The casentino cloth

If we were to make a list of the most famous products of Arezzo internationally, the so-called Casentino cloth would certainly be at the top.

The fabric has a very long history, because the tradition of processing sheep’s wool in Casentino has its roots in the Etruscan era. The true story of the unmistakable “coarse cloth” can be traced back to the 14th century, when the inhabitants of Palagio Fiorentino, today’s Stia, paid taxes to the Florentine Republic using their rustic wool fabrics. At that time the fabric was mainly used to make the habit for monks and friars.

In the second half of the 19th century the proverbial resistance of the Casentino cloth was exploited in Florence to market the cloaks for mounts, then intended to cover the towing animals in the cold months. These were the years in which the Stia and Soci Wool Mills transformed the textile tradition of the valley into an industrial one and marked the entire economy of the two countries, employing hundreds of inhabitants in the wool industry.

The main operations to obtain the Casentino cloth were the fulling to make it waterproof, the gauze to have a hairy side and the patch to create curls, which served to make the fabric more resistant to wear but which soon became one of the characteristic elements, together with the colours “goose-beak orange” and “flag green”.

The orange was born by chance because of a mistake of who, to further waterproof the fabric, thought to add to the rock alum of chemical dyes instead of the madder, plant from whose roots dyers have always derived the red colour. An orange-red came out and was put on the market anyway. The green was initially approached to the orange only as lining, because the two colours matched well. Later it also became one of the classic shades of Casentino cloth.

Realising that in winter they were worse than their horses, the Florentine Barocciai and coachmen began to recover the animals’ cloaks to make them sew together and create pastrani and capes. The idea was much appreciated by the ladies of Florence and was also appreciated by illustrious personalities such as the politician Bettino Ricasoli and the musicians Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini. For men, the Casentino cloth dress began to be made of double breasted, with a martingale and fox neck, a symbol of elegance and refinement.

The road to success was clear. The ancient fabric became during the twentieth century an icon of Made in Italy, worn by people from the world of culture, entertainment and politics. Actress Audrey Hepburn, for example, wore it in the movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. Used by great designers such as Roberto Cavalli, Pierre Cardin and Gianfranco Ferré, who exported it to the big fashion squares around the world, today the Casentino cloth looks to the future in the name of research and expansion of the range of colors, without ever forgetting his past. A Tuscan excellence in the world that year after year finds more and more lovers.

The history of the Casentino fabric can be traced back today in the Museo dell’Arte della Lana in Stia, housed in the former wool mill of the nineteenth century, complex of great architectural importance that at its birth exploited the water of the Staggia stream to move machinery. In the previous centuries, always on the Staggia, there were small filling machines that worked wool in an artisanal way. At the end of the 18th century a wool mill was born that in the early 19th century grew but in 1848 closed its doors. From its ashes, in 1852, the Stia Wool Mill Society arose, which after 1870 and the arrival of modern machinery from abroad came to have up to 500 employees. In 1979 it closed permanently, but thanks to the museum wanted by the Foundation “Luigi and Simonetta Lombard”, created by the family that for sixty years led the industry, the heritage that was the Stia Wool Mill can be made known to the new generations.