OUR HISTORY

We introduce ourselves: we are Olga, Chiara and Mariana and for a while we have the obsession for natural fibres, Jacquard fabrics and original textile products.

We are the third generation of Arcolaio and the history of our weaving is the history of our family.

The Arcolaio was born in the early 50s, in a historical moment in which here in Italy there was a strong economic ferment that led to radical social transformations.

Work united and nourished hopes, returning a fearless optimism to generations of women and men who wanted to leave behind the devastation of World War II.

We like to think that those sentiments pushed two young people from the province of Abruzzo, Lucia and Antonio, our grandparents, to believe that weaving would be their way of building the future they wanted and that, loom after loom, became closer and closer.

The birth of our weaving, seemed like the Sign of a Time and we feel all the solemnity of this heritage.

Being weavers today, makes us feel rooted in a thousand-year tradition of primary economy; it makes us feel a living part of a history that has seen the loom as a symbol of the Industrial Revolution between the second half of 700 and the first half of 800.

Weaving here in Abruzzo gives us back an identity that is not only due to a deep sense of belonging, but also to the textile tradition of this territory, linked – for historical and economic reasons – to wool, but also to ancient cultivations of linen and, above all, hemp.

The production of wool, here in Abruzzo, is responsible for the birth of the Abruzzo Blanket that for its characteristics and diffusion has been unique in Italy.

This makes us feel custodians of an intangible heritage that is renewed through our hands.

We choose to continue weaving exclusively with natural fibers and to work on fabric reinforcements and decorations that make sense today.

Everything starts
from here.

We answer to a deep needing to bring tradition into the contemporary, to translate it- in its etymological sense – in our present, not for a nostalgic sense, but for an intimate need to remain connected to our roots.
Being rooted makes us feel more and more capable of facing new challenges and experiments.

We three sisters feel every day on a way that we take with our collaborators, our suppliers, our business partners and with those who choose Arcolaio for their home.

It’s a progress and we can’t tell you where we are now, but we know what we want with our work: to become more Aware, Creative and Responsible every day.

In one word: Free.

Some summer ago, we were all together listening to a philosophical conversation under the sky of the beautiful Atri (sooner or later we will introduce you to the jewels of our beautiful land, Abruzzo!). It has been an exciting evening, we heard a dialogue about identity the sense of life, its meaning, direction… words that resonate within us, difficult to repeat. But it doesn’t matter, what’s left inside us and that we try to feed with our work is the sense of joy and hope that we share.

We are convinced that our work is a means that contributes together with others to the achievement of a true Freedom, as Prof. Vito Mancuso says.
He told us a Freedom understood as “the state that distinguishes a mind that knows to know or not to know and thus expresses awareness; it’s the state of a mind that acts without automatically repeating what it has always seen to do but is capable of innovation and thus expresses creativity; and it is finally the state of a mind that acts in relation to the environment, responding to the needs deriving from it to increase harmony and that thus expresses responsibility. When in a human being we have awareness, creativity and responsibility, is possible to assert that he is free; free not only from others, but also from himself.”

And this fills our hearts, we love it, because that’s what we try to do every day, with humility, here in Arcolaio.

Today we realized that the Arcolaio is an opportunity to grow and to evolve; we could hardly have measured with so much creative and human richness!
Here we work in the family and we grow every day, thanks to the comparison with the other and through the other and this makes us feel deeply grateful and fortunate.