Here is the topic everyone has been eagerly awaiting: the duel between two legendary Italian designers, Giorgetto Giugiaro and Walter de Silva. A duel over fabulous automotive projects? No, unfortunately not, as the editor-in-chief was hungry. So on the menu today: pasta. “Pasta, pasta, yes, but… ” No, not Panzani, but Marille by Voiello and Papiri by Barilla, both created by Giorgetto Giugiaro in 1983 and Walter de Silva in 2011, respectively. For a few euros, you can invite two giants of automotive design to your dinner table. Why deprive yourself?
It is quite interesting to note that Walter de Silva created his own design studio for various objects and even food items (!) based on a model that Giugiaro pioneered in the 1970s and 1980s (see the new Giorgetto & Fabrizio Giugiaro designers website: https://www.giorgettofabriziogiugiaro.it/). Both have designed cameras, pasta and furniture, among other things. Giugiaro added tyres to the mix, while Walter de Silva designed shoes. On the food side, it all began in 1983 at Ital Design, or more precisely at Giugiaro Design, which works for a multitude of non-automotive companies.
When Italian food manufacturer Voiello asked the Italian designer to create a new pasta shape, Giugiaro did not hesitate for a second, putting his car design teams to work on future product projects, notably the Renault 21 and 19, from 1986 and 1988. Giorgetto Giugiaro sat down at his drawing board to design four pasta shapes, only one of which was selected for production under the name Marille. The Italian designer explained that their shape was designed so that their grooves would greedily hold the sauces accompanying the dish, without the latter softening the pasta.
Giugiaro’s design was considered “a masterpiece of culinary engineering. However, the design, which had been thought out down to the last detail, caused a minor problem: the Marille pasta cooked unevenly in different sections. This problem was undoubtedly due to the joints between the sections, which did not cook as quickly as the rest of the pasta. The Marille was too good to be true. As a result, this pasta disappeared from the shelves.
It took almost forty years for these same shelves to once again feature pasta bearing the signature of a major Italian designer: Walter de Silva, pictured above with his creation on his website. Less well known than Giugiaro, this great designer is well known in the automotive world. Like Giugiaro, he designed a Bugatti, which you can (re)discover as a bonus at the bottom of this post. He began his career at Fiat in 1972, four years after the creation of Giugiaro’s design and styling office, which quickly became Ital Design.
Walter de Silva then moved on to Alfa Romeo, where he created the 156 in 1997 and the 166 in 1998. He then crossed the German border and joined the Volkswagen Group, where he cut his teeth at Seat before heading up design at Audi, where he created the sublime Audi A5. He was in charge of all design for the Volkswagen Group brands from 2007 to 2015. Two years later, he launched his freelance career designing high-end shoes.
You can now visit his website, https://walterdesilva.com, to see some of his recent creations (below, a drawing of the Bugatti). Among them are Papiri pasta. Unlike Giugiaro’s design, Papiri’s ‘Collezione Barilla’ is designed without a seam, but as two grooved spirals, also with a rough surface, and the whole thing looks more like a small vertical roll that cooks evenly on all sides.
Available only as part of the collection, in 450g packs, these pasta shapes are still available on the website today. That’s what Barilla’s AI robot told me, even though I couldn’t find them in the menu dedicated to the collections…
BONUS #01: Walter de Silva’s Bugatti Veyron
Unveiled in July 2025 at Volkswagen’s Autostadt, the Bugatti 18/3 Veyron concept designed by Walter de Silva had been kept secret for 20 years. Why mention it here? Because it once again brings together the two Italian designers Giugiaro and De Silva. When Volkswagen chairman Ferdinand Piëch acquired the Bugatti brand in 1998, he immediately put his good friend Giorgetto Giugiaro to work. The latter wasted no time, as the Bugatti EB118 was unveiled at the Paris Motor Show in 1998, followed in March 1999 at the Geneva Motor Show by an EB 218 saloon car that was very close to production. In 2009, Giorgetto Giugiaro told us that he still had a few parts of the bodywork of this long saloon car in his former Ital Design studio.
In October 1999, at the dawn of the year 2000, a new variant – the Bugatti EB18/4 Veyron – was unveiled. It resembled Giugiaro’s work but was designed by Jozef Kaban, a designer from the team then led by Harmut Warkus at Volkswagen. That same year, Walter de Silva joined the German group and proposed his own vision of the Bugatti Veyron, recognisable by its round headlights and long central rib running from the front cell to the bonnet, reminiscent of the Bugatti Atlantic. However, it was more compact than the Giugiaro or Kaban versions. In the end, the 2005 Bugatti Veyron was the one unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show in 1999, and De Silva’s proposal remained secret until… 2025.
BONUS #02: Barilla’s promotional film
BONUS #03: Interview with Walter de Silva, then head of design for the VW Group
