Italian leather sofas: atmosphere of past ages

An Italian leather sofa can be the absolute protagonist of a sitting room, simply by definition. Or better: the sofa IS the sitting room, it has the right to be.

The very concept of sitting room was born from leather sofas: well, maybe is not a historically correct statement but it's very real in the collective imagination.

Especially if we think about those places, smoky and blurred but just for that deeply fascinating, that gave life to our modern sitting rooms. In the past, sitting rooms where elected places, where people met to talk, create and breathe art. A meeting place for people who would, in the future, become famous.

That was the 18th century, but also the 19th century. Inside sitting rooms History was written and revolutions were planned: like the French Revolution in 1789 or the Neapolitan one, in 1799, less well known but still extremely radical.

Inside sitting rooms new ways of life were created: in sitting rooms people were smoking, creating a new trend, playing and wearing clothes that would soon become fashion.

Inside sitting rooms poems were written; songs and music were composed and heard. And the people there, comfortably seated on those sofas (maybe made of leather) enjoyed those musics directly from the hands of famous artists. And I'm talking about Rossini, Mozart, Verdi.

Inside sitting rooms stories and backgrounds took place; events that maybe you can't find nowadays in books, but that shocked whole lives and souls: how many relationships, meetings, crossing of paths... Sitting rooms were the social life of that time, the only entertainment available, sitting rooms were freedom.

I can see them, can't you? Mysterious characters plotting against each other, or funny ones that laugh, read poems behind a light smoke screen, sitting on a Diamond sofa with black leather cover (without chromed steel feet obviously!) with its imposing presence and its lived and almost unkempt leather.

I can hear the notes of "Péchés de vieillesse" coming from the fingers of an old Rossini, in his home near Paris, while I'm seating on a Chester tufted leather sofa.

And finally, I'm picturing Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca and Francesco Caracciolo, writing the manifest of the Neapolitan Revolution, while seating on the Temple sofa with reclining headrest.

Don't you think that these sofas are able to recall another world? Another atmosphere, way different from your usual sitting room? Can't you smell the same freedom, social life, history of those times, just by possessing a sofa like that?