Textile Machinery Museum | Valdagno "Social City"

Valdagno is a town with a long history of wool spinning and weaving. In 1836 Luigi Marzotto established a large new woollen mill. His son and his grandson Vittorio Emanuele Marzotto continued to expand the business. The company’s headquarters is still in Valdagno.  It is part of the "social city" built between 1927 and 1937, an extensive company site with production buildings in architectural unity and about a thousand typologically different accommodations for workers and employees as well as leisure and social facilities such as a hospital, kindergarten, stadium and theatre.

The Museum of Textile Machinery is in part of the laboratories of the V. E. Marzotto Industrial Technical Institute, a training college for the textile industries that was started in 1936 and is still educating young people today. It is a modernist building of reinforced concrete with large top-lit spaces. The museum opened in 2000. It displays spinning and weaving machines of different eras that were installed for training and research purposes. The textile industries represented are not just wool but also cotton, silk and synthetic fibres. The museum also tells the story of the textile industries in Valdagno and their development.