Fabriano: Museo della Carta e della Filigrana

Fabriano’s paper and watermark museum is housed in the former monastery next to the fourteenth-century church of Santa Lucia (or San Domenico). We would have loved to have visited that church, as our travel guide promised gorgeous frescoes by the local painter Allegretto Nuzi (ca. 1315-1373). However, it also stated that the church is hardly ever open. In fact, an employee of the museum told us the church had been closed permanently because of earthquake damage. Unfortunately, earthquakes are anything but a rare occurrence in the Marche. That same employee then completely brightened up our day by giving us a truly awe-inspiring tour of the museum. The highlight was a demonstration of the various machines that were used in the past to make paper from rags. A papermaker subsequently demonstrated how the fibres won from this process were placed in a frame and then turned into paper with a watermark. There was also an opportunity to join a workshop to make our own paper, but we ultimately decided to skip it in favour of an excellent lunch around the corner at L’Angoletto Bistrot.

Papyrus and parchment

The history of paper goes back many centuries. In Antiquity it was still unknown in Europe. Greeks and Romans wrote their texts on all sorts of materials, ranging from tree bark to tablets made of wood or wax. Texts were also inscribed on marble or metal. But by far the most popular material was papyrus, a material that – in spite of giving its name to it – is completely different from the paper we know today. Papyrus is made from a wetland sedge that grows in the Nile area of Egypt. Directly after the harvest the stem of the plant is cut into narrow strips which are then wettened and placed on top of each other horizontally and vertically. The water serves as a sort of natural glue. After the sheet of papyrus has been created, it is pressed and then – if necessary – the surface is smoothed. Now the sheet is ready for writing. Although it was relatively cheap, papyrus had a number of disadvantages. One was that it was not very durable. In a damp climate such as that of Roman Britain or the Germanic provinces it quickly decayed, while in a hot and dry province such as Egypt it was preserved very well. Moreover, papyrus could only be used in the form of a scroll attached to two sticks. The scroll could be up to ten metres long, so it was not easy to browse through the text.

An alternative writing material was parchment. Its name derives from the city of Pergamum in present-day Turkey, where according to tradition the material had been invented. Parchment is basically animal skin. While texts could be written on sheepskin, goatskin and donkey skin, the best skin was undeniably calfskin. Parchment was very durable and firm, so firm that both sides of it could be written on. It could also be reused fairly easily by scraping off the old text and replacing it with new words. Thanks to modern technologies the old texts on so-called palimpsests can be recovered, which has led to the rediscovery of texts from Antiquity that were considered lost. However, the foremost reason that around the fourth century parchment began to push out papyrus seems to have been that parchment pages with text could easily be turned into a book, or as it was called back then: a codex. A codex made browsing through a text much simpler, which mattered in the case of Christian texts referring to previous passages. Scholars have therefore explicitly associated the rise of parchment with the rise of Christianity from the time of the emperor Constantine (306-337).

Real paper

It is generally accepted that paper was invented in China during the Han dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE). In this respect, the museum works with the year 105, but that can obviously only be a rough estimation. Tree bark, rotan, fish nets, seaweed and bamboo were turned into a pulp that could be used for the production of sheets of paper. From China papermaking spread to Korea (ca. 500) and Japan (ca. 610), but also westward towards Nepal (ca. 650) and India (ca. 850). In the seventh century a new religion had been born in the Arabian Peninsula: Islam. In the one and a half centuries that followed, Islam’s adherents would conquer and colonise huge territories. The Arabs are said to have learned the art of papermaking from the Chinese after defeating them in 751 in a battle fought near the river Talas (somewhere in the border area between Kirgizstan and Kazakhstan). According to tradition the knowledge was passed on to the Arabs by Chinese prisoners of war. This is a rather strange story, as it fairly unlikely that many soldiers in the Chinese army moonlighted as papermakers. Perhaps it is better to assume that after the military confrontation an exchange of ideas and technologies took place in the border area between the Islamic and Chinese worlds.

In any case, Samarkand (in modern Uzbekistan) soon became a centre of the paper industry. The city was rich in water (very important for the production of paper), while on the fields around Samarkand flax and hemp were grown, two important raw materials (if the Museo della Carta e della Filigrana has taught us one thing, then it must be that basically any plant can be used to make paper). From Uzbekistan paper was spread to Baghdad (ca. 793), Damascus (ca. 850) and Cairo (ca. 880). Via North Africa – which was entirely under Muslim rule – paper reached the Iberian Peninsula, where the emerging Christian kingdoms were busy pushing the forces of Islam back to the south. In passing they also learned how to make paper. Paper was, moreover, known on Sicily. The island had been an Islamic emirate since the ninth century, but between 1061 and 1091 it had been conquered by the Normans. Neither King Roger II of Sicily (1130-1154), nor his grandson Frederick II of Hohenstaufen were much impressed by paper. They were afraid that it would quickly decay and both preferred parchment.

Fabriano and the paper industry

The rise of paper in Europe, however, proved to be unstoppable. Rulers with cold feet could do nothing to prevent his. As early as the 1260s, a hydraulic (i.e. water-powered) paper mill was active in Fabriano and twenty years later there were already eight papermakers in the town. The museum uses the year 1284 as the year that the local paper industry was born. In 1326 the Pia Università dei Cartai was founded, the papermakers guild. It is the only medieval guild in Fabriano still in existence. In the fourteenth century Fabriano was able to produce a million sheets of paper annually. Paper now often went the other way: the quality of paper produced in Fabriano was so good that it became hugely popular in the Islamic world. It should be noted that the Muslims were less happy with the watermarks that papermakers added to their products (see below). These often consisted of Christian symbols. In 1409 this even led to a fatwa on the use of European paper.

It is not easy to explain why Fabriano of all places became the centre of the paper industry in Italy, nor is it entirely clear how the technology arrived here in the first place. The museum has a map that connects Damascus and Fabriano with an arrow, but the art of papermaking may just as well have been imported to Italy from Spain, or from Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire to the port city of Ancona in the Marche and subsequently to Fabriano in the hinterland. What is certain is that Fabriano met the two most essential conditions for making paper: it had ample water (from the fast-flowing river Giano) and sufficient raw materials. In those days rags were the most important materials. Clothes were often made of plant material, such as flax and hemp. A water-powered mill in its turn powered multiple hammers, which beat the rags to pulp and reduced them to the constituent fibres. These fibres were then turned into sheets of paper by scooping the pulp onto a frame, shaking it, pressing it and lastly hanging it out to dry.

According to the Museo della Carta e della Filigrana, the machine with multiple hammers is one of three Italian inventions that made Fabriano paper so good. The second invention is the gelatine-based glue that was applied to the paper after production. The application of the glue turned blotting paper – which just sucks up ink and spreads it randomly – into proper writing paper. Lastly, the watermark is said to have been invented in Fabriano. Tradition claims that this happened by accident – an irregularity in the frame – but the result was very useful to establish the identity of the papermaker. From Fabriano and Italy paper was spread to Northern Europe and then North America too. Since 1428 it has been known in the Netherlands. Our guide surprised us with a Dutch invention that had been put on display in the museum: a Hollander. This is a machine, invented in the seventeenth century, that does not beat rags to pulp with hammers, but cuts them into little pieces with knifes in a drum. The Hollander produced a better fibre and, as a consequence, a better quality of paper.

Nowadays paper is no longer made from rags. Rags have been replaced by wood pulp as the most important material. The invention of the process to make paper from wood pulp is attributed to the German Friedrich Gottlob Keller (1816-1895) and the Canadian Charles Fenerty (1821-1892). To me it seems hardly a coincidence that both men came from countries with dense forests. Today papermaking in Fabriano is no longer a craft. It has become a real industry, with the paper factories operating far from the centre of town. Most Europeans will probably not realise that they put pieces of Fabriano into their wallets on a daily base. They should know that Euro banknotes are all printed on paper from this charming town in the Marche.

Sources: for the history of paper, I have made use of the information panels in the museum and of Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence (2021), p. 26-31, p. 99 and p. 152-155.