Milan to Venice: Bring It. A Throw-Down With Apps and Fancy Furniture

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Despite lingering malaise in the furniture industry, the organizers of the annual Milan Furniture Fair, Salone Internazionale del Mobile, have good reason to ramp up their festival's firepower this year: they feel the hot breath of their rival city-state, Venice, on their necks.

The battle for Italian design supremacy burst unexpectedly into view last week as Carlo Guglielmi, the president of Cosmit, which runs the Milan fair, told a group of foreign journalists, most of whom had no idea...