On Thursday, 1 February of this year 2018, the Gruppo Seniores of the Perugia CAI (with the guidance, too, of Roberta Biondi of the Fabriano CAI) walked the “Trail of Paper”; nothing so grand-sounding as the mythical Silk Road or the historic Salt Road (the Salaria) or other famous routes, but a short thematic hiking route that, in less than ten kilometers, lets one rediscover the places where the production of paper at Fabriano took place, and still takes place today. The trail, laid out and waymarked by the Fabriano CAI, sets out in spirit from the Paper Museum, the place devoted to handing down the historical memory of the working techniques, winds along the course of the river Giano and joins in a sort of continuum the ancient paper mills of the 13th century, the workshops of the 18th century, and the present-day production sites.
But in its history the “Trail of Paper” is much longer. Passing through Fabriano, it made of the town for centuries a nerve center, generating and shaping a city in which other important stories then easily took root, where many other paths passed and intersected, one of which, at the beginning of the 1900s, also passed through the Perugia Section of the CAI.
Let us return to Fabriano: Faber and Janus, smith and the river Giano. This is one of the hypotheses put forward about the etymology of Fabriano, perhaps fanciful, but certainly expressive of the historical character of this little town: the skill, the application of the faber, of the craftsman, who, exploiting his own intelligence and the (driving) force of the river water in an innovative way, creates well-being for himself and for his city.
But let us proceed in order. Fabriano is not extremely ancient. The first nucleus, called Castelvecchio, was perhaps founded in 411, and here part of the population of the destroyed Roman towns took refuge, such as Attidium (“Attidium mater Fabriani”) and Tuficum. Much later are the first historical mentions, which go back to 1040 and, together with the Castrum vetus, also cite a Castrum novum (or Podium), walled, fortified boroughs that legend holds to have been separated by a bridge and by discord. Thus the historian Scevolini presents the situation in a chronicle of the 16th century:

“Since among the people of these two places, so close that only a little valley passed between them, there were continual discords and enmities, so that every day they were up in arms, as tends to be the custom of neighbors; a good old man, much esteemed in both of the aforesaid castles, who down on the river Giano, a little lower in the valley, where the old bridge still stands, plied the trade of the smithy, often brought them to agreement, though again they would return to trading affronts and injuries among themselves; nonetheless the good old man worked so hard to compose them together that in the end he attained his intent, and reduced them to making of the two castles a single one, and, in this way, a true and perpetual peace having been composed by which, as the proverb goes, small things succeed wonderfully, they began to spread and to make the town that they then called Fabriano.”

The smith, under the name of Mastro Marino, entered the popular imagination and the coat of arms of Fabriano, where he still strikes the anvil upon a three-arched bridge and where the motto stands out: “Faber in amne cudit, olim cartam undique fudit”. This is the translation: The smith strikes upon the river, once he scattered paper everywhere. But what is its meaning? To begin with, in the motto of Fabriano the paper could not fail to be mentioned.
As is well known, it was the Chinese who invented it, with wholly vegetable fibers, as early as the second century after Christ; the emperors used it above all for banknotes (Marco Polo reminds us of this too) and for centuries kept its manufacturing techniques jealously secret. But already in the 7th century, reaching Samarkand, these were learned by the Arabs, and through them they arrived in the Near East and in Arab Europe. How they arrived at Fabriano is still a mystery; there is talk of Arab prisoners diverted from the port of Ancona toward the interior, but it is only a hypothesis. Arab paper, whose raw material was rags of hemp and linen, was worked exactly like that of the Chinese (and as it is still worked by hand at Fabriano for fine paper), but it had a defect: for sizing, a starch glue made from rice and wheat was used, which made the paper perishable through the growth of microorganisms in it, so much so that several authorities banned the use of cotton-rag paper for public deeds, which therefore still had to be drawn up on parchment.
And here, when we are around the 13th century, the two great and fundamental innovations introduced by the master papermakers of Fabriano come into play:

1 - the invention of the multiple-hammer stamping mill, driven by a camshaft moved by a water wheel, which transforms the rotary motion into an alternating motion and makes it possible to prepare a quantity of rag pulp infinitely greater than the stone mill, in a much shorter time.

2 - the use of animal-hide glue in place of vegetable glue, which allows a better sizing and smoothing of the sheet and makes it resistant to the action of microorganisms.

These two inventions which, as rarely happens, gave the product quantity and quality at the same time, together with the new historical context of the rise, over the old feudal structures, first of the Guilds of Arts and Crafts and then of the entrepreneurship of the Chiavelli, made Fabriano and its district (Esanatoglia on the Esino, Pioraco on the Potenza, ..), for at least the two or three centuries that followed, the paper capital of Europe.
Faber cartam undique fudit: everywhere Fabriano exports its quality paper, recognizable by the watermark, itself discovered at Fabriano, perhaps by chance, but which immediately took on the function of identifying the various master papermakers and thus the quality paper.
This primacy Fabriano tried to maintain also with suitable decrees and statutes issued for reasons of “public utility”, in which it was forbidden to erect new paper mills within a radius of 50 miles of the city, and above all to teach the secrets of the art to outsiders (this was a frequent practice: think of the protection of the secrets for producing rasps at Villamagina near Sellano); the penalties ranged from fines to the confiscation of all one’s goods.
Beyond the materials, the secrets concerned above all the skill of the lavorenti, that is, of those who with the mould drew from the vat the right quantity of pulp for felting, and of the modularo, that is, of that strategic figure who built or repaired the moulds so that they would not undergo deformation during felting. And so, thanks to the intelligence and entrepreneurship of the faber, now identified with the master papermaker, Fabriano paper establishes itself as the only one to which humankind entrusts the written word in order to communicate and hand down its thought and the works of its ingenuity, completely replacing parchment and any other support to write on. A question arises spontaneously: without Fabriano paper, would there have been the invention of Gutenberg’s movable-type printing, which opened a new epoch in communication and thus in the history of humanity?
Let us take up the “trail of paper” again with the words of Aurelio Zonchi (from Le antiche carte fabrianesi alla esposizione generale di Torino, 1884): “If Fabriano cannot be given the glory of having worked the first linen paper, it certainly cannot be denied that of having manufactured so much of it from the beginning of the 14th century, and so on, as to fill Italy and to supply the other nations abundantly, in particular Switzerland and France”. It is thus that Fabriano became the symbol of the first European paper and the reference center of Western paper. But despite protectionist and strongly coercive laws for those who exported the knowledge and the trade of the papermaker, with the ever-greater demand for good paper the diaspora of the fine Fabriano master papermakers toward other cities and other countries soon began: not only in Italy did every little state, or duchy, or seigneury want its own paper mill, but mills also arose in France, in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, and the master papermakers of Fabriano were sought after and well paid.

And so, though the fame remained, the production of paper at Fabriano went on slowing down, and the paper mills, owned by nobles, remained small and family-run. If one then adds that at the beginning of the ^‘600s in Holland, where a sufficient hydraulic driving force was not available, they invented a machine consisting of a cylinder with blades for working the raw material (rags), which in one day supplied as much “pisto” as eight stamping mills in eight days, one realizes how the centers of paper production shifted elsewhere. In Italy the machines called “Dutch” were slow to be introduced, partly because they required investments that the small owners were not able or willing to make (also because there was still a great deal of cheap labor), but above all because the use of the Dutch machine would have required a greater availability of rags, to be found even in more distant places (with rising costs), and would then have required a wider market in which to place the paper, which the small paper mills no longer had [Concerning the age-old and problematic collection of rags, those who belong to my generation, in the era before that of consumerism, perhaps still remember in the villages the passing of the rag-and-bone men, whose calls of solicitation alternated with those of the knife grinders].

And here, in the second half of the 1700s, an extraordinary figure of a “faber” managed to bring Fabriano back to the center of the “trail of paper”, which had in truth by now become very vast and branching. He is Pietro Miliani (1744-1817), son of Niccolò and of Rosalba Loreti, “a delicate paintress”. After his first studies, he was set to work in the local paper mills, where his design and managerial abilities emerged forcefully, so much so that in 1782 he founded the Miliani paper mills. His innovations were once again quality and quantity together: he designed and installed “Dutch”-type machines (both in his own mills and in others), perfected the production process so as to be able to control the quality of the product in progress, and produced papers of the very highest quality, among them wove tissue paper made in the moulds for its perfect execution, and then papers for the needs of drawing, of watercolor painting and of the printing of copperplate engravings. His products became famous and unsurpassed once more in Europe, so much so as to beat the foreign competition; and famous too remained the collaboration and the relationship of mutual esteem with Giambattista Bodoni , “the king of typographers, the typographer of kings”, most active in Parma: their respective skills brought together marked a decisive turning point in the course of the art of printing and of paper in Europe. Among Miliani’s clients there was also the famous engraver Francesco Rosaspina, who made a fine portrait of Pietro, used in 1994 for a commemorative postage stamp. In short, Pietro Miliani brought the paper capital of Europe back to Fabriano; as an entrepreneur he planned the purchase of the paper mills operating in the district, an ambitious project that was carried through by his descendants, first by his sons Niccolò, Tommaso and Rinaldo, then by Giuseppe (1816-1890), son of Rinaldo, and finally by Giovan Battista (1856-1937), son of Giuseppe. There are many publications and conference proceedings in which one may explore this subject further (beginning with the article by Ulisse Mannucci “Le cartiere di Fabriano da Pietro Miliani ad oggi”, available on the website “Fabriano Storica”.

Marcello Ragni was a lecturer in Mathematical Analysis at the University of Perugia from 1973 to 2011. His main hobby is hiking. Since 1992 he has been a member of the Perugia Section of the Club Alpino Italiano, where he was a board member for nine years, president of the Gruppo Seniores, and earned the title of Sectional Hiking Leader. He is currently the editor of the online magazine In…cammino of the Gruppo Seniores.