Museo del Merletto

On the ground floor of Rapallo’s Villa Tigullio, the Lace Museum is dedicated chiefly to bobbin lace: more than 1,400 pieces spanning five centuries, the archive of a famous local factory, ten antique lace pillows and one colossal panel of joined lace designed by Lele Luzzati for an ocean liner's ballroom.

Why it matters

Rapallo’s lace industry is documented in this museum’s collection. The city's lace tradition runs from the sixteenth century, when bobbin work was already part of Riviera life, through the Manifattura di pizzi e ricami founded by Mario Zennaro in 1908, a firm that collected prizes at national and international exhibitions and worked until 1968. When the factory closed, the Lions Club Rapallo bought and donated its collection to the municipality, and the museum opened in 1990 with three rooms, expanding in 1997 into five more below ground. The collection includes not only finished lace — clothing, furnishings, ecclesiastical and domestic pieces — but the working tools, pattern books and some 5,000 preparatory drawings and cartoons that show how a design became thread.

What to notice

• Emanuele Luzzati’s panel of Commedia dell’Arte characters, made entirely of joined lace and measuring 8.10 by 1.15 metres. The museum dates its design to 1964; a secondary account identifies the liner Oceanic as its intended setting.
• About ten antique tomboli, or wooden lace pillows, dating to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• The Zennaro factory archive: pattern books, cartoons and drawings that record the industrial side of a cottage craft, from sketch to finished border.
• The silver and gold laces and the baptism set on the lower floor, arranged by technique and place of production, alongside caps, antique parasols and mid-twentieth-century haute couture.
• The setting itself: Villa Tigullio, a patrician residence by the Parco Casale with the civic international library on the floors above.

Context and history

The collection documents both a domestic craft and its industrialisation. Domestic bobbin lace had supported Riviera households for centuries when Zennaro's factory organised it on a modern footing in the early twentieth century, exporting and winning recognition until its closure in 1968. The Lions Club donation in the 1970s preserved the factory’s collection; additional holdings accompanied the museum’s 1997 expansion. The municipality maintains a register of lace-makers, while the museum’s notebooks, catalogue and publications document the craft’s continuing history.