Between the premonitory dream, the move to Abruzzo and the shearing of spring 2022, in 2020 Benedetta attended the ReStartApp ‘on-campus’ course. At the end of the free residential training course for young aspiring entrepreneurs in the Apennines organised by Fondazione Edoardo Garrone (FEG), her project came second and won a prize of €20,000. “Participating in this residential course made me feel less alone in my ‘crazy choice’ to leave a permanent job,” she recounts.

It was Manuela Cozzi who alerted Benedetta to FEG’s call for proposals. Benedetta signed up, she says, “as a favour to her, who was encouraging me to embark upon this project”. After all, even her brand name, Lamantera, recalls the name of a project started in Anversa degli Abruzzi by the ASCA cooperative at the end of the 1990s, La Mantera, which aimed at involving other farmers and shepherds to recover wool and start an all-Abruzzese supply chain. “But It didn’t work out – it lacked a vision that no-one, other than Nunzio and Manuela, had”, stresses Benedetta.
The name recalls the ancient art of wool processing. In L’Aquila’s traditions, this word is related to the production of Shepherd’s Cloth, a boiled wool mantle’resistant to both heat and cold. The Mantera is also the traditional skirt worn by the women of the valleys around Scanno, also in the province of L’Aquila – a village perched a thousand metres above sea level, some thirty kilometres from Anversa degli Abruzzi.

With respect to that initial project, one of the added values stemming from Benedetta’s presence is the extraordinary research work she carried out all over Italy to select some of the best artisan workshops that can receive and process the wool coming from La Porta dei Parchi. In order to be transformed from dirty, greasy woollen fleece into the final packaged product, wool has to be washed, carded (carding is the reduction of the entangled mass of fibres to a filmy web), and spun. Then, a straight cloth (in solid colour or with geometric patterns) or a jacquard fabric is obtained, characterised by very complex patterns created by weaving the colours directly on the loom. The wool collected by Benedetta during the 2022 shearing will tour Italy, reaching Biella, Genoa, and the province of Treviso. “The expected yield is 30-40%”, she explains. For every kilogram of grease wool, Benedetta will obtain 400 grams of yarn to be used for Lamantera’s first signature collection, to be launched in winter 2022-2023. “I am planning to make small knitwear items like socks, but also shawls and capes”, says Benedetta, who proves she has fully understood the importance of networking among young entrepreneurs in the Apennines: the first wool samples were dyed in Sandra Quarantini’s workshop, ColorOff (“midnight blue is blackwood, brick red is madder”) and recently she got in touch with ètico – sartoria marchigiana, Martina Baldassarri’s fair and sustainable micro-fashion company, who came first with equal merit at the ReStartApp 2021 edition. “We would like to develop a knitwear line together” concludes Benedetta.