Economists said that Mr. Barbera had a point, but they also said that worrying about this issue was like fretting about the head cold of a patient with Stage 3 cancer. They see a country with a service sector dominated by guilds, which don’t just overcharge but also raise the barriers to entry for the millions in ill-fated manufacturing jobs who might otherwise find work as, for instance, taxi drivers. They see a timid entrepreneur class. They see a political system in the thrall of the older voters who want to keep what they have, even if it dooms the nation to years of stasis.

They see a society whose best and brightest are leaving and not being replaced by immigrants, because Italy has so little upward mobility to offer.

To Professor Giavazzi, the future here doesn’t look like Greece. It looks like Argentina.

“Before World War II, Argentina was rich,” he says. “Even in 1960, the country was twice as rich as Italy.” Today, he says, you can compare the per capita income of Argentina to that of Romania. “Because it didn’t grow. A country could get rich in 1900 just by producing corn and meat, but that is not true today. But it took them 100 years to realize they were becoming poor. And that is what worries me about Italy. We’re not going to starve next week. We are just going to decline, slowly, slowly, and I’m not sure what will turn that around.”

Mr. Barbera is optimistic. He is working with a bank to allow him to pay off creditors. After lengthy negotiations with the government and workers’ representatives, he has reduced his payroll to 90 employees from 120.

Best of all, he says he thinks he has found a large group of new customers in an improbable place: China, where he has been talking to a number of distributors. Given that he has been undersold by the Chinese for years, it would be a surprising twist if Chinese consumers became fans of Mr. Barbera’s fabric and his painstaking methods.

“Water from the creek,” he says, as we leave the yarn spa. “Listen. It is the sound of music.”

The sentiment seems so sincere and romantic that it sounds as if he could be kidding. But when the line elicits a laugh, Mr. Barbera’s gentle rebuke makes it plain that he is not.

“You know,” he says, with a resilient smile, “it is a hard world for poets.”