The first sign is a sound. Dry, rhythmic, wood striking wood, almost lost in the murmur of the autumn festival that fills the centre of Lugano. Under the arcades of the town hall, in the low light of an October morning, a woman in traditional Malcantone dress raises and lowers a long wooden blade hinged to a trestle. Between the blade and the base runs a bundle of dry stalks. With every stroke something breaks, and something remains.
Around her, the festival goes about its business: stalls of cheese, chestnuts and wine, people drifting past with a coffee in hand. Some stop for a few seconds, take a photograph, move on. At the foot of the trestle a short grey straw piles up. In the woman’s hands, by contrast, there remains a pale, long, almost blond skein, which she lifts and shows to anyone who asks what it is.
It is flax. Or rather, it is what is left of a plant once time, water and hands have done their part. The tool is a flax brake. Beside her, another woman sits at a spinning wheel; a little further on, a loom shows a weave of orange and green threads, dyed with local plants. Within a few metres of paving stones lies the whole journey from field to cloth. And there is a question the sound of the brake keeps asking, stroke after stroke: why would anyone, today, still choose to do all this by hand?
A Hundred Days, Forty Nights
Its botanical name is Linum usitatissimum: the most useful flax. It is sown in spring, densely, so much so that in the Alpine valleys of Trentino people used to describe anything thick as being “dense as flax”. It grows in little more than three months, flowers blue at the start of summer and, when it is ready, according to another farmers’ saying, “it rings and has the colour of gold”. At that point it is not cut but pulled up by the roots, because every centimetre of stem is a centimetre of fibre.
Then comes the part no one sees. The stalks are spread out on the meadows, and for weeks the morning dew and the damp of the night do work no hand could do: they dissolve the substances that bind the fibre to the woody core. In the Alpine tradition, people counted around forty days. Only afterwards, thoroughly dry, does the flax reach the brake that cracks the wood, the scutcher that knocks it away, the iron comb that separates the long fibres from the tow. And only in winter, in evenings spent around the stove, did it become thread.
Almost a year passes between seed and cloth. What strikes you about that sequence is not the effort. It is that no stage can be skipped or brought forward. Without retting, the fibre will not come away. A brake used with too much force snaps it. A comb drawn through too early tears it. Flax does not reward haste. It rewards those who know the right moment.
Curio, Nine Kilos a Year
The flax at the brake comes from Curio, a village in the Malcantone, the hilly region west of Lugano. Here, as in most valleys of Ticino, it was once grown for household needs; after the Second World War, as society changed, cultivation was abandoned. Within a single generation, a knowledge thousands of years old simply stopped being practised.
In 2016 a small group linked to the association Amici di Casa Avanzini decided to take it up again. The occasion was a tribute to Pietro Avanzini, the last descendant of an old patrician family of Curio, notaries since the fifteenth century, who liked to have his own wardrobe made of linen. The family home, Casa Avanzini, is a labyrinth of fifty-three rooms that grew around itself over four centuries. The project born from that tribute is called CurioLino.
The figures are the group’s own: natural cultivation since 2017, around three hundred square metres of field, a dozen volunteers, nine kilos of flax a year. Since 2024 a weaving and dyeing workshop in the former parish house; since 2025 a second field in the nearby village of Pura. Hardly any of them came from the textile world. Each has found their own stage: one the breaking, one the dyeing, one the loom, guided by a professional weaver.
Nine kilos a year. In the language of economics, an irrelevant figure. Yet that very irrelevance is what makes it interesting: no one grows three hundred square metres of flax in order to produce. They do it so as not to forget how producing is done.
Time as Material
We are used to thinking of slowness as the price of quality: something we pay, reluctantly, in exchange for a better result. If we could have the same result faster, we would choose it without hesitation. Flax suggests another reading. The weeks on the meadow are not a cost that comes before the fibre. They are the fibre. It is during that wait that the stalk becomes something that can be spun. Time, here, does not accompany the work. It is what the work is made of.
History, it must be said, has not been sentimental. St. Gallen built its fortune on linen cloth: before 1364 it already had strict quality rules, and in 1610 it counted more than twenty-three thousand bleached lengths of cloth in a single year. Then, in the eighteenth century, a slow decline set in, partly because its methods were costly and rigidly regulated. Cotton and machines did the rest. In economic terms, slowness lost. It would be naive to pretend otherwise.
But what was lost was not only a way of making cloth. It was a subtler skill: telling apart the time that belongs to us from the time that belongs to the material. On the meadow, during retting, there is nothing to do. At the brake, by contrast, complete presence is required. Those who harvested early or forced the comb did not save time. They lost the fibre.
In the way we work, this distinction has almost dissolved. We have tools that shorten every wait, and so we end up treating every wait as a flaw. We reply before we have understood, decide before a question has matured, expect a newcomer to perform like someone who has been there for years, and a project to show results before it has taken root. Yet anyone who has built something solid knows their own periods of retting: an idea that needs to rest, a professional relationship that needs seasons, a skill that settles only after hundreds of repetitions. Hurrying them does not make them faster. It makes them fragile.
This is where calm reveals its true nature. It is not slowness, and it is not a retreat from ambition. The woman at the brake works with a firm, precise rhythm, without a single stroke too many. She is in no hurry because hurry would give her nothing; she does not hesitate because the gesture has been repeated often enough that it no longer needs to be thought. Her calm is a form of competence: knowing when to wait and when to strike, and never confusing the two. It is the same difference that, in any profession, separates the merely busy from the truly effective. The Curio group speaks of repeated gestures that create calm. The reverse is also true: it is calm that makes the precision of the gesture possible.
An Archive Made of Gestures
In 2009 a team of archaeologists announced that in a cave in Georgia they had found flax fibres, twisted and even dyed, more than thirty thousand years old. On Swiss soil, the oldest traces of linen textiles date back to the beginning of the fourth millennium BC, earlier than wool or hemp. For tens of thousands of years, the knowledge needed to turn a plant into thread passed from one pair of hands to the next without interruption.
In the Malcantone, that chain broke within a few decades. And here the demonstration in the square makes visible something subtler. The stages of flax can be described in a manual, but a manual cannot tell you how hard to strike, when the stalk is truly ready, what sound the fibre should make once it is free of the wood. It is no coincidence that, to start again, the Curio group needed someone who already knew those gestures. Some knowledge cannot be kept in objects or in books. It exists only as long as someone goes on practising it.
Seen this way, a demonstration at a town festival is no longer folklore. It is the only kind of archive possible for knowledge of this kind.
And the matter goes well beyond flax. Every company, every trade, every family holds knowledge that appears in no manual: the way an experienced colleague reads a situation, understands a client, senses that something is wrong before being able to explain why. We call it experience, and we realise how much it was worth only on the day the person who carried it leaves. Procedures can be documented. Judgement cannot: it passes from one person to another by working side by side, as it always has in apprenticeship. In an age that gladly hands gestures, and even thoughts, over to machines, delegating is often the right choice. But a gesture that no one performs any more is not delegated. It is lost.
The Straw and the Thread
Towards evening the festival empties. The stalls close, and the square becomes a square again. The straw that fell from the brake is swept away in a few minutes: it was the part of the stalk that was not needed, the part that time on the meadow and the wood of the brake had separated from the rest.
The thread, however, remains. Nine kilos a year, three hundred square metres, a dozen pairs of hands. Not enough to clothe anyone. Enough for the gesture not to be interrupted.
Thinking back to that dry sound under the arcades, the flax almost disappears. What remains is a question that concerns our own days more than the Malcantone: which parts of our work and our lives need a time that cannot be compressed, and from which of them are we taking exactly that time, convinced we are saving it? The best performance does not come from doing everything faster. It comes from recognising, like those who work flax, what must be left to mature and what asks for our full presence. The rest, like the straw beneath the brake, can be allowed to fall.
