Know the valley Casentino, Arezzo, Italy
Made in the Casentino: wool, iron and wood
A valley that has always made things, and still does.
Give a valley this much water and this much forest and, sooner or later, it starts to make things. The Casentino has fast mountain streams that once turned hammers and fulling mills, and a fir wood that has been cut and replanted for a thousand years. Out of that came three crafts the valley is still known for: a cloth, an iron, and a way with wood. None of them are museum pieces. You can buy all three, and in the right week you can watch them being made.
The cloth
The one thing everyone knows the Casentino for is a cloth: panno casentino, a thick napped wool in a loud orange or a deep bottle green, with a curled surface, the ricciato, that no other fabric has. It was born poor. For centuries it was the coarse, warm stuff of shepherds, friars and horse blankets, woven and beaten in the mills of Stia, at the top of the valley in the comune of Pratovecchio Stia, where the young Arno still had the force to drive the machinery.
Then the tailors found it. That rough curled nap and those two impossible colours turned into coats you now see in Florence and Milan, and the cloth of the poor became a signature of Italian tailoring, still cut and sold in Stia today. The old wool mill on the river is now the Museo dell’Arte della Lana, the Wool Art Museum, where the looms and the fulling hammers still stand in the rooms that used them.
The iron
The same streams that fulled the wool also drove the hammers of the ironworkers, and iron is the valley’s second craft. Every even-numbered year Stia gives it a stage: the Biennale Europea d’Arte Fabbrile, the European biennial of wrought-iron art, when blacksmiths from across Europe light their forges in the piazza and beat glowing bars into gates, leaves and sculpture while you stand and watch. The air smells of coke and hot metal for a weekend, and the sound of a hundred hammers carries up the street. It is one of the most alive things the valley does.
The wood
The third craft comes straight out of the forest. The monks of Camaldoli have managed their fir wood above Poppi for a thousand years precisely so there would always be timber, and the villages inside the forest learned to work it. Badia Prataglia, high above Bibbiena, is the valley’s woodcarving town: spoons, toys, saints and furniture cut from the beech and fir on the slope above the workshop door. Add the chestnut, which gave the mountain its beams, its flour and its honey, and you have a valley that has never had to import much of anything it needed.
Four things the valley makes
- Panno casentino The napped orange or green wool, cut into coats and scarves in Stia. Warm, unmistakable, and made here since long before it was fashionable.
- Wrought iron Gates, hooks, leaves and sculpture beaten out by hand, and celebrated every even year at the Stia biennale.
- Carved wood Toys, spoons and small saints out of the forest’s own beech and fir, above all from Badia Prataglia.
- Chestnut Flour, honey and beams from the tree the mountain villages were built around.
Where to watch it being made
None of this is kept behind glass. Across the year the valley opens its workshops, fairs and markets, and the forge, the loom and the carving bench come out into the piazza. Here is what is coming.
- Make-your-own teddy bear workshop
- Sant’Anna fair
- Little weavers workshop
- Borgo in Fiera market
- Guided tour of textile machinery
- Museum guided visit
The curled nap that makes panno casentino unmistakable began as a defect: a rough, cheap cloth the mills of Stia learned to turn into a luxury.
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