A Schplendid Guide to Italian Linen: its history, science, craft and delights
Posted posted on September 25, 2025
From pharaohs to painters to sofa-makers, linen has been shaping lives for millennia — here’s why we’re obsessed with the Italian kind...
On the face of it, linen is just flax — the same plant rabbits chew on. But in human hands it becomes something else entirely: pharaohs were buried in it, Renaissance painters relied on it, and now it’s draped across our sofas. Call us fussy, but we think a fabric that can wrap a mummy and a Titian deserves a spot in your living room.
We’ll admit, we’ve gone a bit down the rabbit hole with this stuff. Hours spent in Florentine mills, arguing over the merits of heavyweight vs lightweight weaves, fondling swatches like lunatics. But once you’ve lived with real linen, polyester feels like a prank the sofa industry has been playing on us all.
Here’s the story of how linen went from mummies to masterpieces — and why we got a bit obsessed and ended up wrapping Schplendid sofas in the purest Italian kind…
Common Flax or Linseed (Linum usitatissimum) flower.
Flax, the plant behind linen, is an underrated little miracle. Its roots reach deep. The botanical name for flax is Linum usitatissimum, which literally means “the most useful linen”. The Romans were so taken with flax’s versatility, for cloth, oil, food and medicine that they gave it that name.
Evidence of flax use dates back tens of thousands of years: dyed flax fibres found in a Caucasus cave suggest precursors of linen as far back as 36,000 years ago!In more familiar territory, linen fragments in Egyptian tombs and Swiss lake dwellings show that by 4,000-6,000 BCE flax was already woven into garment, ritual cloth and home fabrics.
One of the most remarkable surviving garments is the Tarkhan dress, dated between 3,482 and 3,102 BCE — a linen dress preserved across millennia.Which just proves the point: linen sticks around.
Over time, linen’s uses expanded — sailcloth, rope, domestic sheets, ecclesiastical vestments, banners. By the Middle Ages, linen was a core textile in Europe.In France, for example, a guild known as Maîtresses marchandes lingères (linen drapery and seamstresses) regulated women in linen trade, among the few guilds open to women before the Revolution.
Italy’s story is less about flax fields than about textile refinement. Mills in Tuscany, Prato, Florence and beyond became centres of finishing, dyeing, weaving and design. Italian linen is the result of generations of know-how — weaving, dyeing, finishing — all aimed at making fabric that feels wonderful to touch.
A Neapolitan flax spinner (1877), by John William Waterhouse (Public domain)
What Italy does best is take simple flax and turn it into something irresistible: cloth with colour, drape and character. Run a Schplendid swatch through your fingers and you’re not just handling a very nice fabric — you’re feeling centuries of practice distilled into something you can actually sit on.
Linen in art, history and culture
Linen’s life stretches far beyond clothes and sofas. Here are some surprising ways it has woven into culture and industry…
Linen and the sea
For centuries, linen and hemp sails quite literally carried history. Before synthetics, no other fibre could match their strength, resistance to sun, and ability to catch and hold wind.
The great age of exploration — Columbus, Magellan, Cook — all sailed under flax and hemp canvas. Without them, those long ocean crossings would have been slower, riskier, or perhaps impossible.
The same goes for warfare. In the Napoleonic era, the British Navy depended on flax sails and rigging to keep its fleets mobile and dominant. A single man-of-war might carry acres of linen canvas aloft, not to mention miles of flax rope. You could argue that without flax, Britain might not have ruled the waves.
It wasn’t just Europe, either. Viking longships carried flax sails. Chinese junks used hemp. Across cultures, bast fibres were the invisible infrastructure of empire, commerce, and contact.
JMW Turner, The Battle of Trafalgar, as seen from the mizen starboard shrouds of the Victory, (1806-1808) Public domain.
Which makes it rather nice that today the same fibres find their way into something as everyday as a sofa. They once carried ships across oceans; now they carry you through a Sunday nap.
Linen and painting
Many masters opted for linen canvases, not cotton, because linen tolerates humidity shifts better, resists warping, and supports large-scale works that ripple less over time.Even more poetic: the binder often used in oil painting is linseed oil, pressed from flax seed. So canvas and paint often share botanical origins.
Meanwhile, as an artistic subject, paintings of spindle work, women spinning flax, domestic weaving or rural fields have recurred in European art, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Interior of a Flax Spinning Mill (1913) by Jules Gondry. Public domain
Linen in everyday and ritual life
Linen wasn’t just a material — it was a marker of status, cleanliness and care. For centuries, a well-stocked chest of household linen was a sign of prosperity and pride. Families would pass tablecloths, sheets and towels down through generations, carefully mended and patched, stitched with initials or family crests.
It also shaped language: “linens” became shorthand for household textiles, wardrobes, and even hospital supplies. To “air your dirty linen” was to expose private matters; to keep a fine set of linens was to show respectability.
Next to the domestic, there was the sacred. Churches reserved their altars for white linen cloths; priests wore linen vestments in rites dating back to the earliest centuries of Christianity. In Jewish tradition, burial shrouds were linen, plain and unadorned, chosen for purity. In parts of Eastern Europe, embroidered linen cloths were hung in homes to mark feast days and life milestones.
Christening dress, mid 19th Century (Metropolitan Museum of Art - CC)
And then there were life’s passages: linen woven into trousseaux for brides, christening gowns for babies, burial shrouds for the dead. Linen framed life’s beginnings and endings, its meals and its ceremonies.
That deep cultural embeddedness makes its presence on a sofa today feel oddly fitting. Linen has always been the fabric of everyday dignity and extraordinary ritual – so why not use it for the place we spend so much of our home lives?
How linen is made
A field of flax looks unassuming: waist-high stems topped with little blue flowers, nodding politely in the breeze. Yet hidden inside those stalks is one of the most remarkable fibres humans have ever coaxed into cloth. Getting from plant to sofa, though, isn’t straightforward. It takes patience, craft, and a string of old-world processes with names that sound like characters in a Dickens novel: retting, scutching, hackling…
Harvesting First, the flax is pulled from the ground, not cut. Why? Because yanking the plant out roots and all keeps the fibres long, intact and ready for strength. (It also explains why flax harvesters historically walked the fields stooped like gleaners — brutal on the back, but worth it for the fabric.)
Rippling The seeds are removed by pulling the dried stalks through a giant comb. The heads go one way (to be pressed into linseed oil for paints, soaps, and even snacks), while the stalks head off for transformation. The English word rippling sounds oddly bucolic, but it was noisy, messy work.
Retting Now comes the fragrant bit. Retting means letting water, dew or microbes start to rot away the pectin that glues the fibre to the woody stem. You can do this in ponds, rivers or simply in the field with rain and dew. Do it too long and the fibre dissolves; too short and you’ve got brittle stalks. Get it right and you unlock supple, shining strands of linen. In parts of Flanders and Ireland, entire valleys were known for their retting ponds — local rivers acquired the unmistakable tang of fermenting flax every summer.
Retting flax – the process of persuading the flax fibre to detach from the stem. (Image: CC)
Breaking Once retted and dried, the stalks are broken — literally smashed to bits — so the woody shives fall away from the fibre bundles. Historically, workers did this with wooden mallets or hinged wooden blades, producing clouds of straw dust. It was noisy, physical work, but each crack brought you closer to linen.
Scutching The fibres are then scraped, scutched, to remove the last fragments of wood. Think of it like carding wool, but harsher: wooden blades and knives beating and scraping until you’re left with cleaner, silvery fibres. The cast-off woody bits weren’t wasted either — they often went for animal bedding or fuel.
Hackling (or heckling) Now comes the stage that gave the English language one of its stranger verbs. To “heckle” originally meant to comb flax fibres through iron nails set in a bed. Each pass through finer heckles straightened the fibres and separated the long, lustrous “line” fibres from the shorter, coarser “tow.” The long line fibres make smooth, strong yarn; the tow becomes string, coarse cloth or stuffing. Later, heckling also came to mean badgering a public speaker — presumably because audiences combed their words as roughly as flax.
Spinning The long fibres, now smooth and aligned, are ready to be spun. Historically this was the realm of spindles and wheels, often tended by women in the home. Spinning flax was tricky: the fibres are inelastic, so too much twist and they snap, too little and they unravel. A good spinner was revered for coaxing fineness from a stubborn fibre.
Spinning wheel (18th century) (Creative commons)
Weaving The spun yarn is woven on looms into cloth. Linen can be woven loosely (for breezy summer shirts), densely (for upholstery or sheets), or elaborately (damasks and patterned linens for ecclesiastical or aristocratic use).
Finishing Finally, the cloth is finished — washed, bleached, dyed, softened, pressed. This is where Italian mills shine. Generations of expertise go into coaxing softness, colour depth and drape from the cloth without slathering it in synthetic coatings. The result is linen that feels like linen: textured, breathable, alive in the hand.
Heavyweight Italian linen in Flax colour on Schplendid's Albion sofa
All told, the journey from flax stalk to finished linen is long and involved. Every stage offers opportunities to cut corners — rush the retting, spin the short fibres, dye with shortcuts — but those compromises show. Done properly, linen explains itself the moment you touch it: it's strong, supple, beautiful.
And that’s the linen we insist on for Schplendid sofas. The very same fibre that once ‘perfumed’ valleys with retting ponds, that gave the English language “heckling,” that clothed saints and covered sails, now covers your living-room seat.
The living fabric: how linen behaves (and why it matters)
Linen is unusual in the textile world, in ways that only really become clear when you use it and live with it.
Wet strength and durability
One of linen’s superpowers is its strength when damp. Bast fibres (inside flax stems) swell as they absorb moisture, increasing inter-fibre cohesion. In practice, this means linen’s wet tensile strength often exceeds its dry strength — rare for natural fibres. That’s why linen can take washing, spot care, real life, and not collapse.
Breath, moisture, and thermoregulation
Linen draws moisture away, holds it internally in microcapillaries, and releases it to the air. That gives it a cooling effect in warm weather without ever feeling clammy. In cooler times, instead of trapping heat rigidly, linen drapes and channels air in a way that softens extremes.
Patina, aging and texture
Linen doesn’t age like a coated fabric that cracks, or synthetic that pills. It evolves. Over time, high-touch zones may develop a gentle sheen or slight pile rise. Slubs (tiny variations or thick spots in the yarn) may soften but not disappear. Those quirks become part of the charm – not a fault.
Minimal stretch, defined structure
Linen has low elasticity. It resists sagging, maintains shape, and doesn’t loosen dramatically over time. That makes it a strong candidate for upholstery — it holds lines, forms, and structure in real life.
What “Italian linen” really means for Schplendid
Not all linen is created equal. The difference between so-so linen and linen that delights is in the finishing, the hand, the colour, and the decision not to compromise.
Here are the characteristics we look for:
Finish finesse. Tuscan and Florentine mills often employ finishing steps — mechanical softening, calendering, steaming, subtle brushing — that optimize hand feel without resorting to coatings.
Intentional texture. We don’t hide slubs; we let them speak. Slight yarn irregularities, natural character, grace in minor variation — that’s the soul of linen.
Colouring with restraint. Deep, stable dyes that patina slowly, resist UV fade, and avoid plastic finishes.
Pure linen, always.No blends, no synthetics, no “linen-look.” We define linen by what it is, not by what it pretends to be.
Dual weights for purpose. Our heavy linen gives structure, line and architectural support; the lighter linen offers drape, softness and relaxed elegance.
In short, when you handle a Schplendid Italian linen you’re feeling the result of a lot of craft and a very stubborn refusal to cut corners.
Living with linen — care, change and delight
One reason so many brands avoid linen is because it demands respect. But with the right approach, linen becomes easier, more forgiving, more delightful.
Spot-clean gently. Use pH-neutral solution, dab (don’t rub), avoid saturating.
Avoid prolonged sun. Rotate cushions, avoid direct exposure where possible.
Live with linen and it only gets better. It’s one of the few fabrics that actually improves with age.
How Schplendid makes this luxury affordable
You might look at the care, the finishing, the character — and assume the cost must skyrocket. Many linen-upholstered sofas are indeed price-premium.
But there’s a different path. We run lean: no big showrooms, low overheads, direct sourcing. When we choose better materials, we pass on the cost only, no extra margin stuffing.
That’s how you can experience linen that would otherwise belong on gowns or heritage upholstery — without paying for the hype.
You won’t necessarily see the difference between a blend and pure linen in a photo. But once you sit, snuggle into a corner or run your palm across an arm — that’s when you feel the character. Linen isn’t background. You notice it, you feel it, and over time it collects a bit of your life in it.
We just want your sofa to be comfortable, beautiful and made of the good stuff. Linen ticks all three.
A Schplendid Guide to Italian Linen: its history, science, craft and delights
From pharaohs to painters to sofa-makers, linen has been shaping lives for millennia — here’s why we’re obsessed with the Italian kind...
On the face of it, linen is just flax — the same plant rabbits chew on. But in human hands it becomes something else entirely: pharaohs were buried in it, Renaissance painters relied on it, and now it’s draped across our sofas. Call us fussy, but we think a fabric that can wrap a mummy and a Titian deserves a spot in your living room.
We’ll admit, we’ve gone a bit down the rabbit hole with this stuff. Hours spent in Florentine mills, arguing over the merits of heavyweight vs lightweight weaves, fondling swatches like lunatics. But once you’ve lived with real linen, polyester feels like a prank the sofa industry has been playing on us all.
Here’s the story of how linen went from mummies to masterpieces — and why we got a bit obsessed and ended up wrapping Schplendid sofas in the purest Italian kind…
(See also: Why we only use pure Italian linen and velvet fabrics for Schplendid sofas)
From flax fields to Italian fabrics
Flax, the plant behind linen, is an underrated little miracle. Its roots reach deep. The botanical name for flax is Linum usitatissimum, which literally means “the most useful linen”. The Romans were so taken with flax’s versatility, for cloth, oil, food and medicine that they gave it that name.
Evidence of flax use dates back tens of thousands of years: dyed flax fibres found in a Caucasus cave suggest precursors of linen as far back as 36,000 years ago! In more familiar territory, linen fragments in Egyptian tombs and Swiss lake dwellings show that by 4,000-6,000 BCE flax was already woven into garment, ritual cloth and home fabrics.
One of the most remarkable surviving garments is the Tarkhan dress, dated between 3,482 and 3,102 BCE — a linen dress preserved across millennia. Which just proves the point: linen sticks around.
Over time, linen’s uses expanded — sailcloth, rope, domestic sheets, ecclesiastical vestments, banners. By the Middle Ages, linen was a core textile in Europe. In France, for example, a guild known as Maîtresses marchandes lingères (linen drapery and seamstresses) regulated women in linen trade, among the few guilds open to women before the Revolution.
Italy’s story is less about flax fields than about textile refinement. Mills in Tuscany, Prato, Florence and beyond became centres of finishing, dyeing, weaving and design. Italian linen is the result of generations of know-how — weaving, dyeing, finishing — all aimed at making fabric that feels wonderful to touch.
What Italy does best is take simple flax and turn it into something irresistible: cloth with colour, drape and character. Run a Schplendid swatch through your fingers and you’re not just handling a very nice fabric — you’re feeling centuries of practice distilled into something you can actually sit on.
Linen in art, history and culture
Linen’s life stretches far beyond clothes and sofas. Here are some surprising ways it has woven into culture and industry…
Linen and the sea
For centuries, linen and hemp sails quite literally carried history. Before synthetics, no other fibre could match their strength, resistance to sun, and ability to catch and hold wind.
The great age of exploration — Columbus, Magellan, Cook — all sailed under flax and hemp canvas. Without them, those long ocean crossings would have been slower, riskier, or perhaps impossible.
The same goes for warfare. In the Napoleonic era, the British Navy depended on flax sails and rigging to keep its fleets mobile and dominant. A single man-of-war might carry acres of linen canvas aloft, not to mention miles of flax rope. You could argue that without flax, Britain might not have ruled the waves.
It wasn’t just Europe, either. Viking longships carried flax sails. Chinese junks used hemp. Across cultures, bast fibres were the invisible infrastructure of empire, commerce, and contact.
Which makes it rather nice that today the same fibres find their way into something as everyday as a sofa. They once carried ships across oceans; now they carry you through a Sunday nap.
Linen and painting
Many masters opted for linen canvases, not cotton, because linen tolerates humidity shifts better, resists warping, and supports large-scale works that ripple less over time. Even more poetic: the binder often used in oil painting is linseed oil, pressed from flax seed. So canvas and paint often share botanical origins.
Meanwhile, as an artistic subject, paintings of spindle work, women spinning flax, domestic weaving or rural fields have recurred in European art, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Linen in everyday and ritual life
Linen wasn’t just a material — it was a marker of status, cleanliness and care. For centuries, a well-stocked chest of household linen was a sign of prosperity and pride. Families would pass tablecloths, sheets and towels down through generations, carefully mended and patched, stitched with initials or family crests.
It also shaped language: “linens” became shorthand for household textiles, wardrobes, and even hospital supplies. To “air your dirty linen” was to expose private matters; to keep a fine set of linens was to show respectability.
Next to the domestic, there was the sacred. Churches reserved their altars for white linen cloths; priests wore linen vestments in rites dating back to the earliest centuries of Christianity. In Jewish tradition, burial shrouds were linen, plain and unadorned, chosen for purity. In parts of Eastern Europe, embroidered linen cloths were hung in homes to mark feast days and life milestones.
And then there were life’s passages: linen woven into trousseaux for brides, christening gowns for babies, burial shrouds for the dead. Linen framed life’s beginnings and endings, its meals and its ceremonies.
That deep cultural embeddedness makes its presence on a sofa today feel oddly fitting. Linen has always been the fabric of everyday dignity and extraordinary ritual – so why not use it for the place we spend so much of our home lives?
How linen is made
A field of flax looks unassuming: waist-high stems topped with little blue flowers, nodding politely in the breeze. Yet hidden inside those stalks is one of the most remarkable fibres humans have ever coaxed into cloth. Getting from plant to sofa, though, isn’t straightforward. It takes patience, craft, and a string of old-world processes with names that sound like characters in a Dickens novel: retting, scutching, hackling…
Harvesting
First, the flax is pulled from the ground, not cut. Why? Because yanking the plant out roots and all keeps the fibres long, intact and ready for strength. (It also explains why flax harvesters historically walked the fields stooped like gleaners — brutal on the back, but worth it for the fabric.)
Rippling
The seeds are removed by pulling the dried stalks through a giant comb. The heads go one way (to be pressed into linseed oil for paints, soaps, and even snacks), while the stalks head off for transformation. The English word rippling sounds oddly bucolic, but it was noisy, messy work.
Retting
Now comes the fragrant bit. Retting means letting water, dew or microbes start to rot away the pectin that glues the fibre to the woody stem. You can do this in ponds, rivers or simply in the field with rain and dew. Do it too long and the fibre dissolves; too short and you’ve got brittle stalks. Get it right and you unlock supple, shining strands of linen. In parts of Flanders and Ireland, entire valleys were known for their retting ponds — local rivers acquired the unmistakable tang of fermenting flax every summer.
Breaking
Once retted and dried, the stalks are broken — literally smashed to bits — so the woody shives fall away from the fibre bundles. Historically, workers did this with wooden mallets or hinged wooden blades, producing clouds of straw dust. It was noisy, physical work, but each crack brought you closer to linen.
Scutching
The fibres are then scraped, scutched, to remove the last fragments of wood. Think of it like carding wool, but harsher: wooden blades and knives beating and scraping until you’re left with cleaner, silvery fibres. The cast-off woody bits weren’t wasted either — they often went for animal bedding or fuel.
Hackling (or heckling)
Now comes the stage that gave the English language one of its stranger verbs. To “heckle” originally meant to comb flax fibres through iron nails set in a bed. Each pass through finer heckles straightened the fibres and separated the long, lustrous “line” fibres from the shorter, coarser “tow.” The long line fibres make smooth, strong yarn; the tow becomes string, coarse cloth or stuffing. Later, heckling also came to mean badgering a public speaker — presumably because audiences combed their words as roughly as flax.
Spinning
The long fibres, now smooth and aligned, are ready to be spun. Historically this was the realm of spindles and wheels, often tended by women in the home. Spinning flax was tricky: the fibres are inelastic, so too much twist and they snap, too little and they unravel. A good spinner was revered for coaxing fineness from a stubborn fibre.
Weaving
The spun yarn is woven on looms into cloth. Linen can be woven loosely (for breezy summer shirts), densely (for upholstery or sheets), or elaborately (damasks and patterned linens for ecclesiastical or aristocratic use).
Finishing
Finally, the cloth is finished — washed, bleached, dyed, softened, pressed. This is where Italian mills shine. Generations of expertise go into coaxing softness, colour depth and drape from the cloth without slathering it in synthetic coatings. The result is linen that feels like linen: textured, breathable, alive in the hand.
All told, the journey from flax stalk to finished linen is long and involved. Every stage offers opportunities to cut corners — rush the retting, spin the short fibres, dye with shortcuts — but those compromises show. Done properly, linen explains itself the moment you touch it: it's strong, supple, beautiful.
And that’s the linen we insist on for Schplendid sofas. The very same fibre that once ‘perfumed’ valleys with retting ponds, that gave the English language “heckling,” that clothed saints and covered sails, now covers your living-room seat.
The living fabric: how linen behaves (and why it matters)
Linen is unusual in the textile world, in ways that only really become clear when you use it and live with it.
Wet strength and durability
One of linen’s superpowers is its strength when damp. Bast fibres (inside flax stems) swell as they absorb moisture, increasing inter-fibre cohesion. In practice, this means linen’s wet tensile strength often exceeds its dry strength — rare for natural fibres. That’s why linen can take washing, spot care, real life, and not collapse.
Breath, moisture, and thermoregulation
Linen draws moisture away, holds it internally in microcapillaries, and releases it to the air. That gives it a cooling effect in warm weather without ever feeling clammy. In cooler times, instead of trapping heat rigidly, linen drapes and channels air in a way that softens extremes.
Patina, aging and texture
Linen doesn’t age like a coated fabric that cracks, or synthetic that pills. It evolves. Over time, high-touch zones may develop a gentle sheen or slight pile rise. Slubs (tiny variations or thick spots in the yarn) may soften but not disappear. Those quirks become part of the charm – not a fault.
Minimal stretch, defined structure
Linen has low elasticity. It resists sagging, maintains shape, and doesn’t loosen dramatically over time. That makes it a strong candidate for upholstery — it holds lines, forms, and structure in real life.
What “Italian linen” really means for Schplendid
Not all linen is created equal. The difference between so-so linen and linen that delights is in the finishing, the hand, the colour, and the decision not to compromise.
Here are the characteristics we look for:
Finish finesse. Tuscan and Florentine mills often employ finishing steps — mechanical softening, calendering, steaming, subtle brushing — that optimize hand feel without resorting to coatings.
Intentional texture. We don’t hide slubs; we let them speak. Slight yarn irregularities, natural character, grace in minor variation — that’s the soul of linen.
Colouring with restraint. Deep, stable dyes that patina slowly, resist UV fade, and avoid plastic finishes.
Pure linen, always. No blends, no synthetics, no “linen-look.” We define linen by what it is, not by what it pretends to be.
Dual weights for purpose. Our heavy linen gives structure, line and architectural support; the lighter linen offers drape, softness and relaxed elegance.
In short, when you handle a Schplendid Italian linen you’re feeling the result of a lot of craft and a very stubborn refusal to cut corners.
Living with linen — care, change and delight
One reason so many brands avoid linen is because it demands respect. But with the right approach, linen becomes easier, more forgiving, more delightful.
Spot-clean gently. Use pH-neutral solution, dab (don’t rub), avoid saturating.
Avoid prolonged sun. Rotate cushions, avoid direct exposure where possible.
Expect subtle change. A gentle sheen, softening, slight texture shifts — embrace them.
Live with linen and it only gets better. It’s one of the few fabrics that actually improves with age.
How Schplendid makes this luxury affordable
You might look at the care, the finishing, the character — and assume the cost must skyrocket. Many linen-upholstered sofas are indeed price-premium.
But there’s a different path. We run lean: no big showrooms, low overheads, direct sourcing. When we choose better materials, we pass on the cost only, no extra margin stuffing.
That’s how you can experience linen that would otherwise belong on gowns or heritage upholstery — without paying for the hype.
You won’t necessarily see the difference between a blend and pure linen in a photo. But once you sit, snuggle into a corner or run your palm across an arm — that’s when you feel the character. Linen isn’t background. You notice it, you feel it, and over time it collects a bit of your life in it.
We just want your sofa to be comfortable, beautiful and made of the good stuff. Linen ticks all three.
Take a look at Schplendid fabrics and colours here, and for a proper feel, order a free comfy pack of light and heavy linen samples.
See also:
The perfect touch: Why we only use pure Italian linen and velvet fabrics for Schplendid sofas
A Schplendid Guide to Down: its history, science, uses and delights
Picture top: An Italian Woman Spinning Flax, 1847, by Uno Troili (1815-1875). Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden. Oil on canvas. Public domain.