It's a superfine romance

High in the snowy mountains of Trivero, a small town in the Biella region in the northern Italian Alps, I discover the Italian passion for Australian merino wool.

Nestled in the white-capped peaks is a stately three-storey house that belonged to Ermenegildo Zegna, who in 1910 established a wool mill there to make fine textiles for Italian tailors.

Ermenegildo Zegna discovered Australian merino wool in the 1920s and was seduced by its softness.

Today the Lanificio Zegna factory employs 450 people and produces about 2 million metres of fabric a year for the Ermenegildo Zegna brand and some of the world's top fashion labels, including Giorgio Armani, Tom Ford and Gucci.

Yet despite the scale and high-end nature of the operation, it is the humble Australian merino sheep that still shares star billing in a photograph with Ermenegildo's son, Aldo, that hangs in pride of place in the villa.

Aldo is actually shearing the sheep himself in the black-and-white photograph taken on an Australian sheep station he visited in 1980 to deepen the bond between his Italian family and Australian woolgrowers, who supply the majority of raw wool to the company.

The same villa is home to the gleaming gold Vellus Aureum (Golden Fleece) Trophy, created by Swiss artist Not Vital and awarded each year to an Australian woolgrower for wool 13.9 microns or finer, and the Ermenegildo Zegna Perpetual Trophy, introduced in 1963 in conjunction with the Australian Superfine Wool Growers' Association.

These, too, are aimed at celebrating and further fostering the strong relationship between Zegna and Australian wool.

''The extraordinary quality of the extra-fine merino wool from Australia has always been fundamental in every Zegna fabric collection from the very beginning in 1920s,'' says fourth-generation family member and company chairman, Paolo Zegna.

''It's the cornerstone of the style, the preciousness and elegance that Ermenegildo Zegna's trademark wools are known for.''