The Textile Museum of Prato - springing from a town set that from the Middle Ages keeps alive and continues its vocation for the textile industry - is up to now the first museum entirely dedicated to the textile art and technology. It preserves a textile patrimony of great interest both for the quality and genre of the collections.

Opened in 1975 following a great bequest of the collector Loriano Bertini (more than 600 pieces), its collections have expanded thanks to public and private contributions, gathering altogether a set of more than six thousand samples of fabric from all over the world and datable from the Fifth century DC up to now.

The Management is entrusted - through a proper convention - to a no profit association called Association of the Textile Museum that gathers economic and social representatives of the town. The founders of the Museum - run by a statute - are the following bodies: the Municipality of Prato, the Association of ex-students of Buzzi Institute, the "Tullio Buzzi" Technical Institute, the Authority of Tourist Promotion, the Co.Ge.Fis. (consisting of the trade-union associations CGIL, CISL and UIL and of the Industrial Union of Prato).

The Museum Path includes the collections of ancient textiles present in their various techniques of execution, in a fragmentary state or manufactured for lay, religious or decoration use. There is also a contemporary textile section, deriving from a constant contact between the Museum and the local companies, in order to preserve and communicate the patrimony of creativity and research applied to the fabrics that involve the textile industry of Prato on a daily basis.

In addition to the textile finds, the Museum preserves machinery and equipment used for the preparation to the weaving referable to Italian manufactures and, in some cases, being the result of the elaboration and contrivances carried out for the local production. Finally, the Museum preserves testimonies concerning the field of chemical dying from the end of the Nineteenth century to the first half of the Twentieth century.

[Text from www.cultara.prato.it]