Putin’s long table: Spanish and Italian dispute the authorship of the play

It was last week when Vladimir Putin received the French president Emmanuel Macron, which released the first images of the long white table at which the Russian and French leaders sat. With each one at their end, sufficient distance was thus guaranteed in a pandemic period, as Macron refused to take a blood test. Covid-19 in Moscow.

With a length of more than four meters, the table quickly became a metaphor for the distance between Russians and the West in the management of the Ukrainian crisis. And when the German chancellor was received at the Kremlin this week, the table reappeared, for the same reasons: Olaf Scholz followed the French leader’s example and did not want to test himself in Russia, so he was forced to submit to the strict Kremlin protocols to contain Covid-19.

The table was dismissed only when Putin received the Brazilian president, as Bolsonaro had no problem being tested by Kremlin doctors.

But Putin’s long table nevertheless returned to be the subject of conversation, this time for unusual reasons: in the face of so much publicity, two companies – one Spanish and the other Italian – came publicly to claim the authorship of the piece of furniture.

Valencian Vicente Zaragozá told Spanish radio that he immediately recognized his work at the table. Owner of a homonymous company based in the town of Alcàsser, in the Valencian Community, he revealed with emotion that he has been working for the Russian market for years and that the first thing he did, when he saw the table in images that went around the world, was to look for the imperfections “to improve” something, if need be.

The businessman also revealed that he did several jobs for the former Soviet nations, including a kitchen for the president of Uzbekistan.

But the Spaniard’s speech did not go unnoticed by Renato Pologna, the owner of Oak, an Italian family business based in Como and who says he is stunned by Zaragozá’s statements.

“I honestly don’t even know what to say, because I did this work in 1995-96 and pictures of the table were published in several books, mostly Russian, that were published in the year 2000,” he said.

“This man, whom I don’t know, says he made the table in 2005, so there’s something wrong. We have all the certificates of proof of the work done and even the recognition of the then president, Boris Yeltsin”, added Pologna, quoted by the newspaper “The Guardian”.

So far, it is not known who is right, but the Italian admits that the Spanish company in Zaragozá may have made a copy of the original table. “We’re talking about a table, not an airplane,” he concluded.