Rare Italian Coffee Table

Originally from a grand Italian palazzo, this 19th-century table sits at coffee table height the way it was made, a low Italian Baroque form that lived in salons and ante-rooms rather than dining halls. The construction is serious: six heavy turned baluster legs, two drawers and a plank top with the warm patina of being used for a hundred and fifty years. Tables like this stood in the country palazzi outside Florence and Rome, in the rooms where the family gathered before dinner with a glass of vermouth and the windows open to the garden. Sylvie places it in a living room with a deep sofa, a bowl of olives, and a glass of red wine that lasts the whole afternoon.