The museum sits inside the workshop of the Antica Fabbrica di Passamanerie Massia Vittorio, on via Maria Bricca in Pianezza. The firm is one of a handful of its kind: the workshop was founded in Turin in 1843 by Vittorio Massia, and in 2000 production moved here, into a converted plant; the museum opened the following year, in 2001.
What to see
There are two sections: one devoted to technique and production, the other to display, history and books. The core is the looms and textile machinery, covering a long span from 1790 to 1950, and they are not set aside in a separate room but stand inside the workshop, where they still earn their keep. Beside them are the trimmings and silk fabrics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and an assortment of about 170 wooden cores, the ones on which bows and bracelets were worked: this is the part people look at longest, because they are working objects nobody thought to preserve.
Visiting
You go through every section of the workshop and follow the whole production cycle: that is the reason to come, because this is not a museum of display cases but a working factory that decided to show itself. Openings are not continuous, so call the firm first.
Our editors' tip
Passementerie is one of those trades you only grasp by watching: a braid loom in action explains in two minutes what no caption manages to say. Anyone coming to Pianezza for the parish church of San Pietro and the Jaquerio frescoes should keep this as the second stop: it sits at exactly the opposite end of the town's history.