On Heritage Day (17 November), the archives will be open for guided visits to the collection of fabric
samples begun in 1910 by Ermenegildo Zegna and documentation covering a
hundred years of history. This archive facility is at Casa Zegna, under the
painstaking management of Danilo Craveia.
“I never met Ermenegildo
Zegna, but I’ve certainly formed an idea of him,” explained Craveia in an interview
for the Eco di Biella. “I’ve been
able to personally catalog and re-organize thousands of documents and photographs
concerning him.” Craveia speaks of him as a man “always elegant, but always serious:
you can count the images portraying him with a smile on the fingers of one hand
(…) an open mind, curious and reflective, but capable of audacity, of
transforming his roots into wings”.
On reading his writings, notes
and letters, Craveia was aware that “his words always referred to work, but
also to the life of a town and a country that was experiencing the Great War,
then fascism, another war, the Resistance, the economic boom”. At this point,
the circumstances of one man and his business merge with those of a territory
and influence its development, positively, binding the destinies of a
hard-working, tenacious people, custodians of nature’s infinite beauty, to his
own.
Heritage Day info and booking: Casa Zegna, via Marconi 23, Trivero
– Valdilana. Casazegna@zegna.com – 015.7591464 – www.fondazionezegna.org