The Italian hemp rope-makers

The Italian cordai, or rope-makers, worked cannabis into an everyday material: hemp cordage. Two local museum traditions preserve this history particularly clearly. Carmagnola, in Piedmont, maintains an ecomuseum of hemp working; Castelponzone, in Lombardy, has a museum dedicated to the rope-makers themselves.

Their exhibits give cannabis a history of hands, tools and working distances. The important parts of the plant here were its fibres. This was skilled production for practical use, carried out in particular communities with their own names for equipment and places of work.

Carmagnola’s covered ropewalk

The Ecomuseo della Canapa stands in Carmagnola’s Borgo San Bernardo. The municipal museum account describes a surviving sentè, a long covered working space dating from 1905, and equipment for turning hemp fibre into rope. Demonstrations make the relationship between the tools and the finished cord visible.

Turismo Torino presents the museum as a means of preserving the culture of hemp working as well as the implements. A long rope required a long place in which to make it: the working space is part of the machinery of the craft. Keeping that space helps explain an occupation that a coil of finished rope alone cannot show.

Castelponzone’s cordai

Castelponzone’s museum places rope-makers within the village’s social history. Its account describes workers paid by the piece, operating outside the village along paths called sentèer, often shaded by mulberry trees. It identifies the first half of the twentieth century as the occupation’s period of greatest development there.

A large wheel and a wooden tool called a masoòl helped twist the strands into rope. These names belong to the local account; they should not be treated as a single standard vocabulary used unchanged across Italy. Carmagnola and Castelponzone preserve related crafts in different regional settings.

Fibres, preparation and replacement

The Castelponzone museum explains the preparation of hemp fibres through combing and their subsequent twisting. It also records supplies from the Ferrara and Bologna areas alongside local production. The craft therefore connected a village workplace to agricultural districts elsewhere.

Its decline was not simply a story of prohibition. The museum describes competition from other cordage fibres, including sisal and Manila hemp. Despite its English trade name, Manila hemp is abacá, a different plant; sisal also comes from a different crop. Substitution could change the material while leaving a recognisable occupation and some of its techniques in place.

An agricultural plant under cannabis law

The later agricultural revival also had an organised base. Assocanapa dates its foundation in Carmagnola to 1998. Parrella’s 2014 account describes work on seed supply, Italian varieties and processing equipment. These efforts concerned the crop’s renewed industrial use; they do not establish a revival of the older rope-making occupation.

Italy’s 2016 hemp law established a framework supporting cultivation and processing of qualifying industrial hemp. That modern framework is distinct from the older craft and from rules governing intoxicating cannabis. The museums explain why a history written only around smoking would miss an important part of the plant’s place in Italy.

The English word hemp and Italian canapa meet here in a concrete material tradition. In the museums, local vocabulary survives alongside tools and demonstrations. Remembering the cordai means remembering the people who knew how to turn a crop into a rope, and the villages shaped by that work.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]}