The advent of lace

For a long time, people has been talking about the predating of needle-point and bobbin-lace. In fact, both of them appeared concomitantly in Venice at the end of the 15 ^th Century.

The oldest bobbin-lace witch has been reported is known in Italy. It was a share of inheritance, on September 1493, belonging to the sisters Angela and Ippolita Sforza-Visconti : una binda lavorata a poncto de doii fuxi per uno lenzolo : a lace made with twelve bones and intended for the edge of a bed sheet.

A collection of patterns well-preserved in the Royal Library in Munich indicates : "Lace has been introduced on 1536 by tradespeople from Italy and Venice".

In the absence of handbook allowing the creation of bobbin-lace in Venice, I can tell you  this nice story going round the Venice lagoon :

A young fisherman was promised to the most beautifull girl of the isles in the lagoon. She was as hard-working as lovely. She made a new fishing-net for him and he took it on his fishing-boat. The first time, he used it, he rised a magnificent petrified seaweed to the surface.
But the war came and all the sailors embarked to the Orient.

The poor young girl cryed over her lover and stayed all days long contemplating the nice seaweed he leaved to her as a love-taken.
She was looking at these so thinness and light nervures and she braided the threads ended by sinkers, called piombini, hanged around the fishing-net.

Little by little, she was reproducing the pattern she loved so : lace a piombini was born.