Our first stop on the tour was the Antica Fabrica Passementerie Massia Vittorio https://www.massiavittorio1843.it/we-make-passementerie/. This is a company that makes trim, silk tassels, and all sorts of similar things basically using tech from the 1800s.
Max (short for Massimilian, I think) himself led our tour. He’s the younger guy on the website. More importantly, he’s the current member of the family to run this shop, which has been around in one form or another since 1685.
This company has a really interesting list of customers. They made braiding for uniforms going back to Napoleonic-era armies and navies, and still makes stuff for the Italian Navy dress uniforms. They made stuff for Michael Jackson, too, though he died before he could take possession so we saw examples of what he was going to get. They redid a bunch of tassels for the Bolshoi, too. There’s other notable stuff on the timeline, which you can see below.
They were in the midst of making expensive stuff for the Moroccan Royal family, so whatever pics of people doing stuff will be for them.
By the way, Substack lets me put up galleries of 9 pics, so my plan for these is to just put up a gallery. Make a few comments on those, and then move on. I took over 3000 pics and I don’t have time to comment on all of them.
The two things to note here is the timeline, which I thought was pretty impressive, and the books. They have a library of trim, tassels, weaving, and that sort of thing good enough to make SCA folk start making plans for a heist.
More from the timeline, and also some of the many interesting machines they had. You’ll see lots of those. Also, there’s a scrap bucket there which I suspect SCA folks wouldn’t mind taking as well.
Pictures here have some examples of what they can do. Also, you can see a big Jacquard loom, which I think are the first punch card computers. I’m not positive, but they do use punch cards and Jacquard invented them in 1725 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine.
More machines!
Really cool stuff here, including trim in progress and some close ups of the Jacquard cards.
More machines and tools. I found the old tools really cool, but then I’m a geek that way.
The first few pictures in this set are of the setup where they create tassels, which you can see Max doing in the one picture of his feet. It’s not really of his feet, but the spool holder they use to mesh with the cables stretched and twisted by the wheels. Really neat. Then we start getting into some of their prize examples.
More examples of cool stuff, plus one of their charters.
These were the last pics taken at the factory. The iron thing is the cool scale they have with the curlicued ironwork I thought was lovely.
These last pictures are things from the store, which is in one of the many alleyways of Turin, which I’ll show off soon enough.
Since Drix is getting out of the trim business, may I suggest a new trim pusher? They’ll be significantly more expensive, but some of their processes go back almost to period.
This sure got the tour started with a bang, though it also involved a bunch of steps up and down a hill to get to the factory here on Google Maps. Also, here’s the store on Google Maps, with more pics from other folks.
Okay! That’s the first picture drop. Let me know if you think this format needs to be tweaked.
After all, there’s more to come from Turin, including pictures of the city, the Egyptian Museum, and tastiest of all, the chocolate factory!