Knitting as a perfect metaphor to talk about personal memories, sentimental stories and family anecdotes, but also to tell global economic and political mechanisms. Loretta Napoleoni is convinced of this in “Sul filo di lana”, a book that deals with sociology and politics, but is also a painful journey to discover oneself, one’s limits and one’s resources. A multifaceted game of emotions and information that begins between 6000 and 4000 BC with the story of how the ancients had developed a rudimentary method to create clothing and protect themselves from the elements. The “journey” continues through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance – from the wool-working guilds to the success of Italian yarns and fabrics throughout Europe – passing through the French Revolution, with its tricoteuses, and the American Revolution marked by “knitting bees”. We then arrive at the Great War – woolen garments handmade by those who stayed at home served to keep soldiers warm in the trenches – and the Second World War, during which knitter-spies used knitting as a secret code to send secret messages. Knitting then returned to prominence in the 1960s with the hippie movement, which made it a tool for rejecting the homologation and consumerism imposed by the “system”. Today, the “value” of wool has gone beyond its nature: neuroscience has discovered that knitted fabrics are not only effective for representing physics concepts that are difficult to recreate with other materials, but their processing has the same calming and relaxing therapeutic effects on the mind and body as yoga and meditation. “Looking back, we realize that knitting has always been a leitmotif, a common thread, a rope that has allowed humanity to safely cross the stormy seas of epochal transitions. And that is why it can still help us today to weave relationships more creatively and to find the end of the skein of our lives.”
Title: SUL FILO DI LANA
Author: LORETTA NAPOLEONI
Publishing House: MONDADORI
Year: 2015
