Crespi d'Adda

In 1869 the textile manufacturer Cristoforo Benigno Crespi bought the valley between the Brembo and Adda rivers in northern Italy to build a cotton mill. The mill started in July 1878, and housing for its workers began going up beside it the same year. In 1889 his son Silvio, who had spent time in Oldham, England, became its director.

Silvio favoured houses with their own gardens, which he saw as a source of harmony and a defence against industrial strife. The village had a school, a clinic, a consumer cooperative, a theatre, public washhouses and a hydroelectric station that supplied free electricity. A church copying the shrine of the family's home town, Busto Arsizio, opened in November 1893, the family's castle was built in 1893 and 1894, and a cemetery with the family mausoleum was completed in November 1908. At its peak the mill employed about 3,200 people.

The village was largely complete by the late 1920s, but after the crisis that began in 1929 the family sold the whole town. Many houses were sold to private owners in the 1970s, and the mill later stopped production. Crespi d'Adda was inscribed in 1995 as a company town of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that survives largely intact.