The Most Expressive, Eye-Popping Floor Tiles You ll Find Anywhere
When it comes to Italian tiles, we’re floored.
By Tim McKeough Douglas Friedman
The trattoria was nothing special, but its floor grabbed my attention. After a day strolling the Mediterranean beach and cobbled lanes of Italy’s Sestri Levante, I was hunting for an
aperitivo when I saw it a decades-old composition of hexagonal tiles with a diamond pattern in three colors that created an illusory three-dimensional field of cubes. That such a graphic statement was present in a timeworn trattoria, where sandy shoes and sloshed Negronis ruled, was unexpected. But in Italy, a country that has a long history of producing dramatic tile, it usually doesn’t take long to find inspiration underfoot.