The Italian textile industry, 1600-2000: labour, sectors and products

The relationship between textile production and work in Northern Italy is here considered over the long period. Starting with the decline of the large Italian renaissance urban manufactures, between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century a new productive geography emerged in Northern and Central Italy. This was based on rural manufacturing but also production in larger centres such as Prato, Biella, Schio and Valdagno, areas that are still today major poles of the European woolen textile sector. The merchants based in these areas were specialized in the production of low-quality textiles. However during the eighteenth century they expanded their businesses and increased the quality of their manufactures often by concentrating on specific stages of production performed in what we can call ‘protofactories’. It is within these ‘industrial islands’ that some of the key innovations of the early decades of the nineteenth century took places. A handful of industrial ‘pioneers’ such as the Sella and Rossi families as well as foreign entrepreneurs become models for other manufacturers to follow. Thy ‘pulled’ the entire sector towards modern industrial structures. Alessandro Rossi, the most influential Italian textile entrepreneur of the second half of the nineteenth century, is representative of this phase of modernization of technological and industrial organization. He was also a model of how the entrepreneur should act as a pivot in the political and social life of the country as a whole. The training and disciplining of the new industrial workforce were possible thanks to extensive programmes of technical education and thanks to business welfare initiatives. These paternalistic measures obviated to the problems caused by low salaries but also ensured a smooth transition from rural to industrial life. This linkage between the rural world and the textile industry was present in the entire textile sector and was particularly strong in the case of silk production. On the one hand it was one of the ways in which the social consequences of modernization were kept under control, on the other it provided a low skilled workforce thus reducing the potential gains offered by technical progress in the long term. From the end of the nineteenth century the expansion and industrialization of other sectors reduced the importance of the textile sector in the overall economy of Italy. However, both cotton and woolen textile production continued to prosper even in the difficult interwar period. In the post-war period the opening of European markets ensured a renewed expansion of Italian textile production. Italian textiles enterprises became more competitive by starting working on different fibres and by integrating textile and clothing production as in the case of the famous Marzotto mill in Valdagno. More recently the crisis of textile production in the West has not led to the disappearance of Italian textile production. This has happened because of its capacity to exploit the concept of the Made-in-Italy to create well-known brands.