HISTORY

The historical textile tradition of Biella owes its development to the characteristics of the territory: its position at the foot of the Alps favored farming rather than extensive agricultural crops, so that the use of sheep fur to obtain yarns and fabrics was imposed on the area. 

The presence of many waterways and the resourcefulness of the inhabitants have allowed the development over time of the quality textile business, which from a craftsman has gradually evolved and specialized up to complete industrialization. The first traces of textile production found date back to pre-Roman times, while the first statutes to regulate textile activity date back to the Middle Ages. 
In fact, thanks to the favorable conditions of the territory, the production of yarns and textile products soon extended from the family circle to the exchange with other local realities, making it necessary to stipulate commercial agreements. Between 1275 and 1419 the individual "arts" adopted their own definitive statutes. At that time, textile activities were divided into three branches: tailoring (artisanal or industrial production of clothes), weaving [series of operations (artisanal or industrial) related to the manufacture of fabrics; essentially they have the purpose of producing the formation of the weave of a series of parallel threads (warp) with a continuous thread (weft) according to a predetermined type of weave and are performed by means of looms (hand or mechanical), and drapery (assortment of drapes and fabrics or even warehouse for their sale ; fabrics intended for making men's clothing, jackets and overcoats)]

The Biella wool production is already known from the fourteenth-century statutes, while its organization is known as, between the '500 and' 700, articles are widespread in the territory: the employees of the wool mill work at home raw materials or semi-finished products that the entrepreneur has delivered and will return to collect for finishing and sale. Some factories organize themselves to wash, card and spin the wool in order to supply the household looms, or dedicate themselves to dyeing the final product. Towards the end of the eighteenth century there are already 253 companies that work wool in the Biella area, but from the second decade of the nineteenth century the introduction of the mechanical loom triggers a slow process of production innovation, destined to deeply mark the territory with the creation of architectures industrial specially designed and built. In the large multi-storey factories of the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century, either specific processes or long sections of the production chain or, in some cases, the complete cycle are carried out. The development of wool production is accompanied, significant in the Biellese economy, by that of the related industries, first of all mechanical workshops for the repair and production of textile machines, then factories of accessories or tanneries, for the production of belts for looms or sleeves for cards. . The picture of the Biella economy of the nineteenth century is not, however, monoproductive: knitting and hat factories play an important role. The latter mainly produce felt hats and, located in Biella and in the Andorno area, met with some success in the second half of the century.
The production of knitwear traditionally represents a specialization of the area of ​​Pettinengo, Camandona and Callabiana, linked to the processing of wool, but also of vegetable fibers. In the nineteenth century, thanks also to orders from the army, the production of knitwear spreads. With the introduction of rectilinear and circular mechanical looms for knitwear, a real leap in quality is achieved in the sector, evident above all in the centers of Camandona and Pettinengo (with the Bellia Bernardo and Figli knitwear factory) and then in Biella (with the Boglietti knitwear factory ). In 1887 the Biella knitwear industry had 18 factories, with 126 mechanical looms, 714 hand looms and a total of 1,683 workers.

The Biella area, as happened elsewhere, becomes a land of industry with the advent of machines.

The ability and courage of the textile entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century are manifested also and above all, especially in the era of the pioneers, with investments in the mechanical-textile sector. New mentalities and (new) machines have changed the world: it is the industrial revolution. The change has also revolutionized the Biellese area: the introduction of machines and the concentration of the workers involved are the cause and effect of the birth of factories and the factory system.
The industrial evolution of Biella is, more than anything else, a "mechanical-textile revolution". The delay compared to other mechanized continental realities for half a century was bridged, not without resistance from fellow Biella wool makers who saw themselves threatened by unfair competition, by the personal and solitary initiative of Pietro Sella.                                   

The great epoch of textile industrialization in Biella is inextricably linked to the figure of Pietro Sella and his battle for the introduction of machines, carried out in a social and economic context still strongly conditioned by corporative constraints and governmental preclusions. A student at the "royal schools" of Biella until 1797, then a very young apprentice in the family wool business, Pietro Sella "wanted to travel and see with his own eyes at what point was the industry of pannilani abroad". In 1817, Pietro Sella, manager together with his brothers of the Sella company in Valle Superiore Mosso and an enterprising connoisseur of the national and European textile market, purchased in Seraing near Liège (Belgium) some machinery manufactured by the British Cockerill brothers. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
 The "mechanics", imported into the Biella area, were installed in 1817 in the old "Bator" of Valle Mosso, a paper mill converted to its new use and equipped with large hydraulic wheels: thus was founded the "Gian Giacomo e Fratelli Sella", the first Italian wool mill with mechanical processing. It was an epoch-making event, and - once the hostility of workers and manufacturers had been overcome - the first step towards the industrial revolution in Valle Strona and in the Biella area. A "revolution" to which Sella himself also contributed in other ways, with the creation in the Biella area of the first workshop for the manufacture of textile machines and, again, with the search for new markets for the supply of fine wool to be used for the manufacture of fine cloth.  

 Textiles have always been mechano-textile. The mechanization of textile processing is ancient. If the manual looms used in the homes of the medieval Biellese are more correctly understood as tools than as machines, the batanderii or gualchiere, or fulling mills, active along the streams (sometimes located in the buildings used as mills, but often operating in independent buildings), were real machines.
Moved by the force of the water derived from the Cervo, Elvo, Strona, Ponzone, Sessera and almost every stream in the area, these wooden mechanisms, undoubtedly built on site, are the most long-lived trace of the Biella textile-mechanism.

The beginnings of Biella's textile machinery involved preparation, spinning and a part of finishing. The "wet finishing" remained for a long time the old method, that of fulling mills, while warping and weaving maintained the dimension of domestic processing for several decades. There were eight machines that Pietro Sella obtained and they were used specifically to beat, peel, roughen and card the wool, then to spin it in coarse and fine and then to weave and sheave the cloth.
The industrialization of the wool sector, after the initial contrasts, developed rapidly, but textiles and textile machinery had different development times in the Biella area. The local production of machinery was not immediately established and, except in isolated cases, Biella's factories depended for a long time on the importation of mechanisms and technical skills from abroad. In 1825, the Delorme and Maurin workshop was active in Biella. It could be considered the first documented company in the area, but it was evidently a foreign initiative.
Finding, maintaining and repairing the foreign-made machines that were being concentrated in the wool mills of the Biella area involved logistical difficulties and heavy expenses. And, often, orders for new machinery were delayed to the detriment of entrepreneurs. This situation, however, instead of immediately stimulating the birth of specialized workshops in Biella or in the valleys, pushed the industrialists to face their needs alone. On the occasion of the 1838 Turin Exhibition, some wool workers from Biella exhibited machines built in their own mills.
This trend continued in the following decades. In 1850 the Galoppo brothers of Valle Mosso improvised themselves as builders in order to enlarge their own wool mill and, even before, Giovanni Cartotto had built wooden "mule jenny" (mechanical spinning machines) for his factory in the Mosso valley. The same Cartotto in 1855 started a repair shop, expanded in 1870 under the management of Felice Cartotto.
While the Biella textile-mechanical industry was struggling to get off the ground, foreign manufacturers began to establish a network of representatives in the city and in the territory, which was maintained and strengthened throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond. Some examples are unusual: Graziano Cappellaro, known as a photographer with his partner Giuseppe Masserano, in the 1840s was the local agent for the company Antonio Fetu & De Liege of Liège, a manufacturer of carding machines, while a few decades later Carlo Trossi, later founder of Pettinatura Italiana of Vigliano, sold machinery on behalf of J. Longtain Verviers. Longtain of Verviers.
The mechano-textile that developed spontaneously in factories originated not only from the need to repair or modify the machines in use, but also from a principle that characterized the first experiences of industrial wool processing: those who used certain machines had to know how they work and know them adjust. It is very likely that some of the pioneers of Biella textile mechanics were first or at the same time textile technicians.

The lack of carbon coke, the fossil fuel used in England since the end of the 18th century to drive steam engines, forced Biella's entrepreneurs to build factories along the streams, in places often inaccessible and far from population centers. So it was possible to exploit the water jumps - the natural ones, or the artificial ones realized with ditches and derivations - to set in motion, by means of big hydraulic wheels, vertical motor shafts that, thanks to special transmissions, transferred the movement to horizontal shafts placed at every floor, and from here, finally, with the help of pulleys and belts, to the different operating machines. The factory, built around the paths of movement, was also commensurate in its size to the amount of energy that could be produced and transferred, without excessive losses due to friction, up to the "mechanics". In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the face of an increasingly massive mechanization of the various stages of processing, the industrialists of Biella began to resort, in times of low flows, to the motive power generated by the steam engine. However, this form of energy was used as an auxiliary function: although the cost of coke had decreased with the improvement of transport, it was still quite significant.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the introduction of electricity allowed to free factories from the proximity of waterways. If some industrialists chose to remain in their original locations and to convert their existing plants to the use of electricity (water was still a precious resource for the development of some phases of the production cycle), others decided to move to areas better served by roads and railways, building large horizontal complexes more suitable to ensure stability to machinery and to limit damages in case of fire.

Following the beginning of the industrialization process (1816), large and severe multi-storey factories of the "Manchesterian" type began to rise often on the site of older mills, paper mills or silk factories, adapted and expanded in their structures. The adoption of the "Manchesterian" model, used in the Biella area with a delay of several decades with respect to what had occurred in England, was however dictated by the same technical and productive needs, which can be summarized in the vertical distribution of the hydraulic energy transmission systems and in the necessity of large undivided internal spaces in which to install the different phases of production: preparation and combing of the wool on the lower floors, spinning and weaving on the upper floors. In the factory of Upper Biella recurrent typological features were accompanied by the almost total absence of any figurative refinement and the use of typical materials of the local rural building: stone, wood, brick, only later integrated by the use of metal components and reinforced concrete. Starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, the high building began to be flanked by one-storey sheds, sometimes with two or more floors towards the stream, to house the warehouses and the rooms for boilers and coal storage, flanked by chimneys. Later, with the introduction of electricity, many industries relocated to areas of the valley floor or the plain better served by roads, building new shed plants, able to ensure a uniform illumination of the large processing rooms and often characterized by greater attention to the treatment of external facades and their decorative features.  

Until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the valleys of Biella, wool processing played a fundamental role for peasant families in integrating the meager earnings from agriculture. The passage of the wool craftsmen from this hard but substantially autonomous condition to a situation of dependence on the rhythms and logic of industrial work was a long and far from linear process, which involved a far-reaching social and cultural change. The first to be centralized in the factory and mechanized, following the introduction of "mechanics" in the Biella area (1817), was spinning: even though it expropriated the peasant family of an important phase of wool processing, traditionally the prerogative of women (the spinning machines), this innovation was accepted and "absorbed" without causing strong protests. When around the middle of the century, in order to improve the quality of the fabrics produced, the industrialists of Biella aimed at centralizing in the factory also the weaving operations, many artisans agreed to move to the factories - where their work continued in those years, for the most part, to be carried out with the traditional hand looms - but they refused to comply with the requests for work stability advanced by the industrialists and formalized in the so-called "factory regulations". Those demands, in fact, could not be reconciled with the need to devote part of their time to cultivating the land, an important source of subsistence for the weaver's family. It was just in defense of their autonomy from the factory system that the workers, organized in mutual aid societies, gave life in the '60s and '70s to a long series of strikes. The answer of the industrialists was, in the following years, the introduction on a large scale of the mechanical loom: even if it implied big investments, this choice allowed them to abolish the hand-weaving departments, forcing the workers to accept rhythms and working methods of the factory "regime". One long cycle had ended, another was opening. When the social conflict flared up again in 1889, the workers' demands aimed instead at obtaining wage increases, a reduction in working hours and an overall improvement in working conditions. This was, among other things, the way to reaffirm the dignity of a "profession" that, although profoundly changed, had strong roots in the history and identity of the people of Biella. 
In the valleys of Biella, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the figure of the merchant-entrepreneur flanked the figure of the artisan dedicated to wool processing, who spun and wove for his own consumption and a limited local trade. Strengthened by a patrimony of land and livestock that guaranteed him a certain amount of additional wealth, the "merchant-entrepreneur" bought raw wool on the marketplaces of Borgosesia or of the more distant Bergamasco and entrusted it to the transformation of artisans, then took over the worked pieces, had them finished by fulling and finally sold them on the rich urban markets. Sometimes, taking on the role of "manufacturer", the merchant-entrepreneurs centralized some phases of the wool production cycle - sorting and washing the wool, warping, dyeing and finishing - in workshops set up inside their own homes, thus transforming them into real home-mills. The turnaround from the manufacturing system to the industrial system began in 1817 on the initiative of Pietro Sella. After overcoming rivalry and mistrust, other Biella manufacturers - for example, the Piacenza, Ambrosetti and Vercellone families, who had been involved in the production and trade of fabrics for generations - soon took the same path, accepting the challenge of technological innovation and productive reorganization. An open mentality, an interest not only in the wool business but also in other forms of investment, made some members of these families, as well as established industrialists, the backbone of Biella's ruling class, with leading figures in national politics, science and the arts. Alongside the "wool aristocracy" of manufacturing origin, in the second half of the nineteenth century, entrepreneurs such as Rivetti, Botto, Bertotto and many others emerged who, as true pioneers, started out as simple workers in the first factories of the time, and thanks to a constant dedication to work and continuous savings, built, in the space of a few decades, real industrial empires.  

Today, Biella is the only district in Europe to have maintained intact the entire textile production chain. The main productions are related to men's and women's clothing, as well as yarns for weaving and knitting and everything related to the wool textile industry.
Currently the production is totally carried out through highly automated mechanical-textile machinery. The specialized workforce, the know-how developed by Biella workers in the sector, however, is a fundamental component in obtaining the final quality of the products.  
It is a matter of knowledge stratified over time that is not easy to "transplant" to other places; it is no coincidence that the Biella textile district was studied at length in the 80s and 90s to try to understand its recipe for success, but no one has ever been able to recreate elsewhere the excellence achieved in this area.