Medesy Profile

Thanks to water which gave power to an increasing number of helve hammers, the smiths’anvil, Maniago’s blacksmiths increased their production and became more skilled day by day: at the beginning it was mostly tools related to agrarian work, such as ploughshares, axes and scythes, afterwards the technique rapidly progressed and specialized into what was later renowned as ‘the smiths’art & craft workshop’. 

During the XVI century the blacksmiths of Maniago were able to produce also products of very great prestige, such as the arms for the Venetian Republic. Nowadays the excellent ability of these skilled craftsmen is renowned even in Hollywood where the tool-creations of Maniago were used for many movies, such as Braveheart, Robin Hood and The Lord of the Rings 

The craft workshop appeared to satisfy a new demand of working tools increasingly small in size and dedicated to specific uses, such as pocket-knifes, scissors and surgical instruments. These new small tools had to be extremely precise and also have a nice design: precision and esthetical style defined the new production parameters of the smiths then called ‘fâvri da fin’. 

The work of smiths became so predominant as to further increase the importance of Maniago; since then the town has been renowned as ‘the city of the cutleries’. As iron was not easily available on the territory, Maniago smiths preferred to focus on the concept of highest quality rather than on quantity and developed a superior technique: Maniago’s products were indeed of a higher quality if compared with the production of other Countries. 

At the beginning of the XX Century metals started to be transformed into tools indispensable for surgery and agriculture: incandescent iron was wrought and shaped into rough tools which were then finished into wellrefined instruments by skillful hands. 

In the 70s the introduction of modern specific and precise machines brought about a huge increase in the overall production, Maniago was dynamic and blooming with more than 200 artisanal firms, 15 medium size enterprises and 4 industries. The new technologies paved the way to a diversification and specialization of the production to include other products in addition to classic knives such as dental and surgical instruments, scissors and shears, kitchenware, corkscrews, potato-peelers, sports and sub knives, turbine-engine blades, fine arts spatulas and many more. In those years Maniago supplied the German Federal Republic Army with more than 380.000 pocket knives.