S.A.I.A.R. Ferro-Toso & Co

The firm started in 1895 and produced the first known objects having a "modern" taste, a series of murrine vases, executed on the design of the Swedish artist Anna Akerdhal, wife of the graphic artist Guido Balsamo Stella; that items were exhibited in 1920 at the Exhibition of the Italian Industrial and Decorative Art in Stockholm (Sweden).

In 1923 the firm created a series of thin and light blown glassware and kept to this line for a long time , although some light changes were made. The firm also ventured into the executions of lamps having geometrical forms, made of lattimo glass, on the design of Guido Balsamo Stella, Vittorio Donà, Anita Antoniazzo, to whom the magazine Casabella dedicated a long article in 1929.

In the same year in Turin the Sambuco shop was opened, designed by the architect Pagano Pogatschnig and Levi-Montalcini with furniture by Ercole Morlotti and curtains by the Lenci firm. In addition to the S.A.I.A.R. Ferro-Toso glassware, artistic ceramics by Lenci and Chini, by Primavera and Rouard were offered to the public. But the highest accolade was received in Monza (Italy, Mi), on the occasion of the 1930 Triennale, where several series of blown vases and statuettes were exhibited on the design of Guido Balsamo Stella: the "chimici", "gazzelle", "ermellini" that received so much unanonimous assents that one of these figurines, a graceful little animal, perhaps an ermine, standing on its back paws next to a blue flower, was selected as the symbol of the exhibition itself.

At the 1932 Venice Biennale, together with some more traditional blown items, some innovative proposals were exhbited, on the design of Vittorio Donà, amomg them the mugnoni vases, spherical vases with circular shaped pale pink coloured applications, which new technical interest would later lead to further decorative solutions. In 1936 the firm joined with Barovier & Co. to originate the Ferro-Toso-Barovier firm, which two years later eventually led to Barovier & Toso.