Major Italian designers using the style included Ernesto Basile, Ettore De Maria Bergler, Vittorio Ducrot, Carlo Bugatti, Raimondo D'Aronco, Eugenio Quarti, and Galileo Chini.

"[3] Liberty style is considered to be a western offshoot of the 19th-century British Arts and Crafts movement,[4] which was a response against the mechanization and dehumanizing of the artistic process.

The 1902 Turin Exposition, formally titled, Torino 1902: Le Arti Decorative Internazionali Del Nuovo Secolo, was the signature event of the style.

It included designers from the United States, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, England, France, Holland, Norway, Austria, Scotland, Sweden and Hungary.

The major designers in this style were Vittorio Valebrega and Agostino Lauro, and particularly the furniture manufacturer Valabrega, which produced works in series.

A second tendency was more discrete, and was similar to designs of the British Arts and Crafts movement, with linear forms, simplicity, and artisanal quality.

Pietro Fenoglio was one of the early figures in Liberty style architecture, with the Casa Fenoglio-Lafleur in Turin, which added Art Nouveau elements onto a more traditional facade.

[8] In Palermo the major figure was Ernesto Basile, who used curved forms similar to the Belgian-French Art Nouveau combined with symbolist murals, as in the Grand Hotel Villa Igiea (1899–1900).

The most prominent architects included Giovanni Battista Bossi, whose Casa Galimberti had a facade drenched with decorative sculpture and murals.

Leonetto Cappiello was an important figure in the early style, though he moved to Paris and spent most of his career designing posters and graphics there.

Leonardo Bistolfi designed the poster for the 1902 Exposition in Turin, with the combination of feminine and floral themes typical of the early style.

[11] In its later years, the Liberty Style in graphics and painting moved away from floral and feminine themes to more modernist subjects, under the influence of Futurism.