Italy

Italy’s rope courses go back to the early 2000s. In a 2025 feature, Il Post reported that the first Italian shibari courses appeared then but stayed very niche until about ten years before the article, that interest grew further over the last five years as images of shibari spread on social media, and that the biggest wave came after the pandemic. Practitioners also linked a rise in interest to the novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which they criticized. Tenshiko told the paper that when she started, about fifteen years earlier, there was very little formal training.

Schools in the larger cities

Courses with a continuous program grew up in the big cities. In Rome, the Scuola di Bondage says it officially began in 2011 and teaches through base, intermediate and advanced courses, single-topic and private lessons, guest workshops, free open days and a free-practice Rope Space. Il Post reported that whyKnot has hosted lessons, events and workshops there since 2023. In Milan, Tenshiko and her husband Kirigami founded Rope Tales in 2016 and run School of Rope as their project for teaching Japanese bondage. Their Yugen Studio, opened in 2020, hosts rope classes, shows, photo shoots and community gatherings, publishes its own magazine and works with Japanese teachers, performers and photographers. Turin has Peony Studio, which runs workshops in the Kinbaku LuXuria style, the BDSM school FunLab Torino, whose calendar lists a rope evening every Monday, and the community space Spazio Corde; its guide tells their stories.

A wider map

Il Post’s survey reaches well beyond these three cities. It describes Shibari Loft, on the outskirts of Treviso, as having more than 500 members, and names schools and groups of varying size in Trieste, Brescia, Ravenna, Catania, Palermo, Ragusa, Naples and Turin, as well as Rome and Milan. Rope also appears outside dedicated venues: the paper noted performances at festivals, Pride events and music nights, among them a shibari performance at the Halloween festival of Borgo a Mozzano in Tuscany in 2024.

Lineage

Italy holds a place in the Naka line in Europe through Riccardo Wildties. A school abroad that teaches his Kinbaku LuXuria style describes him as the ichiban deshi (first disciple) of Naka Akira and its own lead instructor as a certified educator in that system. That story, and how it runs on to France and Prague, is told in Kinbaku in Europe, with the Turin guide covering the local studio in that line. Most of the school pages cited here are in Italian, while Yugen Studio presents its program in English. For help comparing schools, see Choosing a teacher.