In this Kingdom of Kongo, they make fabrics with a nap like velvet, some of them worked in velvety satin, so beautiful that nothing finer is made in Italy,” wrote the Portuguese explorer Duarte Pacheco Pereira, one of the first but certainly not the last European to wax ecstatic over the sumptuous artistic production of the political power that ruled over the vast territory that today includes part of the Republic of Congo, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.