A Linen Legacy | Visiting our Italian spinners in the foothills of the Alps
We’re at Villa d’Almè for one reason, to visit the linen spinners who have, for the past 150 years, meticulously transformed flax into yarn. We are far from the fields of Normandy where it is grown, yet the connections run deep, and the relationships are old.
Written by Dax Holding
Bergamo, Italy
Descending from the mountains of the Alps, you follow the streams that once fed the factories of Italy’s industrialised north. Green Alpine valleys with rapidly moving waters, ice cold from the source of melting snow. We’re at Villa d’Almè for one reason, to visit Linificio e Canapificio Nazionale and the linen spinners who have for the past 150 years meticulously transformed flax into yarn. We are far from the fields of Normandy where linen is grown, yet the connections run deep, and the relationships are old.
We enter through a mechanised glass door, ascend in a lift into a modern office space where people sit staring at screens, plying the trade of modern-day commerce. There is information on the walls telling stories and revealing history – old oil paintings of the founders, the changes that have occurred over the past 150 years. We are ushered into a large boardroom, offered coffee, and discuss the effects of market pressure, war and climate on linen.
The narrative is scary; however, we sit in the same seats that generations before us did. We are guided by their history and soothed by their presence. Soon we have spoken of the things we must speak of and it’s time to delve deeper into the building.
We travel down, out of the light, into the humid basements where the real magic happens.
Walking down the humming rows of spinning frames you are immersed in the unique smell of linen, like earth, the same smell you find standing over one of our looms in South Africa.
A smell reminiscent of the fynbos that surrounds us in Plettenberg Bay.
The workers move quietly and gently, focused, with the sure movements of people familiar and confident with the repetition of their work.
These machines were designed and made before any of our times, modified through decades of innovation to produce a little bit more, a little bit better, hopefully a little bit faster. But always using the same basic ingredients. Wood, water, iron and people. All singularly focused on twisting the long thin fibres of a grass into yarn.
We just skim the surface.
We leave the spinning process and now travel by stairway, twisting up to the top floors to find ourselves immersed in an exhibition celebrating linen, life and art. This unexpected delight takes us into yet another dimension and precipitates a completely different conversation. What are we doing as people, as businesses, to change the common narrative?
The space once filled with machines is now devoted to art. High-value real estate is no longer able to sustain production in a country where labour and the cost of doing business has forced the majority of production to move to Lithuania and Tunisia.
The complexities are vast.
We discuss the B-Corp movement and what it means to the people of Linificio and to Mungo. The harsh visuals of brick and concrete reflecting an industrial past echo the sounds of our conversation, about the changing views on how we must now do business and how we must live.
This is how we leave it.