Museo della Seta di Como

This guide to the Museo della Seta di Como traces how, as the city's silk mills shut down through the 1980s, a group of former students at the Setificio school banded together to save the looms and machines before they were scrapped. It follows the Setificio itself back to 1868, when it opened as a modest craft institute, and to the senator who later had it elevated into a Royal Silk School bearing his name. You'll hear about the three trades the school built its identity on, and how alumni carried salvaged machinery back into its own basement. Walk the floor where those rescued machines still stand beneath working classrooms.