Giacomo Puccini were Puccini's contemporaries, drew express parallels between these incidents and particular events in the opera. Checchi cited a diary kept by Puccini while he was still a student, which recorded an occasion in which, as in Act 4 of the opera, a single herring served as a dinner for four people. Puccini himself commented: "I lived that "Bohème", when there wasn't yet any thought stirring in my brain of seeking the theme of an opera". ("") Puccini's composition of "La bohème" was the subject of a public dispute between Puccini and fellow composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo. In early 1893, the two
1830s in Western fashion 1830s in Western fashion 1830s fashion in Western and Western-influenced fashion is characterized by an emphasis on "breadth", initially at the shoulder and later in the hips, in contrast to the narrower silhouettes that had predominated between 1800-1820. Women's costume featured larger sleeves than were worn in any period before or since, which were accompanied by elaborate hairstyles and large hats. The final months of the 1830s saw the proliferation of a revolutionary new technology—photography. Hence, the infant industry of photographic portraiture preserved for history a few rare, but invaluable, first images of human beings—and therefore also preserved our earliest,