A new chapter for the velvet makers of Venice

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Down a tiny Venetian side street near Palazzo Labia, abutting the Grand Canal, a small door leads to a dimly lit entrance where the silence is broken by the occasional echo of clacketing. Inside, huge wooden looms with regimented rows of silk threads fill a cavernous workshop, operated by women bent over in hushed concentration. This is Tessitura Luigi Bevilacqua — the last velvet maker of Venice.

The handmade velvet produced here — painstakingly, 30cm-40cm a day per weaver, per loom — decorates some of the world’s most prestigious addresses: Pope Benedict XVI had the “Giardino” craquelé damask in his library; in the White House’s Yellow Oval Room, a chair and sofa were covered in “Casa Bianca”; the Art Deco bar of Gothenburg City Theatre is lined with soprarizzo; Mariah Carey has a tiger-print chair (the pattern is a bestseller). And when the restoration of Dresden palace called for the walls of the audience chamber to be covered in crimson silk velvet, it took nearly three years to produce the 740 metres needed.

Tessitura Luigi Bevilacqua dates back to 1875 but Venice has a longer-standing velvet saga. In the 16th century, the city was home to more than 6,000 looms in workshops dotted all over its islands, with 1,200 weavers producing velvet that was exported around the world. Then, in the late 18th and early 19th century, Napoleonic decrees effectively shut down the craft guilds, leaving many to almost die out. One of the guild headquarters left abandoned was the Silk Weaving School of the Republic of Venice, which Luigi Bevilacqua — the current chief executive’s great-grandfather — along with his associate Giovanni Battista Gianoglio, went on to buy.

The 18 looms in the Bevilacqua workshop are the originals that came with the building. A series of cogs and shuttles stretches up to the ceiling, operated by weavers (some of whom have decorated their looms: one with pictures of the Pope, another with Tinkerbell). They follow a pattern punched out on graph paper, checking their progress in a mirror underneath the loom (it is woven topside down). “It’s a little bit like magic,” Alberto Bevilacqua, Tessitura Bevilacqua’s chief executive, says. “Sometimes you can’t see what is being created until it finally appears.”

Not all of the company’s velvet is made this way; it has another workshop outside the city with mechanical looms that have a higher rate of production: about 5 metres per day. But the handmade velvet is the jewel in its crown; the one Alberto Bevilacqua feels duty-bound to preserve.

While velvet has rarely gone out of fashion, 20 years ago the appetite for handmade Venetian velvet was low, Bevilacqua says. Now, aided in part by interest from fashion brands — Fendi, Dolce & Gabbana and the shoemaker Le Monde Beryl use Tessitura Bevilacqua velvet — that has changed. Interiors make up 80 per cent of its business — apart from two stores in Venice, its main outlet for small products is the Italian homeware platform Artemest, which reports a 40 per cent increase in velvet sales from September to December.

Artemest also sells the tapestries of the Venetian artist Anna Paola Cibin, who shares Alberto Bevilacqua’s sense of responsibility to her city’s velvet heritage. After studying in Venice and London, and training with master glassblowers in Murano, she was drawn back to velvet. She paints directly on to hand-dyed Italian silk velvet. “I make new versions of old [Venetian] tapestries,” she says, surrounded by bags of scraps of velvet in her studio, just outside Venice. “I am taking that tradition on and translating it for a modern audience.”

She begins by hand dying metres of silk velvet with pigments she keeps in jars, before stretching out the fabric on her studio table, and painting using a variety of tools: it might be a spatula, block of wood or “even a tree branch if it feels right”. She often then layers gold or silver leaf, or elements of Murano glass. The resulting tapestry is, she says, a collaboration: “The velvet makes its part, I make my part and the light makes its part.”

Like Alberto Bevilacqua, Cibin says that two decades ago she struggled to find an audience. But now she sells to collectors from Paris to Palm Beach to Taipei. She has produced work for shoe designer Christian Louboutin, and her work is displayed in Palazzo Mocenigo’s textile museum in Venice.

Ippolita Rostagno, co-founder and creative director of Artemest, says customers are showing “a resurgence of interest in craftsmanship”, with people increasingly fascinated by “high-quality products with rich heritage”.

She set up the platform nearly a decade ago, with “a mission to support artisans who preserve Italy’s cultural traditions”. Venetian velvet is a case in point. “The history of velvet and its deep connection to Venice is not widely known,” she says.

Joining the effort to introduce Venetian velvet to a modern audience is Allegra Marchiorello, co-founder and creative director of homewares brand Once Milano, who was raised near Venice and based her company’s headquarters just an hour away. She says the brand’s new velvet line “took inspiration from the rich history of velvet in Venice”. She’s keen to present it for a modern audience, for instance lining a velvet blanket with linen.

For Alberto Bevilacqua, while this renewal of interest in Venice’s velvet is encouraging, so is the appreciation of its history and craft. He and his brother are the fourth-generation workshop owners, and have established a new apprentice scheme to keep the looms clacking. “It’s important for us to keep our ancestors’ tradition alive.”

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