WE MAKE BAGS, BY HAND, IN ITALY

“We wanted to make bags. We wanted to make them at home, in Tuscia. The first one was born in our mother Ada’s garage. She helped us sew and called out to us when lunch was ready. Today we work at Bottega Bruzziches, in Viterbo, and there is a lot more room. Ada still runs the workshop and makes sure everyone has eaten. Every bag is conceived, designed and made by us, with our artisans and a network of local seamstresses we have trained over the years. Here everyone has a name, a face, a story, and every bag carries a piece of it. Tuscia is the form and the substance of what we do. Here we created what was missing and looked after what was already there: the roots, the dedication, the time it takes to do things well.”

Benedetta & Agostino Bruzziches

“Why make bags in a land famous for hazelnuts?”
“Why not?”

There is a reason. In Caprarola nobody made bags, except Benedetta and Agostino Bruzziches’ father. He was a farmer, and on rainy days he sewed catane by hand, the bags in which shepherds and farmers carried their lunch to the fields. Benedetta and Agostino founded the brand in 2009, in the garage of the family home. The first productions were entrusted to manufacturers abroad. When the finished pieces arrived, something was missing: the finishes fell short of the design. That experience led to a decision: to bring the whole production cycle back to the province of Viterbo. To do it, the Bruzziches siblings went looking for the craftspeople of the town: upholsterers, printers, knitters, almost all of whom had stopped working. With them they designed and built the first prototypes, and learned to put different techniques at the service of leatherwork. The first samples made in Tuscia came to life over one summer, in the garden of Margherita, a neighbour who owned a machine for sewing leather. The province, though, is not the brightest of stages: they chose to entrust everything to the product, because a bag made well in every detail finds its own way to the people looking for it, passes from hand to hand, from city to city, and reaches places no one would have dared to dream of.

For us, handmade in Italy means made at home, by people we know by name.

Bottega Bruzziches is a living space of more than 1,700 square metres where creativity and craftsmanship meet every day, seamlessly. Opened in March 2024, the Bottega marks an important milestone in our journey, the culmination of a search that made the quality of every piece a non-negotiable condition. At its heart is Benedetta’s artistic vision, which takes shape in her design studio, where ideas are born and defined. Around her, the expert hands of our artisans turn these ideas into reality with meticulous care, so that every detail reflects our constant commitment to excellence.

The Bottega is hard to describe; it is much better to walk through it. You can come in to see how a bag is made, to learn to make one with your own hands, to take home something that exists only here. You can come for an exhibition, a talk, a private sale. Or you can come for no particular reason and let this place give you one.

When we discovered crystal mesh, we wondered why no one had ever used it to make bags. Then we understood: it cannot be worked by machine. It cannot be bent, cut or assembled, except by hand. We could have stopped there; instead we built an entire production system around it: around its rules, its timing, the stubborn nature of this hard-to-tame material.

Every bag carries with it the hours of work it took, not a minute less.

Our artisans are masters of their craft, and every piece bears witness to their dedication. It is the touch of their hands, with expertly executed stitching, the delicate placement of the crystals and the careful working of the materials, that turns raw material into works of art. This devotion to craftsmanship defines the essence of luxury in our collections and makes every object tell a story of passion, skill and refinement. With every creation, our artisans carry forward a tradition of excellence and give life to pieces as unique as the women who wear them.

Here in Tuscia, until the 2000s, women would gather in groups to knit for the great luxury houses. It was a widespread skill, passed from home to home and from hand to hand. Then that work stopped. With it, the gatherings grew fewer, and so did the hours spent together, part of the fabric that held the communities of our towns together. We set that network in motion again by creating our own decentralised production model. In almost 20 years we have trained almost 300 women in-house, and today more than fifty local seamstresses, led by Mamma Ada, pick up the stitches of the crystal mesh by hand. They work from home, at their own pace, around their own lives. Each piece of mesh then reaches our Bottega in Viterbo, where the artisans turn it into a bag. Every creation carries this journey with it. A gesture of the land becomes a craft again: the work stays in the towns, the women regain their economic independence, they meet again, talk things through, pass on the secrets of the mesh. Stitch by stitch, the social fabric is mended too.

This is our idea of art.