Seamless Industrialization: The Lanificio Rossi and the Modernization of the Wool Textile Industry in Nineteenth-Century Italy

The town of Schio, 20 miles north of Vicenza in the north-eastern part of Italy, was one of the major European wool manufacturing centres in the second half of the nineteenth century. Schio was famous for the Lanificio Rossi, a woollen mill founded in 1817 by Francesco Rossi and developed by his son Alessandro between 1845 and 1898. By the 1880s the Lanificio was a joint-stock company and, with 5,000 employees, the largest firm in the country. Alessandro Rossi, its chief director and major stakeholder, was at the forefront of the industrial debate dominating the Italian economy in the period following the unification of the country and his firm provided an economic, entrepreneurial and social model for many industrialists to follow. The article examines the most salient features of the Lanificio and how it represented an important (and sometimes controversial) example of Italian industrialization. The Lanificio did not rest on the passive acceptance of foreign technologies and values, or a blind pursuit of the most advanced economies through the adoption of exogenous productive and managerial solutions. The classic paradigm of the so-called ‘second comers’ is interpreted in the Lanificio’s case within the complex association between the preservation of local manufacturing traditions and the necessity to embrace and support a new industrial philosophy.