Many images remain from Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance: the pink casita surrounded by actors, musicians, and stars with Latin backgrounds; choreography on streetlamps, a tribute to the often invisible labor through which Latino communities helped build urban America; taco shops used as theatrical backdrops; and the final parade of flags from across the American continent.
Yet within the stage design that transported millions of viewers to Puerto Rico, one detail more than any other brought people together through a shared memory of home: a child asleep across two chairs, whom Bad Bunny wakes by singing.
Those chairs are called “Chiavarine” and are an essential presence in dining rooms around the world, but also a quiet icon of Italian design and craftsmanship.
The story of the Chiavarina chair begins in 1807 in Chiavari, on the Ligurian coast of Italy. After a trip to France, local entrepreneur Stefano Rivalora returned with the idea of reproducing the Empire-style furniture he had seen in aristocratic salons. He turned to cabinetmaker Giuseppe Gaetano Descalzi, who transformed those models into something radically different. Where French Empire furniture was solid and monumental, Descalzi made it thinner, lighter, and reduced in structure.
The result was a chair built from local materials — cherry, maple, and beech wood — assembled using hot glue alone, without nails or screws. Its unmistakable backrest featured slender, symmetrical spindles rising from the seat to meet a gently arched top rail.
Affordable, durable, and extremely light, the Chiavarina traveled through European courts and institutional buildings, from Napoleon’s residences to the White House. Eventually, it reached Puerto Rico, Italy, Nigeria, China — entering the homes and dining rooms of ordinary people.
Before that global journey, however, it also passed through the hands of Gio Ponti, founder of Domus. Along with other Italian architects and designers, Ponti featured the chair in interior sketches between the 1950s and 1980s. Above all, the Chiavarina inspired him to design the Superleggera, an iconic chair now part of the permanent collection display at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan.
“A chair, just a chair,” Ponti once said. And yet, at Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show, a chair became collective memory. For more than two centuries, the Chiavarina has been present at celebrations, weddings, and family gatherings — the Italian design icon where parents tell you to sleep because you are tired, even if they are not yet ready to go home.