Capriate San Gervasio

Near the river Adda between Bergamo and Milan, Crespi d’Adda is a working-class village founded by cotton entrepreneur Cristoforo Benigno Crespi at the dawn of 1878. The idea of setting up a vertical, integrated factory to transform raw cotton into refined, high-quality textiles was the final element of this entrepreneurial parabola that saw him fail in several other contexts. Here, however, having overcome the initial difficulties related to the construction and commissioning of the hydromechanical power plant, he built the spinning, weaving and dyeing mills. Adjacent to this, a modern and innovative city was being constructed, also thanks to the direction of his eldest son Silvio Benigno, to house the entire workforce employed in the production activity, to whom a school, theatre, hospital and even a sports centre were made available. So it was that, over a period of fifty years, an extraordinary urban and social utopia expanded to assume its present architectural features by 1929. It was during this period that a slow and inexorable decline began, not only because of the crisis of 1929, but passing through alternating industrial vicissitudes, ended towards the end of 2003 with the definitive closure of a textile factory that had operated non-stop for one hundred and twenty-five years.

The bureaucratic process behind the ideal city of work that Crespi dreamed up, as an extraordinary place representing the culture of labour, took about two years to prepare the required documents. It was recognised as a World Heritage Site on 5th December 1995 together with Siena, Naples and Ferrara. This unpredictable result put the workers’ village in the spotlight of the world. After all, it was an admirable example of an industrial city that was still active and almost perfectly preserved. It was only in this way that manufacturing work, which was dying out as a result of an inept relocation policy, was gradually and partially replaced by intellectual work, linked to the cultural and tourist promotion of a place rich in the positive values that work brings.