Stunning Ligurian textiles

Having spent a week in Liguria, a beautiful region in Northern Italy, I had time to visit again Tessitura Gaggioli in Zoagli. Established in 1932 now the Tessitura is in the hand of Sergio, his mother and his sister Paola and they create the most magnificent silk and hand woven velvets and damasks.

The pieces above are all called Soprarizzo and they are the most beautiful and refined velvet made of 12.240 threads for the warp and 3.000 for the weft and it requires 200 movements of hands and feet to create only 1 centimeter. In a day only 40 centimeters of textile are created.

The Tessitura produces also less expensive textiles, with computerized system, but results are always of the best quality.

Giuseppe shows me how after two long beats and a short one of the treadle loom he passes the special tool to cut some threads, then he repositions between the threads the long metal stick which you can see at the bottom, below his hand and the knife and the coordinate movements start again.

A damask in pale yellow and cream is at its beginning.

Here Giuseppe shows me the silk just arrived from the dyeing plant where raw silk (from China) is sent to be colored in the precise hues requested. Italy had a flourishing silk production for centuries but now silk is produced in China and bought raw to be spinned and woven here.

Pure gold thread to start a new order of meters and meters of pale blue damasks with Florentine lilies in gold. It will take months but the result will be stunning as the other pieces created for public institutions, churches and private mansions: for instance Tessitura Gaggioli had also worked in the past for iconic decorator Mongiardino’s residence in New York.