This isn't a story about spit, or clams or even kings.

Chiara Vigo

This is a story about Chiara Vigo, a 62 year old woman living on the tiny Sardinian island of Sant’Antioco. Going back 24 generations in the same matrilineal family tree, Vigo is the current and possibly the last woman to hold the secret knowledge of making byssus.

Byssus, or sea silk, is one of the most coveted materials in the world. Today, Vigo is believed to be the last person on Earth who still knows how to harvest, dye and embroider sea silk into elaborate patterns that glisten like gold in the sunlight.

Under The Sea

Every spring, guarded by the Italian Coast Guard, Vigo dons her white robe and recites her prayer. Under the cover of darkness and guided by moonlight, Vigo plunges headfirst into the crystalline sea off the tiny Sardinian island of Sant’Antioco.

Vigo descends up to 15m below the surface to reach a series of secluded underwater coves and grassy lagoons that the women in her family have kept secret for the past 1000 years. She then uses a tiny scalpel to carefully trim the razor thin fibes growing from the tips of the highly endangered Mediterranean clam known as the noble pen shell, or pinna nobilis.

It takes about 100 dives to harvest 30g of usable strands, which form when the mollusc’s secreted saliva comes in contact with salt water and solidifies into keratin. Only then will Vigo be ready to begin cleaning, spinning and weaving the delicate threads. Known as byssus, or sea silk, it’s one of the rarest and most coveted materials in the world.

An Ancient Fiber Comes To Life

After harvesting raw byssus from the depths of the sea, she desalts the fibres by submerging them in fresh water for 25 days, changing the water every three hours. Once they dry, she cleans the threads with a carding brush to remove any remaining sediment.

Then comes the hardest part: separating each strand of pure sea silk from the tangle of raw byssus. Because sea silk is three times finer than a strand of human hair, Vigo peers through a lamp with a magnifying glass as she delicately plucks each thread of silk using a pair of tweezers.

Vigo has an encyclopaedic knowledge of 124 natural dye variations made from fruits, flowers and seashells. There are 140
patterns in her family, eight of which will never be written and have been passed down orally from generation to generation. Vigo intertwines the spun silk into the linen warp using her fingernails. It takes 15 straight days of extracting and dying raw byssus to create enough threads to weave just a few centimetres. Some pieces, like a 50x60cm cloth of pure sea silk weighing just 2g, take six years to stitch. Others, like the larger tapestries draped atop her loom depicting Biblical passages and pagan deities, take even longer.

No-one is precisely sure how or why the women in Vigo’s family started weaving byssus, but for more than 1,000 years, the intricate techniques, patterns and dying formulas of sea silk have been passed down through this astonishing thread of women – each of whom has guarded the secrets tightly before teaching them to their daughters, nieces or granddaughters.

There Can Only Be One Maistu

Vigo learned the ancient craft from her maternal grandmother, who taught traditional wool weaving techniques on manual looms to the women of Sant’Antioco for 60 years. She remembers her grandmother paddling her into the ocean in a rowboat
to teach her to dive when she was three years old. By age 12, she sat atop a pillow, weaving at the loom.

Vigo is known as su maistu (‘the master’, in Sardo). There can only be one maistu at a time, and in order to become one, you must devote your life to learning the techniques from the existing master. Like the 23 women before her, Vigo has never made a penny from her work. She is bound by a sacred ‘Sea Oath’ that maintains that byssus should never be bought or sold. In fact, despite weaving works for display in the Louvre, the British Museum and the Vatican, Vigo doesn’t have a single piece of byssus in her home. She lives in a modest apartment with her husband, and they live off his pension as a coal miner and donations from visitors who stop by Vigo’s studio.

Instead, Vigo explained that the only way to receive byssus is as a gift. She’s created pieces for Pope Benedict XVI and the Queen of Denmark, but more often than not she embroiders designs for newlywed couples, children celebrating a christening and women who come to her in hopes of becoming pregnant.

Cloth Fit For A King

Women in Mesopotamia used the exceptionally light fabric to embroider clothes for their kings some 5,000 years ago. It was harvested to make robes for King Solomon, bracelets for Nefertiti, and holy vestments for priests, popes and pharaohs. It’s referenced on the Rosetta Stone, mentioned 45 times in the Old Testament and thought to be the material that God commanded Moses to drape on the altar in the Tabernacle.

Maddalena is Vigo's youngest daughter. Like her own grandmother, Vigo began teaching her how to dive and embroider at an early age. There is a problem, though. Maddalena lives in Dublin and wants to retain her own life. Vigo says that the secrets may die with her, but the silk of the sea will live on.

Photos courtesy of Eliot Stein