The company town of Crespi d’Adda is the most important and attractive example of the industrial archaeology in Italy today. It is set in the southern part of the “Isola Bergamasca” between the rivers Adda and Brembo and the Prealps, like an island near Bergamo in Lombardy.
In this area beside the middle course of the Adda there were nothing else than woods and fields, until Cristoforo Benigno Crespi, dyer’s son coming from Busto Arsizio, decided to create here his own textile factory. Over 125 years ago, in July 1878, it began to produce spun and other appreciated fabrics.
Crespi was a small modern city, a settlement based on the model of the nineteenth-century garden-cities and provided with extremely innovative services, among which electric illumination and a capillary water net.
The company town, completed at the end of the Twenties, has not been changed during the time. It is considered a jewel of the industrial archaeology thanks to its perfect state of preservation and in 1995 the UNESCO decided to insert Crespi d’Adda in the World Heritage List, recognizing its historical and architectural importance.
Crespi d’Adda can be described a wonderful and attractive project where the necessity for profit, the philanthropic demands and the ambitions of an Enlightened industrial family met.
