Civico Museo Setificio Monti

On the lakeside road of Abbadia Lariana, a former silk twisting mill keeps its machinery in place: the Setificio Monti civic museum preserves a working circular torcitoio, the water canal that drove it and the story of the silk trade that once employed the whole Lecco shore.

Why it matters

Silk built much of the modern economy of the Lecco area, and this museum is one of the few places where the industry's machinery survives on the spot where it worked. The complex began as water-powered industry in the early nineteenth century, when the silk craftsman Pietro Monti converted an older mill building into a filatoio for twisting silk thread; after the trade faded, the municipality bought the buildings in 1978, restored them, and opened the Civico Museo Setificio Monti in 1998. The Ministry of Culture's listing highlights the great circular twisting machine of 1818, restored and still working, loaded with silk as if the workforce had just stepped out. The museum documents how lakes and rivers powered Italian industry.

What to notice

• The circular torcitoio is a room-sized machine dating to 1818. Its horizontal arms move in continuous circles to twist the thread; the machine has been returned to its original position and restored to working order.
• The industrial archaeology of the building: the sequence of water mill, fulling mill and silk twisting mill on one site, powered through the Roggia canal and its hydraulic wheels, with the mid-nineteenth-century arrangement still legible in the rooms.
• The lunette with the initials of the founder, Pietro Monti, in the courtyard, and the old mulberry tree — the silkworms' food — beside it, echoed by the monumental mulberry at the town's pier.
• The later history on display: the silkworm-raising filanda wing, the shift from wooden to iron water wheels, and the site's afterlife as a foundry before its rescue as a museum.
• Since 2021, an embroidered tapestry by Filippo Biagioli depicting the legend of the Grigna, a contemporary work woven into an industrial setting.

Context and history

The municipality's own account traces the complex to a fifteenth-century building, later enlarged in the seventeenth century, that served in turn as a grain mill and a fulling mill before Pietro Monti, arriving from the Milanese around 1818, turned it to silk twisting. A filanda for raising silkworms and spinning was added late in the nineteenth century, forming an L-shaped complex. Production ended early: the filanda stopped in 1903 and the twisting mill in 1934, after which a foundry occupied the site until 1975. The great twisting machine had already been sold in the 1960s to the Swiss Abegg family and donated to the Tecnorama museum in Winterthur; after the municipality's purchase and restoration, it came back on loan to the room where it had worked, which is why the museum can show it running today. The civic museum opened in 1998 and runs educational programmes; the former Monti house next door is now the town library.