Lanificio del Casentino: the Soci mill and the Casentino cloth

The Casentino is the upper valley of the Arno, in the province of Arezzo. Wool has been worked here for centuries: in the fourteenth century the people of Palagio Fiorentino, today's Stia, paid their taxes to Florence in woollen cloth.

By the late nineteenth century two villages had turned that craft into industry, Stia and Soci. Stia counted around 500 mill workers in 1878; Soci, 309 in 1909. The valley's economy has been bound to wool ever since.

Panno casentino is the valley's famous cloth: wool that is fulled to close it against rain, raised to bring up a nap, and then finished by rattinatura, which rolls that nap into the small curls, the ricciolo, that make it recognisable at a glance.

The curled finish is younger than the cloth. The wool museum at Stia records that it was not yet on the market in 1890, and that a German ratinating machine was already working in the Stia mill by 1916, which places the curl at the turn of the twentieth century. The two classic colours are a vivid orange and a flag green; the orange is traditionally said to have come from a dyeing accident with rock alum.

It was worn by Bettino Ricasoli, Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, cut double-breasted with a half belt and a fox collar, and the museum notes Audrey Hepburn's Casentino coat in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

The name Lanificio del Casentino belongs to the mill at Soci, near Bibbiena, founded by the Bocci family in 1848. Sisto Bocci was sent to Belgium, then the centre of the wool trade, and came home with its machinery; by the end of the century the mill employed around 500 people.

Its twentieth century was a succession of owners and failures: sold after the First World War, bankrupt after 1929, again in 1956 and again in 1970. In 1972 the workers themselves formed the Cooperativa Tessile di Soci and kept the looms running. Under its president Marchesini the cooperative began producing under its own brand, Lanificio del Casentino. It celebrated 150 years in 1998, and was declared bankrupt in 2005.

This is the confusion worth clearing up. A label reading Lanificio del Casentino, often with dal 1848, names the Soci mill's brand. The 1848 is the mill's founding year, not the date of the garment.

That label turns up on tailored coats and jackets in pure cashmere and camel hair: fine, smooth cloths with none of the curled nap. A coat can therefore say Casentino without being panno casentino. The curl, the fulled weight and the orange or green are what identify the traditional cloth; the label alone does not.

The brand also helps with dating. It was the cooperative's own label, and the company behind it failed in 2005, so a Lanificio del Casentino label most likely places a cloth between the 1980s and the early 2000s. We give that as a strong indication, not a certainty.

Panno casentino belongs to the same family as Alpine loden: wool deliberately fulled until it closes against the weather. The cashmere under the Lanificio del Casentino name is best read alongside our cashmere note.

The Soci cooperative's brand ended with the company in 2005. What it wove survives in coats that have already outlasted the mill: cashmere from a valley that has worked wool for centuries, chosen here one piece at a time.