Antonio Ratti

A true 20^th century Renaissance man. Antonio Ratti (1915-2002) was not just the founder of Como’s celebrated Silk Mill (Tessitura Serica Antonio Ratti), which would market and sell high quality fabrics for ties and scarves in the post-war years, but also the visionary patron of the Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a center of conservation, restoration and cataloguing of MET’s collection of textiles.

As he wove together #business and #art, Ratti saw #textiles as fundamental sources of knowledge about our present and our past, and #culture as a force to endow any entrepreneurial activity with everlasting relevance.

This idea would apply to his business venture since its start in 1945, in the postwar years, as his company (now the Ratti Group) eventually became a world-renowned producer of textiles, and as its artifacts gained the status of timeless cultural products.

This idea would also define a new image of the #entrepreneur as a cultural patron, or, as he used to say about himself, as the “first violin in a large orchestra.” His project of a world “library of textiles” then served the purpose to catalogue and preserve the company’s textile heritage and, at the same time, became the platform to recreate industry as a ground to support the arts, promote research, and encourage new technological solutions.

In addition to the Textile Center at the MET, Ratti’s legacy is now enshrined in the Fondazione Antonio Ratti (FAR), which is located in the historic Villa Sucota on the shores of Lake Como. From textiles to texts, from business to culture, from silk to art.

More on the Italian textile industry athttps://youtu.be/bgFfhBoBFKw