The Filatoio Rosso stands on the edge of Caraglio and was built between 1676 and 1678 for count Giovanni Girolamo Galleani, who had come from Bologna to the Duchy of Savoy meaning to put up a palace and make a silk-throwing mill of it. It took him two years. It was one of the first silk plants in the duchy and in Europe, and together with the contemporary one at Venaria it is the ancestor of the mills that multiplied across Piedmont in the following decades, from Alba to Busca, from Mondovì to Racconigi.
What to see
The complex rises through three floors, with elevations plastered in light tones and two wide internal courtyards. Of the six circular towers around the perimeter, each holding its own staircase, five remain: one took a direct hit from an aerial bomb during the Second World War, when the building served as a barracks. The façade block has a pair of towers with loggias and a summit balustrade loaded with amphorae, a detail that betrays the noble patron and suggests a designer from the court: perhaps that Amedeo di Castellamonte whom Galleani met while the Venaria silk mill was going up. The name, on the other hand, comes from the red the walls took on, probably in the nineteenth century.
Visiting
Inside was the whole production chain: from the mulberry grown in the surrounding fields and the rearing of the silkworm, through to the finished thread. The machinery was driven by five mills fed with water from the Cèlleri spring, brought here by a canal dug for the purpose with ducal authorisation and in such a way as not to take water from the fields, which used the outflow. About three hundred people worked here, largely very young women, and the speciality was Piedmontese organzine, a double-twisted yarn that left almost entirely for France and served as the warp of fabrics for the aristocracy. Today the mill houses the museum of the Piedmontese silk industry, with working reproductions of the wooden machinery rebuilt from documents in the archives of Cuneo and Turin.
Our editors' tip
Look at it knowing it is a factory, not a castle: the towers and the balustrade with its amphorae were there to say the owner was a count, but behind that front were the mills, the water and three hundred women workers. Production went on until 1936, when it stopped partly because of the autarky policy pushing viscose and fustian in place of silk. Then a barracks, bombs, decades of neglect; in 1993 the Council of Europe called it the most distinguished monument of industrial archaeology in Piedmont, and in 1999 the municipality of Caraglio bought it to save it.