A dive into the luminous deception devised by Fernand Jacopozzi to fool German bombers: a fake Paris reconstructed twenty kilometres to the north-east, with its fake Gare de l'Est, its fake Champs-Élysées, and a train whose bulbs run for eighteen hundred metres.
Read article →On 4 July 1925, Fernand Jacopozzi lit up for the first time the 250,000 bulbs that turned the Eiffel Tower into the world's largest advertising sign. One hundred years on, a look back at the night that made Paris the City of Light.
Read article →On 5–6 April 2025 in Rennes, the grandchildren of Fernand Jacopozzi and André Citroën gathered to celebrate the centenary of the Eiffel Tower illuminations — surrounded by enthusiasts passionate about the Citroën story.
Read article →Thirteen Christmases in a row, Fernand Jacopozzi reigned over the illuminations of the Parisian department stores. From the Magasins du Louvre to the Bon Marché, he invented the animated shop window as we still know it.
Read article →In June 1930, Fernand Jacopozzi illuminated Notre-Dame de Paris with 500 hidden projectors — in so doing inventing the technique of indirect architectural lighting that the whole world would copy.
Read article →At the French Consulate in Florence, Véronique Tessier Huort Jacopozzi retraced her grandfather's life before the Institut Français, the Académie internationale de Médicis and the Italian press.
Read article →Two weeks before his death, Fernand Jacopozzi was raised to the rank of Commandeur of the Légion d'honneur. He was fifty-four. The ceremony took place privately, in his Parisian apartment.
Read article →Fernand Jacopozzi was born on 12 September 1877 in Florence, the eldest of seven children of a Florentine bourgeois family. An engineer by training, he would leave for Paris at the age of twenty-two, where the 1900 World Exhibition would reveal his calling.
Read article →More than two hundred photographs of the Eiffel Tower illuminated by Fernand Jacopozzi, together with a 3.30-metre drawing of the 1925 lighting design, exhibited in Shanghai as part of the 'Paris Moderne' exhibition.
Read article →For the International Colonial Exhibition of 1931, Fernand Jacopozzi illuminated the full-scale replica of Angkor Wat erected in the Bois de Vincennes. One of his last great works.
Read article →Born in 1921, Donatella Jacopozzi was eleven when her father died. For the rest of her life she preserved his archives, told his story, and waited for the world to recognise what he had accomplished.
Read article →On 30 May 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at Rouen. Five centuries later, the city commissioned Fernand Jacopozzi to illuminate five of its monuments simultaneously — one of his last great works, months before his death.
Read article →From storks made of four thousand bulbs to façades thirty metres high: how Fernand Jacopozzi 'spectacularised' the Parisian street and anticipated what American architects would soon call the 'architecture of the night'.
Read article →On 21 May 1927, Charles Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget after crossing the Atlantic. He later wrote that he had spotted the flashes of Jacopozzi's illuminated Eiffel Tower from the ocean — his first visual landmark on French soil.
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