In 2025, the Museo del Tessuto Foundation will celebrate the Museum's first 50 years with the exhibition Silk treasures. Textile masterpieces from the Falletti Donation curated by Daniela Degl'Innocenti and open to the public from 20 December 2024 to 21 December 2025.

Created thanks to textile entrepreneur and collector Loriano Bertini's donation to the Tullio Buzzi Institute of Prato of a corpus of antique textiles, 50 years later the Museum is now celebrating this milestone with another exceptional donation, that of the collection of the Florentine physician Giovanni Falletti, an eclectic collector and devotee of various disciplines. Thanks to over 50 years of passionate research, he has preserved and collected textile artefacts, embroidery, books, prints, jewellery, historical weapons and ritual masks from Europe and many Asian and African countries.

This most generous donation counts almost 2,000 greatly assorted objects, including artefacts of incredible historical, artistic and anthropological value, such as 250 Japanese prints from the second half of the 18th and 19th centuries by artists such as Hokusai, Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi, Utamaro, textiles from European manufactures from the 15th to the 18th centuries, more than 450 lithographs, etchings, woodcuts and prints from the 16th to the 19th centuries - including Dürer, Van Leyden, Salvator Rosa, Piranesi, Max Klinger, Lorenzo Viani - and more than 1,000 objects including embroidery, ornamental bands, panels, masks, jewellery and ritual weapons from Africa, Central Asia, East Asia and South America.

Silk treasures. Textile masterpieces from the Falletti Donation is the first exhibition formed with works from this substantial collection that has extraordinarily enriched the Museum's heritage.

Curated by Daniela Degl'Innocenti, curator of Museo del Tessuto, with the scientific consultancy of Roberta Orsi Landini, Italy's foremost scholar of textiles and costume, the exhibition presents antique textile and embroidery artefacts for the first time. The selection represents the initial nucleus from which Falletti began his journey as a collector. Falletti's collection began by pure, lucky chance after he was particularly struck by a 15th-century green velvet cope (liturgical robe) displayed in the window of a Florentine antique dealer.

Exhibited in the hall specifically dedicated to historical textiles, the exhibition unfolds along a chronological path that spans four centuries of great textile manufacturing and crosses styles, productions, materials and subjects, exceptional witnesses of European production from the 15th to the end of the 18th century.

These fabrics were used to make sumptuous secular robes for the aristocracies of the time. Thanks to their enormous prestige and value, they were later donated to religious institutions that reused them to make sacred vestments such as chasubles, dalmatics, copes: an extraordinary custom of reuse that allowed the conservation of textile masterpieces, some wonderful examples of which are displayed for the public in the exhibition.

To facilitate an understanding of the historical and technical content, the exhibition hall includes two media tables that use different methods and languages to narrate the fabric-making process and the how the art of silk developed up to the pre-industrial period. Digital microscopes offer a closer look at the internal structure and intricacies of the woven velvet, damask, brocading and lampas (figured silk fabrics). Lastly, graphic reproductions alongside the textiles illustrate the development of the main decorative motifs used by the workshops between the 15th and 18th centuries. Reproductions of important paintings alongside textiles from the same period make the different functions of these precious silk masterpieces immediately apparent.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Edifir (due out in 2025) with in-depth analyses and fact sheets edited by Daniela Degl'Innocenti and Roberta Orsi Landini.