The Due Torri Hotels group, which includes historic properties such as the Grand Hotel Majestic già Baglioni in Bologna, the Bernini Palace in Florence, Hotel Bristol Palace in Genoa and Due Torri Hotel in Verona, has launched a literary initiative for its guests (The Good night Books, Edizioni Minerva). At evening turndown, a Goodnight Booklet is placed on the bed. This small booklet contains a story tied to a local landmark written by a curated selection of writers. In Bologna, the featured story, written by Federico Chiara, Print Director and Culture Editor of Vogue Italia, talks about how the city was one of Italy’s leading producers of luxury silk—until its gradual decline due to industrial espionage, changing fashions, and Napoleon’s arrival. To read more about Bologna, have a look at our itinerary here.
Maybe not everyone knows that Bologna, between the 13th and 18th centuries, was one of the most appreciated Italian producers of a luxury good of oriental invention: silk. The rich and powerful coveted it, thus contributing to the creation of a Bolognese Silk Road dotted with silk throwing mills, canals and mills, where public and private worked together. Today these places are mostly unknown, or have even disappeared. But it is worth rediscovering them, imagining a different geography of the city of Bologna, where the manufacture of the precious fabric prospered and also made “la Dotta” very elegant.
It all began with a journey. Travelling, as we know, broadens the mind, but Marco Polo’s trip to China – from 1271 to 1295 – also opened up new trade routes. From the East, he brought back merchandise, spices, foods, medicinal plants and fabrics, but also information and innovations capable of changing the economic physiognomy and competitiveness of Venice. One of these innovations, in particular, concerned the production of silk, a luxury good that came to the Serenissima from the eastern Mediterranean, but after the writing of Il Milione it witnessed an increase in popularity and, it goes without saying, demand. Born in the 2nd millennium BC in the Yellow River valley – where the silkworm, or Bombyx mori, could easily feed on the widespread mulberry plant (Morus alba) and turn into a butterfly, but not before having produced a filament of length varying from 350 meters to 3 km to form the cocoon – silk gave rise to organized farms around it starting from the 14th century BC and a rudimentary textile industry, thanks also to the invention of rod and then shuttle looms, which spread starting from 500 AD.
The secret of this luminous, transparent and beautiful fabric had been revealed in the West by an act of proto-industrial piracy: in the 6th century AD, Emperor Justinian sent two monks to China, who returned with silkworms and thus started production in Syria. Through the Byzantine rule in southern and central Italy, in the 12th century the cultivation of the mulberry plant, indispensable for local production, expanded. And from there it proceeded to the rest of the peninsula, heading northwards. After all, the demand for the expensive and rare fabric was growing and this meant only one thing: wealth.
The silk industry came to Bologna from Lucca, where an extensive network of merchants had already been active since the 12th century, often owning throwing machines, or they were employers of artisans specialized in washing the skein, in twisting, up to the weaving and dyeing of the fabrics, or the various stages of processing. The immigration from Tuscany of silk artisans, producers of very fine fabrics called “zendadi”, was encouraged by the Bolognese government, which was aware of the potential economic benefits it would bring; in 1231 the Silk Guild (whose headquarters were located in Via Clavature 20, and whose coat of arms is present inside the Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio) was granted a series of benefits which were included in the municipal statute. The most assiduous buyers at the time were young people of good families who came to study in Bologna from all over Europe. A further migration of 300 families from Lucca then occurred in 1314, when Uguccione della Faggiola, the lord of Pisa, conquered the Tuscan city. One of these families, originally from Barga, gave birth to the Bolognini lineage, which prospered thanks to the silk trade from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century – as will be seen below. Evidence of the relationship with the Lucca area is visible, moreover, in Via Val d’Aposa where, on the facade of a building where there was probably a silk throwing mill, there is a fresco reproducing the Holy Face of Lucca.
The reason for Bologna’s primacy in silk, however, lies in the invention of the “running water throwing machine”, an innovation that was soon enhanced with further additions such as a mechanical winder, the to-and-fro, the drive belt – all improvements capable of ensuring a notable saving of work and generating a thinner and more resistant thread (models of this throwing machine, as well as of the looms and the hydraulic wheels with drawers, are today found at the Museum of Industrial Heritage in the city of Bologna). The water wheels were powered by the canals and underground sewers that branched out into the city from the Savena and Reno rivers.
A first example of this noble operation dates back to 1341: in that year, in fact, a certain Bolognino di Borghesano di Bonaventura da Lucca, who was dedicated to the art of silk, signed a written request to the lord of Bologna, Taddeo Pepoli, for the use of the water from the canal (covered in 1840) that flowed in Via Rialto, at the confluence with Via Castellata, where he, like other artisans, carried out his activity. The growing fortune that this silk merchant managed to accumulate allowed him, very soon, to leave the modest house in Via Castellata to build Casa Bolognini, with its adjoining tower, in Via Santo Stefano. What made it characteristic were the auspicious heads similar to those of the Magi present in the cathedral of Barga, and which would later also appear on the facade of the grandiose Palazzo Salina in Piazza Santo Stefano, built by his descendants, and in the Bolognini Chapel in San Petronio (famous for the Dantesque scene in which Mohammed is portrayed in Hell).
In the following centuries, the life of silk artisans – whose number according to a memorial dated 1587 amounted to 24,900 – was conducted along several routes, punctuated by fixed places and appointments. The silkworms raised in the countryside were brought to the city at the beginning of the summer and sold in Piazza Galvani (then called Piazza Pavaglione, because of the large cloth drapes that formed pavilions) and in Corte Galluzzi (called Pavaglioncino). While in 1610 there were 464 looms and 278 master weavers, in 1683 the Reno canal reached the number of 119 silk mills with 353 water wheels. In short, almost half the city worked in the silk industry. The most requested product in all of Europe was the Bolognese veil, smooth or ruffled, and used to emphasize mourning or as a fashion accessory, but also as a mosquito net, filter or sieve. It is no coincidence that it appears in the Portrait of an Old Lady by Guido Reni, exhibited today at the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna. And on the other hand, the elegance of fashionable Bolognese women was underlined by Cesare Vecellio who in 1590 published Degli abiti antichi e moderni di diverse parti del mondo (Ancient and modern clothes from different parts of the world) in Venice.
The waterways were not only used for industry, but also for trade: for this reason, in 1548, the Bolognese Senate gave Jacopo Barozzi, known as Vignola, the mandate to build a real port, located near the Cavaticcio canal, feeding into the navigable canal called Navile, the only one on which boats loaded with goods headed for Ferrara and Venice could sail. To get an idea of its importance, just think that at the end of the sixteenth century 1000 boats passed through it every year, for a total of 80 thousand quintals of goods. In the port area there were also modern infrastructures such as the Salara, a salt warehouse still visible today.
The network of canals was widespread: the dyers used the waters of the Aposa torrent that flowed behind Via Castiglione, after passing the church of Ss. Crocifisso del Cestello. The underground course of the Reno canal in Via Riva di Reno, between the church of Lame and Via Marconi, fed the silk mills that stood in the area between Via S. Felice and Via Nazario Sauro. The city of silk had even generated its own toponymy: Via Chiudire (or chiuvare) indicated that the processed cloths were hung out there; Via Fusari referred to the manufacturers of the weaving spindles; Via Gelsi, for the presence of the plants that the silkworms fed on; Via dei Tessitori and Via dei Vascelli, where the dyers who used the boilers or “vaselle” lived.
Despite the quality of the Bolognese veil, the silk industry of the Emilian capital began to decline in the second half of the 17th century. Industrial espionage was fatal, as it violated the secret, until then well-kept, of the Bolognese silk mills. Similar ones thus arose in Lombardy, Veneto and Piedmont, regions rich in waterways capable of creating shorter supply chains and with less expensive labour. At the end of the eighteenth century, fashion also changed, and caused both the sale and production of Bolognese veils to plummet. One of the last important silk producers and traders in Bologna was Domenico Bettini who, despite the now irreversible crisis in the sector, at the turn of the eighteenth century bought Palazzo Paltroni in Via delle Donzelle.
Already in 1668 the Monte di Pietà of Bologna had to face the refinancing of the artisans of the silk industry in crisis. At the end of the seventeenth century the Monte della Seta or di Santa Caterina were established, located under the Pavaglione (where the traditional cocoon markets were held), and that of Canapa (in Piazza Verdi). But the death of this experience in wealth was decreed by the arrival of Napoleon on 18 June 1796, when he shut down the Monti and confiscated all the pledges. The thread that, in the name of fashion and beauty, had unravelled between sea and land routes, bringing Bologna closer to different cultures, was thus cut. However, the journey of silk did not stop there. And even today it brings this fabric into our wardrobe, to make us as elegant as the Bolognese ladies of the sixteenth century.
The Author
Federico Chiara. Born and raised in Bologna, he graduated in Modern Literature at the Alma Mater Studiorum with a thesis on Pier Paolo Pasolini and then studied fashion journalism, communication and corporate marketing. He began collaborating with the magazines of the publisher Condé Nast in 1998. Since 2000 he has lived in Milan and worked in the editorial office of “Vogue Italia”, where he currently holds the role of Print Director and Culture Editor. Since 2003 he has been a professional journalist. Over the years he has mainly dealt with culture, travel, art, and has written for “The New York Times”, “T Magazine” and “International Herald Tribune”. He created and coordinated the magazine “aQCua”, a project of “Vogue Italia” for the QC Terme group, as well as the two editions of Into Words, the literary week of “Vogue Italia” in collaboration with maison Valentino. He has taught at the University of Bologna and published his texts in collective books edited by Mondadori and Rizzoli, the latest of which is Ken Scott (2022)
*photo credits: Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, “Ritratto della madre”, Guido Reni (1615)