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Red Spinning Wheel by Caraglio

The Red Spinning Wheel by Caraglio (Filatoio Rosso di Caraglio) is a historic building located on the outskirts of Caraglio, a town in the province of Cuneo.

That of a Piedmont with a past intimately linked to silk is a story unknown to many. Nevertheless, the production of silk yarns was important for the region, not only because it became the driving force of the economy between the 17th and 19th centuries, for the technical innovations developed, for the capital created (by a few), but also for the choral involvement of the population, employed as labor in the numerous factories that have sprung up in the area and, above all, in the production of the raw material: the breeding of silkworms.

Built between 1676 and 1678 on the initiative of Count Giovanni Girolamo Galleani, it was one of the first silk production plants in the Duchy of Savoy and throughout Europe.

It housed the entire production chain of the yarn, from the cultivation of mulberry trees in the surrounding countryside for the breeding of silkworms to the processing and realization of the finished product, becoming the progenitor together with the contemporary Venaria plant of a system of spinning mills built in Piedmont in the subsequent decades.

After years of neglect and decay, since 1999 it has been acquired by the Municipality of Caraglio. A new life.

Today the ancient building houses, in addition to an exhibition that for years has hosted popular temporary art exhibitions, the permanent 'Museum of the Piedmontese Silk Building', with the aim of enhancing not only the building, but an entire territory, becoming a sort of bulwark of the Piedmontese historical-economic memory.

Thanks to the careful studies and the subsequent reconstruction project curated by Prof. Flavio Crippa, since 2005 the museum boasts the reproduction of hydraulic silk twisters, a technology used in the twisting phase of the renowned Piedmontese organzine, known to be, according to what the merchants noted English Lewis and Loubière in the 1700s, "the finest silk produced" in Europe.

These sophisticated machines, of Bolognese conception, were introduced in Piedmont in the second half of the 17th century by the Galleani family and it was also thanks to them that Piedmont became a leader in the production of silk yarns exported all over Europe.

The new challenge that the "Museum of the Piedmontese Silk Factory" proposes to carry forward is to pass on this history made up of technological challenges, movements of money, trade, but also of human lives, a story that is not an end in itself. , but it is part of a much broader one, that of human evolution and the role that silk has played in this sense for millennia.

Map: Red Spinning Wheel by Caraglio