From Perugian Tablecloths to Sicilian Drawn-Thread Work: A Journey Through Italy’s Textile Know-How

From archives to workshops, many Italian textile traditions continue to offer tangible inspiration for the present. They preserve rare techniques, but also a distinctive way of conceiving surfaces, details and quality. Following the first chapter, this journey continues with five regional traditions worth exploring up close, starting from their essential elements: fabric, gesture and the time required to create them.

Perugian tablecloths are among the most recognizable textile languages of central Italy. Linen, light-colored backgrounds, blue decorative bands, animal figures, heraldic motifs, inscriptions and vegetal elements create surfaces that seem to lie somewhere between liturgical textiles, illuminated manuscripts and ornamental design. Their use spans centuries, churches, convents, inventories and family dowries. The history of Tela Umbra also belongs to this tradition. Founded in Città di Castello in 1908 by Alice Hallgarten and Leopoldo Franchetti, the workshop was established to provide employment for women and preserve the craft of hand weaving.

In San Leucio, Campania, silk tells a story in which manufacturing, architecture and community coexist. The complex built around the Belvedere was dedicated to silk production and organized as a complete industrial system, with looms, housing, schools, workshops and social regulations. Damasks, lampas fabrics and brocades are not merely luxurious textiles; they are the outcome of a broader project in which technical expertise was intertwined with an idea of collective life. Today, the museum route still preserves hand looms, twisting machines and tools that convey the complexity of that production chain.

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The bobbin lace of Isernia is more delicate in scale, yet equally significant. It is created by intertwining fine threads, often ivory cotton, moved by bobbins over a pillow and guided by a preparatory design. The tradition is believed to date back to the fourteenth century and to have spread through women’s monasteries before becoming a skill passed down from generation to generation. Its beauty lies in its precision: solids, voids, transitions and knots form a light yet highly technical design.

Longobucco, in Calabria, carries a weaving tradition deeply connected to the Sila region. The town is known for rugs, blankets and textile products made from wool, cotton and silk, featuring both ancient and contemporary motifs, while local tradition also includes the processing of broom plant fibers, from plant to thread. In the Longobucco blanket, the pattern emerges from within the fabric structure itself, through techniques that can be raised, flat or developed according to local methods handed down by generations of weavers. Whether at the center, in the borders or in the decorative bands, every element follows a precise construction.

Sicilian drawn-thread work, by contrast, is based on subtraction. Starting from a woven fabric, selected threads are removed to create an open grid, which is then reconstructed through embroidery, knots, solid motifs and net-like patterns. The Museum of Sicilian Embroidery and Drawn-Thread Work in Chiaramonte Gulfi preserves more than two hundred pieces, including curtains, tablecloths, towels, lampshades, sacred vestments, looms and historical tools. This technique explores the relationship between presence and absence, light and shadow, material and emptiness. It is a form of embroidery that lightens the fabric without stripping it of meaning.