Champion of proportion and harmony, both emblematic and luxurious art at the same time, the chinese carpet is not a simple object of daily usage. It is a creation of cultured craft, carried out with moderation and a careful choice of colors and symbolic contents.

The collection presented in these pages is made up of 26 items which represent a testimonial of chinese textile production between the end of XVIII century and the beginning of the XX. The carpets have been selected for their technical quality and preservation state, but also for their rarity and the taste shown by the craftsmen in working out decorative themes and tradition symbols.

The technique comes from the contact with nomadic populations of central Asia, as proven by the most antique carpets, of XVII and XVIII century, with a cotton structure and hand-spun, solid and with coarser knotting, but of unquestionable fascination.

Production, although huge and of remarkable variety, is scantily documented. It follows a notable difficulty of attribution. Tha main manufacturing centers, to some of which the carpets in this collection may be ascribed, are Ningxia, Gansu, Peking, Tianjin, Baotou and Suiyuan.

It was around the half of XIX century that cotton mechanical spinning allowed the making of finer structures and knottings. Production increased enormously between 1880 and 1929. In these decades chinese carpets met an extraordinary success in both Europe and America, with the birth of new and important factories capable of transforming traditional motifs and adapting them to the new customers' requirements, giving birth to a sober and well-proportioned decorative style, that marks the chinese carpet art telling it apart from those of other areas. The increasing demand had strong repercussions on production and on the creation of new models: new, very strong themes were adopted, with full-field flowery embellishments, with revisitations of traditional motifs or even with their reading in a Liberty key.