Aspide Table lamp by Gianfranco Frattini

"Serpentine in shape, beautifully balanced and gleaming like a jewel, the Aspide Lamp by Gianfranco Frattini is both a brilliantly practical piece of industrial design and an irresistibly playful design statement. First developed in 1970, the Aspide is a highly adjustable table lamp that looks like no other light before or since, but which still expresses the material and aesthetic tastes of its time. Named after the Italian word for ‘asp’, referencing its sinuous, snake-like form, the Aspide was designed as a versatile task lamp that can be manually adjusted to create either direct light for work or reading, or turned toward the wall to create a softer, ambient glow. The body of the lamp comprises large curved tubes of iron ftted to a specially engineered steel shaft. The shaft allows two different parts of the lamp – the neck and the head – to be rotated seamlessly around their own axes by as much as 350º, with an integrated stop. This simple and intuitive mechanism adjusts both the aesthetics and function of the lamp, giving the user the ability to easily control the light in their space, switching smoothly between task and accent lighting as they wish. "