Spotting Genuine Italian Leather

"Genuine leather" is printed on more tags than genuine leather actually sits under. It is a real term, and a fairly meaningless one - it only rules out synthetic materials, not the bonded scraps and heavily corrected hides at the cheaper end of the real thing. Full grain, the kind cut from the top layer of the hide and worked as little as possible, is a different material altogether, and it is usually not stated loudly, because the goods that carry it don't need to shout.

Start with the grain. Full-grain leather keeps the hide's own irregularities - faint variations in texture, small marks, pores that aren't perfectly even. Cellerini's passport holder is cut from cross-grained calfskin for exactly this reason: a hard-wearing finish that shows its own texture rather than hiding it. A corrected or printed grain, by contrast, has a pattern stamped into the surface - regular, repeating, too even to be an animal's actual hide.

Bend it. Real leather creases into fine, soft wrinkles that relax back once you let go. A bonded or coated material tends to crease into a harder, more permanent fold line, and sometimes shows a fabric backing at the crease if you look closely.

Check the edges. On a well-made piece, the raw edge of the leather is burnished or hand-painted, one edge at a time - which means, up close, it will vary slightly from one side of the piece to the other. A perfectly uniform edge, identical all the way round, is usually a sign the piece was finished by machine on a material built for exact repetition.

Smell it, if you can. Vegetable-tanned and lightly finished leather carries a faint, warm, slightly tannic smell - nothing like the flat chemical smell of PU or "vegan leather," which is plastic wearing leather's name.

Finally, watch what happens over time, if you already own the piece. Genuine leather softens and darkens slightly with handling - it is designed to improve. Cellerini's smaller leather goods, cut and stitched on the bench in their Florence atelier since the late 1950s, are built on that assumption: an object that gets better the more it is used, not one that is protected from use.

Shop our Cellerini leather goods, hand-cut and hand-stitched in Florence.