Graphic designer, editor, art collector, passionate bibliophile, builder of labyrinths, Franco Maria Ricci, weakened by a long illness, died of a heart attack in his home in Fontanellato, in the province of Parma.
He was 82 years old, most of which he spent in search of Beauty: it is no coincidence that 'Ephemere - The inevitable beauty' is the title of the documentary that the team of 'his' Labirinto della Masone had dedicated to him for his 80th birthday. Born in Parma on 2 December 1937, Franco Maria Ricci began his business in 1963. A great friend of Jorge Luis Borges, he will build the Masone Labyrinth in Fontanellato, the largest in the world, which also includes monumental buildings and houses a prestigious collection of art and books, also to honor the promise made to the Argentine writer. Struck by his encounter with the work of Giambattista Bodoni, Ricci began his career with an anastatic reprint of the Typographical Manual, a work that cannot be found even in antiques, in three volumes issued in 900 numbered copies, on Fabriano paper and bound in black leather. In 1965 the Franco Maria Ricci publishing house was born. And in 1972 Ricci begins the printing of the great Encyclopédie de Diderot et d'Alembert and at the same time creates his series of art volumes: Quadreria, Segni dell'Uomo. In 1977 'La Biblioteca di Babele' was born, directed by Borges, published in Italian, French and English, which includes rare or little-known titles by great writers such as Chesterton, Henry James, Jaques Cazotte, Giovanni Papini. But the great success came in 1982 when Ricci, together with Laura Casalis and some excellent collaborators such as Giulio Confalonieri, Massimo Listri, Vittorio Sgarbi and Giovanni Mariotti created the art magazine that would mark the publishing house's greatest success: FMR, which it will soon become a magazine of great circulation, printed all over the world in four different editions, Italian, English, French, Spanish and defined by Fellini as 'The black pearl', published until 2004.