The so called Moorish style became popular in Italy in the second half of the Nineteenth Century thanks to the great exhibitions and it spread mainly in places dedicated to entertainment and amusement: grand hotels, bathing establishments, thermal baths, summer arenas.
In the abodes of the new rising middle class, the cabinet-makers, besides undertaking the realization of neo Renaissance and neo Baroque rooms, expressed their purchasers’ taste for exoticism at least in the smoking rooms, or in the bedrooms.
This is the case of the monumental room in neo Egyptian style created in 1890 by the two oriental style Bolognese painters, Fabio and Alberto Fabbi, for the Palazzo Gonzaga in Guastalla near Mantua.
Re-interpreting certain Islamic art motives, the Milanese furniture-maker Carlo Bugatti elaborated, by means of formal research, a new style, the originality of which was immediately recognized at international level.