By Oliver Charles Harry - Creative Director at Ghini Como, an Italian silk scarf brand based in Argegno on Lake Como
Quick facts: the history of silk on Lake Como
- Silk production in the Province of Como has been documented since the early 14th century, making it one of the longest continuously operating textile traditions in Europe.
- The Visconti family, rulers of Milan, formally established silk cultivation around Lake Como in the 1300s by mandating the planting of mulberry trees throughout the region.
- Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan - patron of Leonardo da Vinci - industrialised Como silk production in the 15th century, transforming it from a cottage craft into an organised regional economy.
- By 1972, Lake Como had surpassed both China and Japan in the production of luxury printed silk.
- Today the Province of Como accounts for an estimated 70-75% of the world's finest luxury silk, supplying Hermès, Chanel, Prada and virtually every major fashion house.
- The Setificio Paolo Carcano, established in Como in 1869, remains the world's only dedicated school for silk craftsmanship and continues to train master weavers and printers today.
Medieval origins: How silk arrived on Lake Como
The silk road that brought the mulberry silkworm to Europe is one of the great stories of ancient trade and, arguably, espionage.
The historian Procopius recorded that in the sixth century AD, two Byzantine monks travelling from Central Asia concealed silkworm eggs inside hollow bamboo canes and carried them westward to the court of the Emperor Justinian in Constantinople, an act of industrial theft that transferred the most commercially valuable biological knowledge of the ancient world from East to West.
From the eastern Mediterranean, sericulture spread gradually northward through Sicily and up the Italian peninsula over the following centuries, borne by Arab traders, Crusaders returning from the Levant, and the restless commercial ambition of the medieval Italian city-states.
It was not until the early fourteenth century, however, that Lake Como began its long relationship with silk, when the Visconti family - whose seat of power in Milan made them the dominant force in northern Italy - began encouraging the cultivation of mulberry trees and the rearing of silkworms throughout the lake district.
The Viscontis understood, with the economic instinct that characterised the great Italian signorie, that the region's geography made it incredibly well suited to silk production.
Indeed, the lake itself (at 410 metres one of the deepest in Europe) moderated the local climate to produce the temperate, sheltered conditions in which mulberry trees thrived.
Furthermore, the abundant Alpine water flowing down from the mountains to the north was exceptionally pure and soft - ideal for the dyeing and finishing processes that gave finished silk its colour and lustre - and the agricultural wealth of the Po Valley to the south provided the mulberry leaves on which the silkworms fed in vast quantities.
The Sforza transformation: Como becomes Europe's capital of silk
The decisive moment in Como silk history came in the latter half of the fifteenth century, when Ludovico Sforza - known to posterity as il Moro, the Dark One, and remembered today chiefly as the patron who commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint The Last Supper - formalised and dramatically accelerated what the Viscontis had begun.
Sforza ordered the systematic large-scale planting of mulberry trees throughout the Province of Como and organised the rearing of silkworms as a structured regional industry, moving what had been a dispersed collection of household workshops toward something approaching coordinated production.
Under Sforza's patronage, the cities of Como and Cernobbio became the centres of this new silk economy, their way of life reconstructed around the silk production cycle - the spring hatching of the silkworms, the summer rearing on mulberry leaves, the autumn harvesting of cocoons, the winter reeling and weaving that transformed raw thread into finished cloth.
The workshops that were established along the lake's western shore in this period laid down the geographic template that the industry still follows today: a dense concentration of specialist mills, printers, dyers and finishers within a small area, each dependent on the others, each contributing a specific expertise to the transformation of silk thread into finished luxury fabric.
The production journey: from silkworm to finished scarf
Understanding why authentic Lake Como silk is categorically different from silk produced elsewhere requires understanding the process by which it is made, because it is in this process - specifically in the accumulated refinements of six centuries of continuous practice - that Como's advantage resides.
The silk production process:
- Silkworm spins cocoon from a single continuous thread of up to 1,500 metres
- Cocoons are softened in hot water and the thread is carefully unwound by hand
- Multiple filaments are twisted together to create a weavable yarn
- The yarn is woven into silk twill on specialist looms in Como's mills
- Designs are screen-printed or digitally printed using Alpine water in dye baths
- The fabric is washed, steamed, stretched and hand-inspected by artisans
- Finished scarves are packaged in locally made envelopes in Como
The silkworm responsible for Como's silk is specifically Bombyx mori, the mulberry silk moth, whose larvae produce a finer and more consistent thread than any other commercially reared silkworm species.
Each larva spins its cocoon from a single continuous thread that may extend to 1,500 metres in length, and it is the unbroken nature of this thread - reeled carefully from the softened cocoon rather than spun from broken fibres - that gives mulberry silk its characteristic smooth texture, natural sheen, and the particular way it catches and holds light that no synthetic fabric has ever convincingly replicated.
The weaving stage is where Como's accumulated technical knowledge becomes most tangible.
The specific structures used in luxury scarves - silk twill above all, with its characteristic diagonal weave that gives the fabric its body and its clean drape - require a precision of tension, a calibration of warp and weft, and an intuitive reading of how the emerging fabric is behaving, that is learned over years rather than weeks and refined over generations rather than years.
A silk twill woven by a Como master produces a fabric that holds a knot differently, moves differently, and ages differently from one produced by a less experienced hand, and these differences are immediately perceptible to anyone who handles both.
The printing workshops that follow weaving are, if anything, even more concentrated in their expertise, having developed over the past century screen-printing and digital-printing techniques of extraordinary colour precision that the world's great fashion houses rely upon specifically because they cannot be replicated at the same standard anywhere else.
The particular warmth of a vermillion, the cool precision of a navy against cream, the way a polkadot sits on a silk ground without bleeding at its edges - these are not accidents of technology but achievements of accumulated craft knowledge expressed through the specific properties of Como's Alpine water in the dye bath.
The industrial era: survival and specialisation
The nineteenth century brought machinery to Como's mills, but it did not displace the craft knowledge that made them distinctive, but amplified it.
Mechanical looms could weave faster, but they still required skilled operators who understood the material; power-assisted printing could produce greater volumes, but the colour knowledge remained human.
The Setificio Paolo Carcano, established in Como in 1869 specifically to codify and transmit the accumulated technical knowledge of the region's artisans to new generations, represented the moment when Como's silk tradition became formally self-conscious - aware of its own exceptionalism and determined to preserve it.
By the late nineteenth century, the mills along the lake had attracted international attention as the source of the finest luxury silk available anywhere, and the family dynasties that operated them (many of whom continue to operate today) were supplying fabrics to the royal courts of Europe, the fashion houses of Paris, and the luxury retailers of London and New York.
The twentieth century brought Como's greatest competitive test in the form of mass silk production in China, Japan, India and Vietnam, where lower labour costs enabled factories to produce silk at prices the Italian mills could not match on volume.
Como's response, which in retrospect looks like strategic genius but at the time must have felt more like survival, was to abandon the volume market entirely and concentrate exclusively on the technically demanding, small-run, high-specification work that the world's great fashion houses required and that no factory elsewhere could deliver with the same reliability.
By 1972, the strategy had produced a remarkable result: Como had surpassed both China and Japan in luxury printed silk production, commanding the summit of the market rather than competing for its base.
Como silk today: a continuing tradition
The Province of Como today contains a density of silk expertise without parallel anywhere on earth: mills that weave, workshops that print, finishers who inspect every length of fabric by hand before it leaves the building, and the Setificio Paolo Carcano, which continues to train the next generation of silk craftsmen with the same rigour and the same material knowledge that it has applied since 1869.
The fashion houses that return to Como season after season - and the list includes virtually every household name at the forefront of international luxury - do so not out of habit but out of a practical recognition that the combination of technical capability, quality consistency, and craft knowledge concentrated here is simply not available at the same standard anywhere else.
Ghini Como continues this tradition, partnering with one of the oldest and most respected silk producers in Como to produce luxury Italian silk scarves that are genuinely zero-mile: woven, printed, finished and packaged within the Province of Como, using the same specialist looms and family craft knowledge that has been making silk on these shores for hundreds of years.
Oliver Charles Harry lives in Argegno on the western shore of Lake Como, where Ghini Como's silk scarves are designed and produced.
