At the end of April, shearing is the first step in a complex supply chain that involves both animal breeding and craftsmanship.

Let’s rewind the ‘ball of yarn’ and start from the beginning: Benedetta Morucci was born in 1987 and grew up in Veneto. In 2020 – after working for a long time in the fashion industry, mainly in the footwear sector, as a designer, style office manager and project manager – she moved to Abruzzo to start Lamantera. Her idea was to valorise Italian wool, promoting respect for both resources and human beings as a way of life.
She and her partner rented a house in the old town of Anversa degli Abruzzi, one of the most beautiful hamlets in Italy. On the ground floor she created a small workshop, a room she shares with her cats, filled with naturally-died yarns. There are also some socks, the first Lamantera-branded product. The business’s logo represents a stylised bow made of wool. The label reads ‘from nice people to nice people‘ – in English – “because I’ve found many nice people in the world of wool, and it is with them that I have chosen to work”, says Benedetta.

To explain how she came to Abruzzo, Benedetta has to go back to something that happened entirely by chance more than ten years ago, in Florence: “The day I sit the entrance examination to enrol in the Master’s Degree course in Design, I met Viola. I didn’t know anyone in town, I didn’t have a place to stay. It was a Wednesday. Had I been accepted, I would have had to start classes the following Monday. Viola approached me and asked if everything was OK. I explained my situation and she invited me to stay at her place, with her brother and a cousin”. Viola’s surname is Marcelli and she is the same age as Benedetta. Her parents are Nunzio Marcelli and Manuela Cozzi: her father Nunzio (an Agriculture Economist) was one of the founders, in 1977, of the ASCA cooperative, set up to promote Abruzzo’s sheep farming, which ten years later also opened the La Porta dei Parchi holiday farm. In the meantime, her mother, a Tuscan from Prato, had joined Nunzio in Anversa: after graduating in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Florence, in the early 1980s she had moved down here and started working on his project, too.