the courage, vision and revenge of a beauty entrepreneur – La Voce di New York

Details. One may think that they are minor and superfluous things. Instead, you can focus on the details to create a company, which is also a philosophy of good living, of Italian taste, of craftsmanship at the highest level. Details that led Romeo Sozzi, more encouraged than ever at 72, to buy back shares in his company from the Hong Kong fund with which he allied in 2018. Details that today make this entrepreneur say, in love with life in all her appearance, that the confinement is overcome with courage and vision, and that is why, with her three children by her side, she wants to make her dream come true, the last in the series of dreams that have come true. To open soon an international carpentry school.

Sozzi has the character of a mountaineer who never gives up. Your company is called Reminder ed it’s in valmadrera, which is not an immediately comfortable place but when you arrive you understand that perhaps only here could you gather so many skills, passions, tenacious ambitions. Its symbol is the frog. Why the frog? “Because it is the only animal that cannot back down.” Is the message clear?

Promemoria headquarters

Now before I continue, I will have to explain what the heck Sozzi does (in keeping with the saying that the devil hides in the details). In short, Romeo Sozzi was born in the shop of his father, who was a decorator and restorer of furniture for local gentlemen, and he in turn had learned from his father that he fixed carriages instead. Young Sozzi grows up looking at beauty, entering villas through the back door, observing styles and settings, capturing and collecting other details here as well. Always with a sheet and pencil in hand, so as not to miss anything, from the eye to the drawing on paper. Then you think about it, it’s about those quick sketch sheets, go figure.

That is why in the eighties he created his company Promemoria. Because the memory of things is important. And it is a great accumulator of objects that tell stories and memories, always at the highest level. Over the years he has collected cameras, you can imagine what brands. Historic motorcycles and cars (he didn’t reveal which ones, perhaps out of modesty). You’ve bought chairs around the world that wouldn’t look out of place at a Wright Chicago auction, all from great designers or anonymous, but always unique, rare, museum-worthy. He became passionate about wine and has a land sown with vines that he discovered, rummaging through ancient documents, which was already there a thousand years ago, recovering a forgotten indigenous cultivar. Not happy, he designed and had glasses made especially for him, with his last name engraved on them.

Lectern d’Orsay by Gae Aulenti.

He is passionate about books, collects and reads them, and when he likes a book, he buys more copies to give to his friends. The books, along with the requested authors’ content, are also edited. By choosing thin paper and thread, the cover with the appropriate art image will be applied on top. Divine details, because the second version of the motto says that instead it is God who inhabits the details, as stated by Aby Warburg, father of iconology: Romeo caresses these details, making the sum of many elements settled in memory, chosen, become become a luxury Context, taken from tradition and destined for the future in the boutiques of international haute couture houses, which are not disclosed due to professional secrecy.

At the Valmadrera factory, Romeo is a paparone who goes over the processing of leather and wood with a telephoto lens capable of capturing the slightest imperfection from a distance. When this happens, you stop to see why it happened, find a way for it not to repeat itself again, and then put aside the object that is not perfect for the reasons above. His employees, 140 and over, meet them one by one, call them by name, meet them, their wives or husbands, speak to us in dialect when he has to get to the point.

In detail, over the years, Sozzi has taken over Bottega Ghianda, the laboratory of the wood poet Pierluigi Ghianda, who died in 2015. And today he renews that ability to read wood, combining heritage and design with ever new pieces. . Sometimes they are games, like that serrated pole with a propeller at the bottom that Ghianda made at the suggestion of the Castiglioni brothers for Gianni Agnelli. Sometimes simple masterpieces, like the lectern designed by Gae Aulenti. Small, delicate and timeless works of art.

The Segavento of the Castiglioni brothers

Romeo Sozzi can wait up to two years before putting his hand on a piece of furniture if he is not convinced that he has chosen the right essence. He knows how to select the most sought-after leathers that he entrusts to the expert hands of a single worker who, with two needles, knows how to join the leather around the wood with a movement that looks like a dance, while he stares. with pride. Romeo knows how to stop and study a brass hinge, also with the engraved logo, and he wants new ones made for him. I could go on and on, you get it. But if you’re near Madison Ave., at 152, go up and see what’s in their showroom.