Museo Didattico della Seta

Como's silk museum traces the production chain from cocoon to dyed, printed and woven fabric. Historic machinery in the silk school's own building tells the story of the industry.

Why it matters

Como's silk industry is the city's great economic saga. The collection documents spinning, twisting, dyeing, printing and weaving through machines, sample books, documents and tools from the sector's golden age. The museum was conceived as a didactic institution tied to the silk technical school that shares its building, and continues to serve schools and universities.

What to notice

The collection follows the material. The twisting machine for silk yarns, one of the great pieces in the collection, shows the scale of industrial silk processing; looms, dyeing equipment and printing tables carry the story from yarn to finished cloth. The sample books, campionari, are the connoisseur's delight: page after page of patterns and colours that silk firms sent around the world, a design archive as much as a technical one. The museum has developed multisensory interpretation, including audio, olfactory and tactile elements, and an Italian Sign Language video resource, with support from the PNRR programme since June 2023.

Context and history

The museum opened on 4 October 1990, the result of a project begun in 1985 by local associations rooted in the silk trade, including former students of the Paolo Carcano Silk Technical Institute in whose building it lives. That setting is meaningful: the institute, founded in 1869, trained generations of Como's silk technicians, and the neighbourhood around Via Castelnuovo thrived on textile businesses powered by the nearby Cosia stream from the mid-1800s onward. The museum thus sits exactly where the industry taught, worked and innovated. Its multisensory interpretation extends its educational mission.