Written by Luciano Di Gregorio
The traditional costume of Scanno © Archivio di Sergio Paolo Sciullo della Rocca/Wikimedia Commons
Scanno is particularly well known in Italy for the way its women dress. We’re not talking about the latest in Prada heels or the Louis Vuitton Speedy 30 bag (so popular in Pescara) – rather a different kind of fashion.
In the 17th–18th centuries, the women of Scanno developed a traditional costume: a black dress adorned with homemade lace and an often colourful apron, and topped with a distinctive flat headdress. This fashion arose alongside the growth of the wool and dyeing industries, and during the 1700s, the women who made these garments were renowned throughout the Kingdom of Naples for their cloth-weaving skills.
Whilst you can’t fault the people of Scanno for making use of this distinctive attire for drawing in a crowd or two, many women still today choose to wear the costume, and it is not unusual to see a local woman going about her day-to-day business in this archaic style of dress.