Italian marbled paper lampshade
Italian marbled paper lampshade
Giulio Giannini
The paper that has covered Florentine bookbindings since 1856 here covers something else entirely.
Each shade is wrapped in a single sheet of hand-marbled paper from Giulio Giannini e Figlio - colour scattered onto a seaweed bath, spread into its stone pattern, lifted whole onto the page in one press. The process cannot be hurried and cannot be repeated; the pattern you see on this shade exists nowhere else. Lit from within, the gold grounds warm differently than they do in daylight. It changes the object.
15 cm top, 20 cm base. Available in green, crimson, and blue.
Exclusive to Australia.
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Product information
Base diameter 20cm
Top diameter 15cm
Height 18cm
About Giulio Giannini & Figlio
Marbling is close to a thousand years old. It came west along trade routes, reached Europe through the Arab world, and by the nineteenth century had found a particular home in Florence. In 1856, Pietro Giannini opened a stationery and bookbinding bottega in Piazza Pitti, in the Oltrarno, a few steps from the Palazzo Pitti. It has been there ever since - long enough that you could visit Florence for years and still walk past it.
The craft has moved through the family without a break since: six generations of it. Maria Giannini runs the bottega now, alongside Guido Junior, the fifth generation - and the name, "e Figlio," still records an earlier Giulio and his son. The first Gianninis bound books for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. In the generations since, the family has trained makers who went on to open workshops of their own, in Italy and beyond.
The marbled paper is made the old way, one sheet at a time. Colour is dropped onto a bath thickened with seaweed, combed and feathered into pattern, and lifted away in a single pass. No two sheets are the same; no sheet can be made twice. From that paper - and from Florentine leather - the bottega binds notebooks and photo albums, and hand block-prints its gift wrap, each piece finished by hand in the room behind the shop.
The marbled paper across The Leopard - the homepage, the identity - is theirs.
Giulio Giannini e Figlio is exclusive to Australia at The Leopard.
