Il Museo della Carta e della Filigrana a Fabriano

THE PAPER AND WATERMARK MUSEUM OF FABRIANO (with English subtitles)
The fountain pen dances; the printing press prints. Manual or mechanical, they personify perfection with movements that hypnotize. The subtlety of the hand, the energy of the machine: though the playing field is the same.
Paper is the most delicate and resistant base invented to withhold the software of humanity. Thoughts, ideas, emotions, languages created, transformed into symbols and then entrusted to a sheet of paper. A technology that was founded in China; and following the caravan routes of times past, arrives among the Arabs to then finally land in Italy. Its journey ends aptly at the foothills of the Marches Apennines, in a city along the riverbanks of the Giano river, where the fuel ‘water’ of the medieval industry abounds.
The city is Fabriano.
The world of printing is in continuous evolution (for example in the 1980’s Linotype is replaced with photo-composition); but in one way or another it all comes back down to its landing site – that is – on a sheet of paper. Nowadays if it can be said that the production method has become industrialized, then the journey that unfolds in the Fabriano Museum is in itself a history book of the technique, of the art, of the style but above all of a way of thinking.