Printing Museum

The Printing Museum of Jesi was founded in 2000 to document the long and important printing tradition of this town, which was the first in the Marche region to witness the birth of a printing house and the printing of the first editions of the "Divine Comedy" in 1472 by Federico de' Conti. The museum is housed in the 16th-century Palazzo Pianetti Vecchio and extends along a wide and bright room, where presses and printing machines from different periods as well as rare books of great value are shown, in a visually striking and charming setting. The museum path highlights and investigates the two aspects characterising the invention that changed the history of human knowledge: printing machines and books as final products.

The volumes on display retrace the history of printed books, from incunabula to beautiful 19th-century examples, showing their extrinsic features: title page, format, adorned initials, printer's marks, bindings and illustrations. Among them some Aldine editions are shown as well as some examples of a rare collection of notices, gazettes and almanacs, a wonderful example of the Bodoni's edition of the Iliad dated 1808 and many others.

Presses, printing machines and printing tools such as composing sticks, galleys, matrices and an interesting collection of movable types preserved in their original boxes retrace the history of printing from the technological point of view, from the 18th-century platen press made from wood to the flat-bed press equipped with a cylinder, from handset movable typesetting to mechanical typesetting with a Linotype machine.

The material on display is of local origin. As a matter of fact presses, machines and printing tools belong to press houses of Jesi or neighbouring villages. The museum is lively and dynamic and has great potential. Some printing presses and art printing presses, as well as their tools, are still working and are at the disposal of both schools, for which educational workshops are arranged, and of those who want to learn about the pressing techniques or the ancient printing arts (xylography, chalcography and lithography).

The museum also holds the archives of the printing houses from which the machines come from. These archives are consulted by students and scholars and are an inexhaustible source of news and information about public, political and social life as well as private activities reflecting over 100 years of history.