In Sant’Antioco, Sardinia, lives the last sea-silk weaver.It’s a textile fiber of animal origin, a sort of natural marine silk obtained from a filament secreted by a species of bivalve mollusks endemic to the Mediterranean Sea, also called “nacchera” or “penna” in Italian whose processing was exclusively developed in the Mediterranean area. The last sewing master of the “sea silk” is Chiara Vigo. “Byssus is not bought, it’s not sold. It has no weight nor touch.” It’s an ancient product with no commerce. Every 300 immersion one can recover at the most 300 grams of raw material, 30 grams clean, which would be 20 meters of twine. Once dried up, it produces a thin and precious filament. In Italy the pinna nobilis is secured by a protection act which, however, is not applied to its habitat. A useless measure.
Chiara has been harvesting it for over forty years, coming from a family with a long-dating tradition: her grandfather was a sewing teacher and her grandmother a museum canvasses master. She keeps her precious filament safe in a trunk together with a family recipe and she keeps processing it every day in her laboratory. Guests are coming from all over the world to see her sewing this special filament: while Chiara Vigo is stitching, she always whispers a weaving song in Hebrew. In order to produce her canvasses, she spins and lightens the byssus, which latercan be dyed with vegetal or marine materials. “Adding pomegranate juice and lemon seeds, one can obtain different shades of red, from brick-red to scarlet red.” Chiara Vigo does not reveal any secret of the process and the conservation, but she does confess that she still has many.
Once it was thought that byssus was a higher quality of linen or cotton, ignoring completely the existence of the same-named animal fiber. From byssus one could obtain expensive and precious fabrics with which, probably already in ancient times, were made clothes that the most influent people used a status symbol in the Babylonian, Assyrian, Phoenician, Jewish, Greek and finally Roman society. Moreover, byssus had strong therapeutic properties known by the fishermen, in fact, thanks to its powerful hemostatic properties it was used to medicate the wounds procured frequently with fishing tools.
Chiara Vigo collaborates with the Chemistry Department of Bologna, the Max Planck of Berlin and the Marine Biology Department of Cagliari.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
