The Tessitura Luigi Bevilacqua, located in the very heart of Venice and led by the Bevilacqua family, keeps one of the oldest traditions of the city alive. The Bevilacqua family thus managed to preserve 18 looms, now placed in our building in the Santa Croce district of Venice. They’re real pieces of history, as the plates from the Encyclopaedia by Diderot and D’Alembert prove, since they show the same looms with which we produce our handmade velvets. This is the most precious kind of velvet, and the one with the most difficult production, because its ground consists of curly velvet, and the surface of cut velvet. The uniqueness of a handmade velvet is its softness and the height of the pile: the gap between ground and pattern can be clearly felt when you touch it, but it’s plain to see, too. And, as far as patterns are concerned, those of our fabrics are all kept in our archive: the designs are around 3500, and we customise them according to the customer’s needs. We don’t use these patterns only on velvets, but on brocades, damasks, lampasses and satins, too. Our fabrics, are present in theatres, palaces and prestigious buildings like the White House, the Kremlin and the Stockholm City Hall.