The Silk Queen of Naples

Rome–Naples, an October afternoon. Behind the thick, fortress-like walls of a house in the capital, Teams is working intermittently as usual, and eventually we have to switch off the video. Giuseppe Menniti, an entrepreneur from Campania and managing director of Barbuti, a premium menswear brand, appears crystal clear on screen and is in excellent spirits. In a few days’ time, he will be hosting a thousand people in San Leucio to show them the Antico Opificio Serico De Negri – a building steeped in three centuries of history – which he purchased about a year ago and has thoroughly restored, renaming it Opificio Menniti. He has brought back its original artisans and tailors and taken on new ones – around thirty in total – which, given the nature of the project he is working on, is actually quite a large number. His idea has a name, HERitage, with the prefix written in capital letters – like the feminine pronoun, and for reasons that will become clear – but above all, it is a structure serving as a platform for the revival and revitalisation of the art of silk-making. The idea stems from the first product to be brought to market there in the final years of the eighteenth century: the fichu, a small or large scarf worn folded into a triangle with the tip resting on the shoulder blades, which was one of the symbols of the fashion of the period, tucked into the corset or worn as a shawl and fastened beneath the waistband.

Menniti’s choice is decidedly unexpected, given that for two centuries the silks of San Leucio – or at least those bearing the designation of origin, which is strongly supported by local politicians but is, in truth, rather vague and unknown to anyone unfamiliar with the history of Italy and the textile industry, which is to say almost everyone – have appeared in the halls of power across Europe as decorative elements. “I am well aware that when one thinks of San Leucio silks, one conjures up tapestries in royal palaces and chancelleries,” he says. “However, the first items that Maria Carolina of Habsburg-Lorraine wished to bring to market were precisely those scarves – some as small as today’s carrés, others as large as the fashion of the time dictated for the wealthiest ladies. Let’s start again from there, with a small workshop and made-to-order commissions – or rather, by invitation and upon presentation, as in a club. I’m not interested in drawing in the crowds, partly because we wouldn’t be able to meet their demands: this will be production for connoisseurs.”

This isn’t the first time someone has attempted to revive the Real Sito; to be honest, even back in the founders’ day, things didn’t go well despite the genius behind the venture, so we wish them the very best of luck. After all, it is easy to see why the site exerts such fascination: visitors arriving at the Belvedere, touring the palace with its colossally heavy grey marble swimming pool on the first floor—the work of Vanvitelli and Collecini, two design geniuses—and walking through the factory from the silkworm nursery with its large stove, and from there observing the workers’ cottages, neat and elegant, with a garden on the slope from which, to the left, one can see the Royal Park of Caserta and, opposite, in the distance, the sea. The San Leucio colony was the first – indeed, the only – socialist utopia put into practice in Europe seventy years before the publication of Das Kapital; in short, rather than socialism, it was the Enlightenment in its purest form. It was, moreover, designed and partially implemented by a king, Ferdinand IV of Bourbon, who – despite the nickname ‘lazzarone’ (idler) bestowed upon him for his fondness for mingling with the people, and despite having quashed the Revolution of 1799 in a bloodbath – possessed a refined education and a wealth of innovative ideas; as evidenced by the decree which, in 1817, granted the French entrepreneur Pietro Andriel the exclusive right to hydrogen gas lighting in Naples: the idea remained on paper and it was to fall to his grandson to put it into practice, twenty years later, but the reality was that Naples became the first Italian city to be lit by gas after London and Paris – not Milan, let alone Rome – and that someone had thought of it before the others. Undoubtedly spurred on by his wife, the irrepressible Maria Carolina, who did not disdain female company (Lady Hamilton) and whom we imagine to have been the principal, if not the sole, inspiration behind the Statute of San Leucio of 1789 – for no other European state, certainly not the French revolutionaries who, two years later, would imprison and then behead her younger sister Marie Antoinette, would have done the same for women for another two and a half centuries; King Ferdinand approved and implemented a text which, apart from a few details such as working hours, remains to this day a model of fairness, gender equality and meritocracy. The statute provided for compulsory education for both boys and girls, and included vocational subjects in the curriculum. It provided the inhabitants of the settlement—which the king planned to shape into an ideal city, Ferdinandopolis—with a free house complete with a garden, running water and sanitary facilities, an absolute luxury for the time and not just amongst the working classes; it also provided a dowry and maternity leave for young women, a communal ‘charity’ fund, and guaranteed care for the elderly and the infirm. Inspired by the theories of Gaetano Filangieri, the charter also abolished private property. Enthusiastic workers flocked from silk-producing centres throughout Italy, France and Turkey (which explains why a certain Francesco De Negri, with a Ligurian surname, arrived in San Leucio around 1780, and why the family remained there for over two hundred and fifty years. As Menniti recounts, ‘they were the last to maintain the factory within the Belvedere’). The project was in fact interrupted for the first time ten years later by the outbreak of the Neapolitan Revolution, about which Alexandre Dumas would write so much in subsequent years, then by the birth of the Parthenopean Republic following Napoleon’s invasion and the establishment of Joachim Murat’s kingdom—he too attempted to revive and expand it—and finally abandoned for good with the unification of Italy, when it also lost its special status. From artisans holding a royal licence, upon landing in Milazzo the De Negris had in fact become entrepreneurs: they remained so until about ten years ago, weathering all manner of political and economic upheaval, until Chinese competition and the increased use of [a certain material] over two and a half centuries led, a decade ago, to the need for state intervention; through Gepi, the company had found a new shareholder in the Sabelli family of Rome. Shortly before that, the ‘protection mark’ promoted by the Caserta Chamber of Commerce had been introduced – full of fine words and pledges to ‘counter Chinese production’ – but in reality unenforceable and, indeed, never enforced. Menniti, who is also president of the local Fondazione Orizzonti and who, as his name suggests, set out to give the area a new future, with particular regard to female employment, arrived when all seemed truly lost, bringing with him decades of experience at the helm of Harmont&Blaine’s global commercial strategies: He does not belong to the ranks of those somewhat pathetic politicians for whom ‘the world always envies us’ something it generally doesn’t even know about, nor is he obsessed with fashion.

He has reached a point in his career where he can afford to invest time and money in a venture of social, political and cultural significance. The result is the restored and revitalised Opificio in Piazza della Seta, alongside the ‘HERitage San Leucio’ project under the creative direction of Stefano Chiassai, and a series of visual codes and artefacts – from fichus to tapestries – which are intended to cement this journey of rebirth by becoming part of the