As I did some research on Italian Silk, I found it interesting that two Persian merchants disguised as priests smuggled silkworms out of China way back in the sixth century. They initiated the labor-intensive business of breeding silkworms and it spread to other parts of Italy and the Mediterranean area. It didn’t take long before master weavers were working in Florence and Venice making it a silk processing center for the entire region. Then in the 17th century Como became the country's largest producer.
I never knew this, but the silkworm will eat just about anything, but it will only produce silk when it eats mulberry.
World War II was the catalyst of many changes in Europe - and the work of cultivating the rapacious and picky silkworms left Italy after the war returning to China. For Italy though, the finishing end of silk production stayed and expanded. Today in Como and the surrounding foothills, there are some 800 companies engaged in the silk and textile trade—manufacturing, printing, dyeing, designing, and selling. More than 23,000 Comaschi, as Como residents are called, work in the business. In 2007 they turned out some 4,400 tons of silk fabric. (I find “tons” of silk to be mind-boggling, considering its weight).
Como’s physical setting—a palm-lined fjord with an improbable Mediterranean climate and snowy ridgelines in the near distance—may be unmatched in the world. Even its man-made attractions, especially the grand 16th- to 19th-century villas that dot its shores, suggest that adding to the sum of beauty on earth is what is supposed to happen here. And it does—in the silk, in the architecture and in the lifestyles. It’s called la cultura del bello,. "The culture of beauty".
Source and quote: Smithsonian Magazine
Amazing silk ties: Stanley Lewis
