They eat. Around the clock. Domenico Vivino goes to you three times a day, with a car, full of long, tightly overgrown branches. The smaller ones only receive leaves, chopped to cut. With large, Vivino simply puts the whole branch in it. The 37-year-old football player goes to the loudspeaker in the corner of Dim Room. Loud Italian music.
“Do you hear them?” Domenico Vivino leans over a wooden plate. It sounds like a quiet rain. The line in line, caterpillars feed through the leaves. A few hours later, nothing was left of green. Replenishment for hungry animals grows below the house, in a valley with soft inclined slopes: several thousand mulberry trees. Previously, they were located throughout Calabria, because the region was once known for its silk. This easily forgets in our highly industrial period – a natural product based on the work of small animals: the larvae of a silk spinning holder, better known as silk raw. And they eat exclusively on the leaves of the mulberry.
Knowledge of the production of silk in the 9th century, in the visible one, was for Calabria, when the Italian tip of the boot belonged to the Byzantine Empire. The craft developed especially around the Katanzaro capital. La Città Della Seta was caused. The city of silk.
The mountain village of San Floro, the house of Domenico Vivino and his childhood friend Giovanna Bagnato and Miriam Puglis are located 20 kilometers south of Katanzaro. Unlike many of their peers, these three did not leave their homes or returned here. In the Kalabrian internal area, where places hang like the remains of an eagle on mountain ranges, where the streets are so steep and seductive that even Italians adhere to 30 km/h data, and the population is so low that the villages are “like large families”.
Miriam Puglis stands on San Floro Square and jokes with a salvator, one of the few hundred inhabitants in this place. Before she tells her story, there is one cafe In a small bar, where half of the village gathered on Sunday. According to Pugliz, she only recognized the value of a close community at a distance. She went to Berlin at the beginning of 20. It was a time when partisan gardening became a big thing, and many city residents found their interest in nature, growing their own food or producing their own honey. Puglizi also liked this, and soon this longing appeared for her native village, in which she spent the most beautiful summer – moving to Milan in childhood.
“There is nothing!” Her parents said. Miriam Puglies and her colleagues could not be discouraged. They discovered a project that regional politicians initiated in the 1990s: at that time, 3,500 mulberry trees were planted, where a small museum was created on Piazza. They wanted to rely on the old tradition, which was forgotten with industrialization, political shocks and rural outcome. However, when the regional government changed, the project was dropped a few years later. Trees overgrown.
An old weaving machine that it existed in every house in Calabria fifty years ago
Photo:
Verena S. Mayer
Puglis fixes the creaky door of the museum. In 2014, the trio received permission to capture the building and five hectares of cultivation. Nido Di Seta called your company, a silk nest. “When we started here, the house, the old castle, was in a deserted state.” Today, dull rooms are equipped with windows and boards. Decorative silk threads hang from the ceiling in different colors and strengths, in the corner there is an old weaving machine. “There was one in every house fifty years ago.”
Women prepared bedding and clothes of fabrics with themselves. Miriam Puglis indicates a dark dress. “This is a wedding dress. They often consisted of two parts, ”she explains. From a simple skirt and a thoroughly decorated top that shared several families. Although silk was widespread at that time, it was precious.
This is a long way, until gray silk rush eggs the size of poppy grain at first will not become larvae, then cocoons, then yarn and, finally, fluid fabrics. “As soon as they hatch, the larvae begin to eat immediately. In just 28 days they add 50,000 times more weight and size! ” Says Miriam Puglis. She laughs. “I still know how I first saw here, in a dignity -flororo, and they appeared on me for the first time here.” She dreamed of giant worms for several weeks.
The young team began without previous knowledge, but they quickly learned. Several old residents of San Floor presented them in the craft. Later, Vivino, Bagnato and Puglis went to India, Thailand and Mexico, to the centers of traditional and modern silk production. They helped and collected a lot of knowledge. Also about how you do not want to do this. For example, color with chemical agents. “It is terrible,” says Puggogies, “for workers who are in the broth, and the nature in which wastewater is disposed of non -den. With Nido Di Seta you use only natural colors, that is, shells, leaves or roots.
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Silk is carried out directly next to the plantations that you can reach through a soil forest path. Buzina, oranges and figs grow between mulberry trees. What is presented today as a book with pictures was overgrown and littered with garbage. A small store and production enterprise are located in once dilapidated houses. And, of course, the reproduction station, the “children’s room”, as Miriam Pugliz calls.
She goes to a warm room where her colleague Domenico Vivino is currently spreading dinner. “Feel,” she says, raising one of the white worms. They, yes, are silky soft and small, like nails. If you grow completely in a month, measure up to five centimeters. Then begin to rotate yourself. “They have two containers under their mouths. One of them comes from one of the threads, a kind of glue from the other. ”
Three days later, ready -made cocoons resembling white peanuts gather, gather and dry in special furnaces. Silk caterpillar dies. “Otherwise, she would have broken up and destroy the cocoon.” And to do this unsuitable for the production of high -quality silk, because the special thing is that the cocoon consists of one thread, which, hardly possible in size, is from 1000 to 1500 meters.
Miriam Puglis in the “children’s room”, reproduction station
Photo:
Verena S. Mayer
Since caterpillars must die, they criticize the silk production of activists to protect animal rights. Puglis knows the accusation. She answers before the question comes. Her life will also be short in the wild, she explains. “As soon as you are in pairs, you will die.”
To solve glue, sericin, dried cocoons are impregnated in hot water. Then the stream curls up, which can take up to 45 minutes. If these are fabrics, you have raw silk. This is tougher than known from noble boutiques. For such small fabrics, the fabric should first be washed to weaken all glue. This is followed by twisting of thin threads, coloring, weaving, and finally adaptation. About 60 kilograms of silk yarn, ready Nido di Seta per year. “We are the largest manufacturer in Europe,” says Pugliz.
At the same time, the fashion world also found out about it. With the support of the Italian brand of luxury, you purchased a special machine on which you make breathtaking silk threads for skin tissues. But her heart beats for traditional handmade. “A tree is not worth it without roots,” says Pugliz. Nido Di Seta is now working with eight local craftsmen. “We not only want to get old knowledge, we also want to create work.” Especially for women who were financially dependent in Calabria.
On the other side of the valley, you opened a small restaurant in which you offer dishes enriched with mulberry aromas: this is above all the berries of the tree that are processed in syrup (in aerosol) or jams (to cheese). There are also several leaves, but only as an aromatic side dish for stewed pig. As the main dish, they serve only insatiable caterpillars.
