A country of extremes, no single costume
Italy has existed as a country only since 1861. Before that, it was a mosaic of kingdoms, duchies and republics that turned their backs on one another. Which is to say there is no Italian costume, but a variety of regional dress probably greater than anywhere else in Europe.
From one end to the other, it is extremes. In the north, the Italy of the rich Renaissance cities: the silk of Como, the velvet of Genoa, the brocades you see in the portraits, an elegance of merchants and bankers. In the south and the islands, a poorer, more archaic Italy, where the peasant costume loads itself with wool, embroidery and hoarded gold.
A word in passing on a misunderstanding. What the world today calls “Italian style”, that of Milan and the great houses, has nothing to do with these regional costumes. It is haute couture born in the twentieth century. The true traditional Italian wardrobe is elsewhere, in the villages.
Burano, the island of lace
In the lagoon of Venice, a small island of houses painted every colour made its fortune on a thread: Burano. There people practise needle lace, the punto in aria, “point in the air”, where the motif is built in the void, without a cloth support, on the point of the needle alone.
It was women's work, handed from mother to daughter, of a mad slowness. A large piece could occupy several hands for years, each specialised in one stitch. Venetian lace clothed the courts of all Europe, the collars and cuffs of kings included.
The art nearly vanished in the nineteenth century before a school saved it, in 1872. Today a few elderly lacemakers still keep it. Once again, the precious lies in the time given more than in the material.
Sardinia, a world apart
If there is one region where costume not only survived but kept all its richness, it is Sardinia. Isolated in the middle of the Mediterranean, the island preserved dress among the oldest and most sumptuous in Europe, different from one village to the next.
Each paese has its costume, its colours, its way of folding the veil and embroidering the shawl. A Sardinian woman did not move without saying, by her turnout, where she came from and whether she was a girl, married or a widow. The garment was an embroidered identity card.
And it is still passed on. Look at the little girl in costume beside her mother: at that age, you already learn to wear the shawl and the gold of your valley. The tradition does not sleep in the museum, it still walks in the street.
Sant'Efisio, a thousand costumes in a day
Once a year, on 1 May, Sardinia brings out its whole wardrobe. In Cagliari, the procession of Sant'Efisio files past for hours: thousands of people, come from every village of the island, each in the costume of their pays.
It is the greatest gathering of traditional costumes in Europe, and a spectacle of colour: the shawls of lace and brocade, the pleated skirts, the gold and coral that weigh on the chests. You read the geography of the island in one afternoon, village after village.
Nothing frozen in it. These costumes are worn by people who own them, keep them up and pass them on, not by extras. That difference is what separates a living tradition from a picture-postcard folklore.
The costume as a coat of arms
Seen up close, the Sardinian costume is an accumulation of know-how. Brocade bodice, pleated linen shirt, shawl embroidered with flowers in silk thread, and above all the gold and coral: filigree buttons, rosaries, brooches shaped like a thistle flower.
This gold was not only adornment. Like the coins of the Seto women or the silver of the Appenzell herdsmen, it was the dowry, the savings and the rank of the family, worn on feast days. A richly adorned Sardinian woman announced without a word the standing of her house.
The coral, fished off the island's coasts and worked since Antiquity, added its blood-red touch, reputed to bring luck and ward off the evil eye. The costume was at once coat of arms, strongbox and amulet.
The South and the coppola
Go down to Sicily and the continental south, and the tone changes entirely. Here, the men's costume is sober, dark, without swagger: pale shirt, waistcoat and trousers of brown corduroy, and on the head the coppola, that flat cap become the emblem of the man of the South.
An amusing detail: the coppola descends from English tweed caps, adopted by the Sicilian landowners in the nineteenth century before it reached the whole people. Another “immemorial” emblem that turns out to be more recent and more well-travelled than one thinks.
The South put its colour elsewhere than on everyday dress: in the painted carts, the processions, the saints' feasts. Ordinary dress, for its part, stays frank and durable, cut for work and heat. Another form of rightness.
