The first Lanificio di Stia Company was established in 1852, when a modern entrepreneurial activity had been organized in a few decades to concentrate the various phases of wool processing in a single factory.
In the early sixties of the nineteenth century the Lanificio employed about 140 workers and remembered as the first in Tuscany to use machinery imported from abroad. Between 1862 and 1888, under the direction of Adamo Ricci, the mechanization of the entire production process was completed and the complex of plants was rationalized. From the end of the nineteenth century the Lombard family became the owner of the Lanificio and entrusted the direction to the Venetian Giovanni Sartori, who modernized the factory, bringing it to the levels of the most important Italian mills and worked to create a concrete social security coverage to all workers in difficulty .
With the direction of Sartori the Lanificio reached the peak of its prestige, as evidenced by the fact of being the official supplier of the House of Savoy, and at the highest level of employment. At the end of the first world war the workers employed were 500, the chassis around 136 and the production was over 700.000 meters of cloth. Following the crisis started in the 1960s, the Lanificio failed in 1985 and closed definitively in 2000. Simonetta Lombard, heir of the family who owned the Fabbrica for over sixty years, reacquired the buildings by setting up a foundation for a restructuring project for the creation of a center for the dissemination of the textile culture. This project took shape in 2010 with the opening of the Museo dell'Arte della Lana.
