Home ›› 25 Apr 2023 ›› Opinion
With its water-lapped palaces, canal-laced islands and golden basilicas rising from the tides, Venice is a floating master-piece of creativity and craftsmanship. A metropolis of marble conceived from a cluster of mudflats, the City of Water’s fairy-tale setting has inspired centuries of artists and inventors. But while Venice’s urban fabric has always shaped the city, its fine fabrics once spun the fashion world.
From the 13th to 18th Centuries, Venice was the epicentre of the luxury textile trade, and no fabric from the maritime re-public was more coveted than velvet. At the height of the industry in the 1500s, the clacking of 6,000 wooden looms ech-oed throughout the Venetian lagoon as the city’s Guild of Silk Weavers slowly wove velvet from thousands of silk threads to supply sumptuous patterned garments to the highest rung of Renaissance nobility.
Today, there’s only one company left in Venice – and all of Italy – producing velvet on traditional wooden looms: the Luigi Bevilacqua Company, a small, family-run business that can trace its velvet-weaving lineage back to 1499. And if you follow the rhythmic clattering to a windowless workshop hidden off the Grand Canal, you’ll find a team of loyal weav-ers single-handedly preserving the secrets of Venetian velvet from sinking into oblivion.
Like the city that holds it, the Bevilacqua workshop is adrift in a world of its own place and time, and entering the dusty stu-dio feels like stepping inside the ghost of a medieval mill.
Some 3,500 designs and weave drafts dating from the Middle Ages to the 1920s sit stacked floor-to-ceiling. A maze of ropes and rigging criss-crosses 18 towering looms from the 1700s. And two ancient circular warps inspired by sketches from Leonardo da Vinci shake the creaky wooden floor with each hand-cranked turn.
“Not much has changed here over the years,” explained company director Alberto Bevilacqua, surrounded by a plush trove of centuries-old silk damasks, brocades and gilt-embroidered tapestries. “The rising tides cause the floor to flood more of-ten now, but we still produce velvet the same way it was made 300 years ago: thread by thread and entirely by hand.”
Alberto’s great-grandfather, Luigi, opened the workshop in 1875 across the Grand Canal, and today, it is the oldest active velvet-weaving mill in Italy. Yet, the family’s textile traditions trace back more than 500 years, as evidenced by a 1499 painting showing a parade of Venetian aristocracy in flowing velvet togas with the inscription: ‘Giacomo Bevilacqua, weaver’. Since then, the intricate techniques and patterns of Venetian velvet have been passed down through a remarkable thread of artists in the Bevilacqua family – each of whom has guarded them tightly before revealing them to a trusted team of weavers trained in the family workshop.
In the past 143 years, the family business has woven velvet for popes, kings and more than a dozen royal palaces. Its yel-low-patterned velvet hangs in the White House’s Oval Office, its crimson ciselé covers chairs in the Kremlin, and it was an official supplier to the Vatican for decades.
BBC
