecchi began his career not as an artisan but rather as an avant-garde kinetic sculptor. He formed the Gruppo T in 1959, together with three other like-minded young artists, and continued to stage performances and create installation art into the 1970s. In 1962 however, he took over the leadership of his father's firm and began to design objects, eventually forming strong connections to other key protagonists in Italy's design and architecture scene such as Enzo Mari. A particular interest for him has been the reflective qualities of silver - its ability to disappear visually in certain light conditions or to create dynamic patterns when placed into certain environments.

For most of his career, De Vecchi has explored this interest in perception and transformation within the boundaries of a restrained Modernist formal idiom. In the Linea Storia (`history' or `narrative' collection), however he took a very different approach. For decades, the De Vecchi atelier - like most small 20th century silver shops - had been involved not only in producing their own designs, but also in repair and replica work. One of the most beautiful historical silver designs that passed through the shop was a baluster shaped coffee pot, often enlivened with a pattern of swirled flutes, which had originated in 18th century Turin. Examples of this design are well documented in the firm's archives and library. In 1983 Gabriele De Vecchi decided to develop a line of objects based on this shape. Over the next few years he created a series of works in the Linea Storia. The two earliest designs created for the collection (the Torincubo and the Equilpiemonte) featured pure geometric shapes that seemed to have magically collided with the historical shape. De Vecchi has said that the pieces reflect "a way of thinking about design as an assembly of different parts, drawn from the historical repertory as well as my own ideas". In Equilpiemonte designed in 1983 as the first of the series, a volume whose cross section is an equilateral triangle cuts up into the body of the coffee pot. ('Piemonte' refers to the Piedmont region of Italy where Turin is located). The 1985 design Torincubo which might be translated as 'Turin cubed' is a similar gesture in which a plain walled coffee pot seems to have been flattened on its sides. A decorative cartouche, again based on historical forms, adorns the front and spout. In other works in the series (for which six further designs were eventually created, the last in 1993), the body of the coffee pot is split, rotated or otherwise manipulated.