Joe Colombo and Santa Tecla: the lost drawings of the jazz club that made Milan history

Joe Colombo — “Giòe” to his friends — remains one of the great myths of 1960s Italian design: immortalized in futuristic interiors, provocative imagery, his Mars-like living environments and the Space Age objects later canonized by the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Italy: a new domestic landscape”. But the landmark show curated by Emilio Ambasz opened in 1972, one year after Colombo’s death on his 41st birthday. By then, the myth already existed — and he was no longer there to shape it. The legend of the designer behind the Acrilica lamp was built as much through art and friendship as through industrial design. It emerged from nights spent in jazz clubs as much as from meetings with the entrepreneurs driving Italy’s postwar economic boom. Among those clubs was Santa Tecla: a cult name in Milan’s music history, linked to figures such as Adriano Celentano, Enzo Jannacci and Giorgio Gaber, alongside generations of jazz musicians.

Its story has already been told through memoirs and historical accounts. But now three previously unknown drawings have resurfaced: small graphic fragments that lead back to a basement venue beside Milan’s Duomo.
The drawings were discovered almost by chance by two Milan-based researchers in a folder of documents that narrowly escaped being discarded for recycling. The sketches include a floor plan and an interior perspective. The Colombo studio, led by Ignazia Favata, confirmed that at least the perspective drawing was made by Joe Colombo himself. They are project drawings for the interior design of Santa Tecla — two words that encapsulate the story of postwar Milan, when nights of music, drinking, exhibitions and experimentation helped forge the city’s future identity in art and design. It is the same Milan whose atmosphere the world still tries to relive today during the city’s endless design weeks, between Brera and Bar Basso.
The discovery emerged from research conducted at the Politecnico di Milano by Ilaria Bollati and Marta Elisa Cecchi, whose project explored design outside formal institutional contexts. Their research later became both a book and a podcast, A tutte le ore, created with Giulia Cavaliere. It is precisely this kind of investigation into overlooked cultural spaces that led them to the lost Santa Tecla drawings.

Santa Tecla was a cave, inspired by the intimate cellar clubs of Paris: a tiny basement venue with a small stage where jazz arrived in a Milan still scarred by war. The city was rebuilding rapidly in the 1950s, yet traces of darkness remained in the background — a place where, as jazz pianist Enrico Intra recalls in the podcast, “everything had to be rebuilt, and people wanted to live again.” Everyone seemed to be making something happen. Artistic movements, for instance: painter and sculptor Enrico Baj founded the Nuclear Art Movement together with Sergio Dangelo, and not long afterwards a barely twenty-year-old Joe Colombo joined them. They spent their nights in the caves — underground clubs like the Aretusa, right beside Santa Tecla, which they would soon take over and run themselves. Baj, after all, was an artist, but he had trained as a lawyer, so he took care of all the bureaucracy. The drawings, in fact, were found in a folder preserved by his niece Laura Agnoletto Baj, and had originally come from the law office of Baj’s uncle, where he had once practiced.
Colombo, meanwhile, was also an artist, but he had begun studying architecture — and the rest is design history.

For Colombo, the Santa Tecla project marked a turning point. According to Bollati and Cecchi, it represented his transition toward interior and product design — a move that Baj would later experience almost as a betrayal, feeling he had lost a fellow artistic experimenter. Yet the collaborative spirit of the group remained central. “Nobody acted alone,” Roberta Cerini-Baj recalled. “Everyone was constantly exchanging ideas within a collective.” And Santa Tecla became exactly that kind of collective cultural laboratory. Chet Baker performed there, followed by the circle around Celentano and an extremely young Lucio Battisti. Its format was surprisingly contemporary: people came not simply to drink, but to sit, listen and experience music or cabaret performances together. In many ways, today’s listening bars — now everywhere in Milan — differ mainly in their sound systems. Even Ugo La Pietra played music there as a teenager, before his urban experiments and long before his years at the Jamaica Bar.

Over the decades Santa Tecla lived many different lives: from avant-garde cultural cellar to nightclub, from underworld haunt to early-2000s clubbing destination. It survived fires, closures, reopenings and changing fashions, including the era of Punks Wear Prada, before finally shutting down in 2016. Fragments of Colombo’s presence remain visible in archival footage from the 1950s, when the venue was dismissed by some as a den of drifters while it was actually becoming part of Milanese cultural history. Other traces survived in a 1990s exhibition dedicated to Baj, which recreated parts of Santa Tecla’s interiors using mannequin fragments across the walls. Yet in the end, Santa Tecla remains almost immaterial: an icon that survives more in memory and storytelling than in physical space. In June 2026, Bollati and Cecchi will revisit its legacy through a new event at Bar Basso. But perhaps pianist Enrico Intra summarized its meaning best: “Right now we do not need Santa Tecla as a physical place. What we need is the mindset — the curiosity of a journey that has already happened, because every present moment always has something new left to discover.” 

Opening image: Joe Colombo, sketch for the interior of Santa Tecla, Milan. Courtesy Laura Agnoletto Baj

Special thanks to Ignazia Favata, Laura Agnoletto Baj, Ilaria Bollati and Marta Elisa Cecchi for their valuable contribution.
The podcast and audio book A tutte le ore will be presented on June 17, 2026 during an event at Bar Basso.