A charming, smiling lady with caring, industrious hands. Hands moving slowly in the air, as though caressing the most precious of work. Loretta Caponi, embroiderer and owner of the trade name known from Florence to all round the world, tells her story of a child who held a needle and thread in her hand for the first time at just five years old. “I don’t think I had the perception then of what was happening to me. My parents were severe and in that period young girls had to have a vocation in life. I clearly remember that the first thing I made was a cushion depicting a young girl”. A skill which she knew how to exploit, working initially for other people. “At 14 years old I was embroidering handkerchiefs and bras, they paid me one lira for each piece of finished work”. Time passed and with it came love in the form of the painter Dino Campana, a pupil of Ottone Rosai, with whom she lived an enjoyable and creative life, filled with encounters and important friends. “My husband - she calmly relates - had his studio in Via degli Artisti and every evening at nine ‘o’ clock on the dot his friends would ring the doorbell”. 
Friends whose surnames echoed those of text books. From Vasco Pratolini to Mario Luzi to Giuseppe Ungaretti, Tommaso Landolfi, Piero Bigongiari and Romano Bilenchi.Thousands of incredible objects dating from the 15th century to the 30’s of the 19th century. After the 1996 floods the first shop was opened, a world of materials, threads and colours where she realized exceptional weaves, first in Borgo Ognissanti and later in Via Tornabuoni, which is still here today and where she works together with her daughter Lucia and a team of collaborators. An all female staff. “The problem - she laments - is that you can no longer find anyone. Sometimes schools accompany their students to see the laboratory; but no-one wants to become an artisan, today who studies fashion, only wants to be a designer”.
(Portions of this article first appeared in "Toscana & Chianti News")
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