PARMA - The scent of inks and the rustle of papers, wandering among punches and matrices, manuscripts and prints to discover all the secrets of an ancient book factory and its famous creator: it is part of the general renewal implemented in recent months at the Nuova Pilotta in Parma by the director Simone Verde, the new Bodonian Museum that will enrich the cultural offer of the complex starting next April 19, when it will reopen its doors in a completely renewed guise.
Founded by Angela Pezzana in 1842 and in fact the oldest printing museum in the world, the museum institution tells and celebrates the figure of the typographer Giambattista Bodoni, born in Saluzzo in 1740, whose refined and elegant craftsmanship is considered an excellence Italian and European.
Thanks to a series of structural and plant engineering interventions that began last September and are now in the pipeline with the museum layout (the total investment was approximately 760,000 euros, entirely covered by Mibact), the Museum is now ready to facing the 21st century and addressing a wider audience, including young people and not just experts.
Conceived in a radically different way than before, both as regards the arrangement of the spaces and the enhancement of the collections, the Bodonian Museum from the top floor of the building will move to the ground floor of the Pilotta, with entrance and exit from the arcaded street, in the former premises destined for the magazine of the Palatine Library periodicals.
The institution will be divided into four main sections: in the first, "Bodoni, Parma and Europe", a multimedia table with the map of the Duchy and its links with the European courts will reveal the economic and social aspects of the period, with particular with regard to the location of the paper mills, the places of life and the cultural path of Bodoni (Saluzzo, Rome, Parma, Turin, Milan), its relations with neoclassicism.
The largest section called "The book factory" will tell all the phases of Bodoni's work, from the foundry, with the punches and dies, the casting forms and the relative characters, to the reproduction, with examples of typography manuscripts, the compositor and the advantage.
This will be followed by "La stampa", which will give the opportunity to admire proofs on paper and parchment, copies on silk, and the press (a reconstruction of 1940), put back into operation also for educational purposes, and "L'Illustration and the binding" , which will also show the copper plates relating to the Bodonian editions.
Bodoni's masterpieces will also find a place in the exhibition itinerary, with particular reference to those sent for the universal exhibition in Paris in 1811, as well as manuals.
Finally, in a large library there will be "The myth of Bodoni", the collection of Bodoni volumes, including those of the Palatine collection still with original bindings, in order to document Bodoni's bibliophilia.
"For 3 and a half years we have been carrying out an activity of redevelopment, rethinking and remuse of the rooms and collections of the entire complex of the Pilotta.
The Bodonian Museum is a flagship for us: but now there was a need for a new concept of museum, to enhance the precious collection ", explains Simone Verde, director of Nuova Pilotta, underlining that" protection, redevelopment, enhancement are achieved through a re-functionalization that regenerates the heritage of the past ".
"We hope to be able to make the inauguration on April 19: on that occasion the new graphics of the Gazzetta di Parma will also be unveiled, reset to the Bodonian characters", adds the director.
(HANDLE).