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Post/teca
Photograph by Almanac Piemonteis Times.
Last month, on a visit to Piedmont in northern Italy, I chanced upon a small museum in the hill town
of Gignese that is devoted to the local craft of umbrella-making. At first, I wondered how this
particular region along the west shore of Lago Maggiore became associated with the production—
through the past few centuries—of quality umbrellas and parasols, but the reason is not hard to
find. Every year more than thirty-three inches of rain falls over the neighborhood of Turin, and more
than thirty-nine around Milan. That’s at least a third more than what London gets. Meanwhile the
northern Italian summers are hot and sunny. The word umbrella descends from the Latin
umbraculum, which means a convenient device for providing shade.
The ancient Romans were very fond of umbrellas, and regularly exchanged them as gifts. Yet
umbrellas were virtually unknown in England and America before the 1780s, and the traveler Jonas
Hanway, who acquired a Piedmontese umbrella in Leghorn (Livorno), was for many years held up
to ridicule when, in about 1750, he returned to London with one. The problem before the midnineteenth
century was that Regency umbrellas were oily, not necessarily reliably waterproof, and
tended to run—and the harder it rained, the worse it was. Oil and dye in roughly equal measure
dribbled and spattered onto silk or muslin dresses. Gloves, bonnets, and satin slippers were
maculated by nasty black spots. So at first umbrellas were used in England much more as shelter
from the sun than the rain, and exclusively by women. It took several early Victorian decades for
the English umbrella to shed its reputation for effeminacy, and more than a century and a half for it
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