«We arrived there on 11th September (1888, editor's note). It
seemed as though we were at the end of the world. No modern
amenities, neither in the home nor in the town. No street lighting,
no doctors, no chemist. No communication services with the rest of
the world, unless you make an exception for the one battered coach
pulled by three old nags (Far West stage coach type) that crossed
the Molinà bridge twice a day, carrying mail and passengers from
Belluno to Comelico and back. For supplies and even the telegraph
you had to go to Pieve».
This was Calalzo as seen and narrated by the daughter of Carlo
Enrico Ferrari in the year of grace 1888.
Carlo Enrico Ferrari, born in Modena, captain of artillery and son
of playwright Paolo, left active service that year in Milan and
moved to Calalzo with his family. You're probably asking yourselves
why? Because, together with his partners Bonomi and Colson, he
had taken over a small spectacles factory on the Molinà torrent.
Angelo Leone Frescura and Giovanni Lozza, from Cadore, set this
small factory up in 1878 in a place called Le Piazze. They later
moved, in 1883, to a wheat mill near Molinà Bridge under the
sixteenth century Madonna Church; this small glass factory was not
only the first of its kind in Cadore but also the first in Italy. It still
stands today, in exactly the same spot: today it's called Safilo,
barycentre of a spectacle empire that sells its wares all over the
world.
The brothers Angelo and Leone Frescura from Cadore were,
together with Giovanni Lozza - and Lozza is anoher large firm still
working today - the pioneers of the modern Italian spectacle
industry; 80% of today's production still comes from the Belluno
region thanks to the work of 650 companies of which 312 are
located in the Cadore area; out of the first 20 leading, Italian
spectacle makers, 15 are in the Belluno region and these 15 make
59% of the total Italian production of glass frames (1987 statistics).
Following in the footsteps of these pioneers, great merit goes to the
Modenese-Milanese Carlo Enrico Ferrari who introduced, in
Calalzo, the most advanced technological and production
innovations: we owe him the changeover from craftsmen made
glasses to those made in the industrial forms.
Later came Ulisse Cargnel, who took over from Ferrari in running
the Molinà factory: he was the first to introduce the production of
lenses in Cadore. Then there was Guglielmo Tabacchi who, starting
in 1934, changed the name of the ancient Molinà factory to Safilo
and today this factory is run by his children.
Frescura, Lozza, Ferrari, Cargnel, Bonazzola, Fedon and later
Tabacchi: these are the families that, starting in 1878, created the
spectacle industry in Cadore from nothing, spreading to the Belluno
region, giving life to one of the most fascinating sagas of Venetian
capitalism, but also Italian and European.
This is all very well, but why did it have to be Cadore, in a Calalzo
that, according to Carlo Enrico Ferrari's daughter seemed to be «at
the end of the world»?
In his enthusiastic research «Dallo smeraldo di Nerone agli occhiali
del Cadore», Enrico De Lotto, doctor and humanist, reminded us of
how Angelo Frescura began. In fact, like many from CadoreX he
began as a pedlar of glasses imported mostly from France -
renowned as the leading European producer of glasses in the
nineteenth century - and Germany. Also for patriotic reasons,
Angelo Frescura stayed in Modena and then in Piedmont; in 1868,
two years after the annexation of the Veneto region to united Italy,
he opened a stall and then a small shop in Padua, selling optical
materials. It was there he got the idea of setting up that spectacle
factory in Calalzo. Ten years later, in 1878, together with his
brother Leone and Giovanni Lozza, he opened it. Once he had got
this factory going, he persuaded his brothers and friends to open
optical shops in different Venetian towns where he sold the first
Molinà spectacles.
Thus the Italian spectacle industry was born from a pedlar trade, a
seasonal migration so's to speak, that the people from Cadore had
always, practiced, traipsing among the Venetian plains and Centtal
Europe; this is a typical case of an industry created from trade and
not vice versa. It is an extraordinary case if you think that between
1797 - the year when the Serenissma Republic of Venice fell - and
1878 - the year when the first Frescura-Lozza factory was founded -
no other shop of its kind existed in the whole of Italy, not even in
Florence where, in the nineteenth century, a craftsmen laboratory
toiled over precision optical instruments (embryo of the future
«Galileo»), but it wasn't just glasses or lenses that were being
made.
And here we have another historical paradox: not only does it
appear evident that spectacles were invented in Venice and not
previously in Florence, but it also goes without saying that Venice
was, in the first half of the eighteenth century, one of the major
European centres producing spectacles (the famous «occhialini»
(lorgnette)) and lenses (a job that the Murano glass factories later
abandoned).
Giacomo Casanova tells us about a famous Murano nun who had
three such lorgnette and their handles transmitted silent but
eloquent messages: a golden handle meant «I love you», a silver
one meant «I don't care tuppence for you», a tortoise handle meant
«careful, we're being watched».
Something similar also happened in the textile industry that,
flourishing in Venice up to the eighteenth century - as proved also
in Goldoni's plays - then migrated in the nineteenth century to
settle on the Venetian mainland. Here, moreover, for example in
the valleys of Vicenza, textiles were already being made way back in
the sixteenth century. There was never a cut in the production of
textiles but more of a progressive migration from Venice to the
Veneto region. On the other hand, as we have already seen for
glasses, there is a «black holes» lasting almost a century. And who
knows, at the end of the nineteenth century, by which mysterious
means and by which strange twisting paths did they reappear in
Cadore that, as chance would have it, renewed its centuries-old
loyalty to Venice even during the Renaissance.
