Antica Stamperia Marchi

The Antica Stamperia Marchi in Santarcangelo preserves a tradition of hand-printing cloth with rust-coloured designs. The family workshop, established in the seventeenth century, still contains the large mangano, a wooden wheel and stone mechanism used to smooth and compact printed fabric.

Why it matters

The workshop is a rare surviving example of Romagna's rust-printing craft. Its history links household textiles with a specialised production process passed down through generations. The mangano, built in 1633, is a defining feature of the workshop and a remarkable survival of pre-industrial technology.

What to notice

Wooden blocks, or clichés, carry the patterns used on cotton, linen and hemp. The rust-based colour comes from a family recipe, and a fixing bath helps make the print permanent. Once printed, the fabric passes beneath the mangano, whose weight and rollers leave it smooth and compact. The workshop preserves about two thousand carved blocks, many dating from earlier generations of the craft.

Context and history

Rust printing spread through the Romagna countryside as a decoration for household cloth. The Marchi workshop has continued production since 1633, and its mangano was described in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert. The craft has remained in family hands, with Lara Marchi adding a line of brush-painted work in 1991. The workshop is listed in the Register of Historic Businesses of the Italian Chambers of Commerce and has received Santarcangelo's Arcangelo d'Oro award.