Abegg Silk Museum

Garlate lies 40 km north of Milan and 6 km south of the town of Lecco, just south of the border. The silk museum was established in 1953 in a seventeenth century lakeside reeling mill and has some claim to have been the first museum of industrial archaeology in Italy. It was established by the Swiss silk manufacturers, the Abegg family, and passed into the ownership of the Garlate municipality in 1976. It includes many machines for unwinding cocoons and for doubling and twisting, as well as looms weaving. There is a section on new research that is continually being carried out on silk. The museum is linked with other silk-working sites and museums around Lake Como, where silk has been made since the early fifteenth century, and which remains Europe’s principal centre for the manufacture and design of silk garments. Silk is now silk imported from China and Brazil, but the mulberry groves around the museum at Garlate are a reminder that it was once produced from silk worms raised in the locality.