That silk thread that binds past and present
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Follow the beauty and you will find silk. That intangible thread that binds art, business, history and holds Italy together. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Bologna, set out on the trail of silk as if they were the little stones of Pollicino and in her Going through the Italian silk routes traces an artistic, social and economic history of our country woven on silk, which «is an uninterrupted journey. Without end, on the legs of men and women of different faiths and backgrounds in the perennial search for better conditions of work, of life ».
There are three historical phases: the beginnings of production, between the middle and the late Middle Ages, the splendor of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and the revival between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after the difficulties of the mid-nineteenth century.
The arrival of silk from Byzantium
The journey starts from the South, between Calabria and Sicily, where the silk arrived from Byzantium, to then go up again towards the North, in seven capital cities of beauty. Just enter the church of San Vitale in Ravenna to be dazzled by the chlamys of the Emperor Justinian and imagine the silk manufactures of the V-VII century, real art workshops. As they were, decades later, the ateliers in Lucca, where it all began thanks to Jewish families emigrated from the South and custodians of the manufacture of zendadi, those fabrics as light as the wind and as precious as gold. The city is swarming with artisans and workshops but around the 14th century it loses its monopoly in favor of Venice, Bologna and Florence capable of attracting workers thanks to interest-free loans, houses for workers and free-to-rent workshops. Bologna becomes the capital of veils and organzini, also thanks to the addition of the water wheel, in Venice there were the best dyers and to understand the Florentine market just look at the portrait that Agnolo Bronzino makes of Eleonora da Toledo with her son Giovanni (1545 ): a triumph of luxury and refinement.
Bachi and mulberry: regional traditions
This is beautiful Italy, a story of silkworms, mulberries and threads that unravel bringing work, wealth and wonder. In Florence, as in Prato (to visit the Textile Museum), and so in Venice (the ancient Luigi Bevilacqua weaving mill), in Genoa (Gaggioli di Zoagli factory), in Milan, where intensive gelsibachiculture led to a successful silk industry, or to Naples, where, at the behest of Ferdinand IV in San Leucio, 4 kilometers from Caserta, a colony-factory was created which, by producing silk, “promoted a new way of being a community”.
Today the main producers of silk in the world are China and India, followed by Uzbekistan, Brazil, North Korea and Turkey. In our country (Trentino, Veneto, Friuli, Calabria, Marche), there are many projects to revive this ancient art not only because a silk rope can support much more weight than an equally thick metal cable but because silk is the Esperanto of Italy for centuries.
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