When we visited the Museo del Baco da Seta at San Giacomo di Veglia, I found myself looking at the history of silk rather differently.

This was not simply another museum about an old industry. Alexandra’s mother came from this part of the world and worked in the silk industry, feeding mulberry leaves to silkworms. So, for us, there was a very personal connection with what we were seeing.

And I was genuinely impressed by the museum. It is housed in the former Maffi silk-reeling factory, an old industrial building that was finally disused in the 1960s. The museum itself was inaugurated in 2010 and has been carefully created not simply as a collection of old objects, but as a record of an entire way of life. It was recently reopened after improvement works in August 2026.

The presentation is excellent. There are machines and equipment, photographs, documents, old films and other material showing how the industry actually worked. But what impressed me most was something rather more valuable than the machinery: the voices of the women who had actually worked there.

The museum has collected oral histories from former workers, and these are fascinating. They explain, in their own words, what happened in the filanda: the different jobs, how the cocoons were handled, how the silk thread was produced, who did what and what it was actually like to work there. One testimony, for example, comes from Francesca Giordan, who entered a filanda at only twelve and describes the hierarchy of the women workers and the jobs involved in producing the thread.

That makes the museum much more than a collection of old machinery. It is a valuable historical resource because it preserves memories that would otherwise simply disappear. The official description talks about recovering both the personal and collective memories of the industry, and that seems exactly right.

And this was a huge industry here. Sericulture began as something families did alongside agriculture, but it eventually became one of the principal activities of the area. Mulberry trees were everywhere. The raising of silkworms, the work in the filande and the scientific establishments connected with silk involved a very large proportion of the local population. In 1873 a Regio Osservatorio was established here, and Vittorio Veneto subsequently became an important centre for silkworm research and the production of silkworm seed.

Which brings me back to Alexandra’s mother.

She was part of this world. She fed the silkworms with mulberry leaves. It sounds almost ridiculously simple when you put it like that. Yet that small job was one stage in a remarkable chain.

The silkworm produced its cocoon. The cocoon was collected. The silk was reeled. Women worked in the filande turning it into thread. Eventually that thread could become the luxury fabrics that travelled across Europe.

The story goes back much further, of course. Silk originated in China and gradually travelled westwards along what we now call the Silk Road. There is the famous Byzantine story, recorded by Procopius, of monks bringing silkworm eggs to Constantinople during the reign of Justinian. Whether every detail is literally true is another question, but by the Middle Ages silk production had spread across the Mediterranean world.

Italy became one of Europe’s great silk centres. Lucca was particularly important, and its merchants and craftsmen helped establish the city’s wealth through silk manufacture and trade.

You can still see traces of that world in Lucca. And then there is Jan van Eyck’s famous Arnolfini Portrait, painted in Bruges in 1434. The man is generally believed to be the Lucca-born Italian merchant Giovanni Arnolfini, and his magnificent outer garment is probably silk velvet. The woman’s green dress, interestingly, is fine wool rather than silk.

The painting isn’t a documentary about the silk trade, but it gives us a glimpse of the extraordinary luxury that silk could represent.

Eventually the centre of Italian silk production moved northwards, particularly towards Lombardy and Como. But the old rural system declined. Agriculture changed, labour became more expensive, synthetic fibres appeared and Asian competition became increasingly difficult to resist. The great silk industry of Vittorio Veneto disappeared.

Yet silk itself did not disappear from Italy. Como is still an important centre for high-quality silk textiles. What Italy largely lost was the beginning of the process: the mulberry trees, the silkworms, the cocoons and the huge numbers of people involved in producing raw silk.

So the Silk Road has not really disappeared. It has acquired lorries, ships and containers.

What I found particularly moving in San Giacomo di Veglia was that the museum brings the enormous history of silk down to the level of individual people.

It tells us about machines and factories, but also about women who got up in the morning and went to work. It preserves their voices. It tells us what they did, how they did it and what life was like.

And one of those women could have been Alexandra’s mother.

That makes this little museum much more than a museum about silkworms.

For us, it is also a small piece of family history.

***

If you enjoyed this post, please consider clicking the Like button or leaving a comment. It lets me know that my writing is reaching people.