And yet, this passion – which is also thought to be a bit frivolous, as is often the case with fashion – has reaped illustrious and numerous victims, even in the highest spheres of the fatherland of letters. Let’s take, for example, a typical representative of the Italian intelligentsia, Mario Praz. Distinguished scholar, essayist expert of the Napoleonic period, writer, translator, journalist and fanatical collector of furniture, knick-knacks, paintings – especially the so-called conversation pieces depicting domestic interiors – as well as author of one of the inevitable texts in a self-respecting design bibliography, The Philosophy of Furniture (which was joined, in 1975, by the small jewel, now unfortunately out of print,  The house of life). 

In the book, Mario Praz even goes so far as to write – in black and white – what few intellectuals would confess: “As in any other field, so with furniture, men are divided into two classes: men who care about the house; men who don’t care at all. I feel much nearer to that wife of Zechariah of whom W. Hale White speaks in Revolution in Tanner’s Lane, who could not sit quietly if an ornament of the mantelpiece appeared to be displaced.”