Description of the attraction
Crespi d'Adda is a small village within the municipality of Capriate San Gervasio in the province of Bergamo and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is also the most important example of a handicraft village in Italy, both in terms of the preservation of buildings and in terms of the uniqueness of the layout.
Crespi, a family of weavers, began operations in 1878. It was not by chance that they chose the Capriate of San Gervasio for this - in those years there was an available labor force and there was the possibility of building a canal on the Adda River to use its hydraulic energy. It was an era of ambitious entrepreneurs who owned factories and factories, and at the same time, philanthropists, inspired by the ideas of social restructuring of the world. One of these ideas was the creation of a craft town where workers would live next to their factories and industries.
The founder of Crespi d'Adda was Cristoforo Crespi, but the real inspirer of the project was his son Silvio, who, after studying in England, returned to Italy and developed the real plan. The main principle of the plan was to provide all employees with a small house with a garden and vegetable garden, as well as provide residents with all the necessary services, from public baths, churches and gyms to a school, hospital and hobby clubs. It also envisaged the creation of a theater, a grocery store, a fire brigade, a laundry, a summer camp and the organization of courses in home economics.
The layout of the city is quite simple: on the river bank there is a factory with its high chimneys, and around it on several parallel streets there are workers' houses. In the southern part of Crespi d'Adda, there is a group of later buildings for clerks and managers. At the entrance to the city you can see a neo-Renaissance church and a school next to it. Other buildings are in neo-medieval style and are richly decorated with terracotta tiles and wrought iron. The panorama of a factory, a castle and a hydroelectric power station, a real gem of industrial architecture that is still in operation, completes the picture. The Crespi d'Adda cemetery is a national monument and the notable mausoleum of the Crespi family, a pyramid-shaped tower decorated in Art Nouveau style.
In 1995, the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Committee recognized this craft village as an object of world importance. This is the fifth place in the world, included in the prestigious list as a monument of industrial architecture.
