Filanda di Forno: the crumbling remains of a 19th-century textile factory.

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2 weeks ago Danilo

The Filanda of Forno is a textile factory located in the village of Forno in the Province of Massa-Carrara in Tuscany, central Italy.
The opening of a massive factory was announced in 1889, destined to the manufacture of cotton, exploiting the abundant and continuous supply of water necessary for the various processing phases. A few years earlier, in 1881, the cotton mill owners had obtained a license to dig a drainage canal about 550 metres long for the turbine, in order to obtain water from the spring.
The turbine was positioned at the bottom of a well so as to utilise the greater power of the water which, at that point, made a leap of some 64 metres.

It began full production in 1891 and, at its peak, it employed just under a thousand workers, almost all women, the so-called “filandine.” According to local sources, in 1893, it had three steam boilers, a 500 horsepower engine, and a 750 horsepower hydraulic motor.
Built on a project by engineer Frimi, a typical industrial village grew up around it.
The complex featured three large blocks, consisting of the cotton mill buildings and a warehouse, a building for the offices, the workshop and the director’s residence, and a housing complex for the workers, while the huge machinery that spun cotton worked thanks to the power of the water of the Frigido River, which operated the turbines.
The cotton was washed and beaten in the basement, the looms were on the first and second floors, while the equipment for special processes were lodged on the top floor.
Cotton manufacture followed a process divided into six phase: wetting, beating, ironing, carding, intermediate benches and spinning.

Hit by the economic and industrial crisis of the late 1930s and penalised by the closing of the steam tramway, the cotton mill gradually decreased production and it was 1942, during World War II, when the spinning mill closed due to a lack of raw materials.
Transformed into a warehouse by the Navy, German troops looted parts and machinery from the shuttered factory, also planting explosives that heavily damaged the buildings and led to roofs and attics collapsing.
After the war, the factory’s turbine was used to produce electricity until 1970, and then it definitely fell into a state of neglect.

In 2013, an industrial museum opened at the site of the former textile factory, exhibiting surviving machinery, but in recent years this has closed, and today the spinning mill is again in a state of decay and abandonment.