M.A.C.S. - Museo delle Attivita Cartarie e della Stampa

Subiaco was an early centre of Italian printing. Its civic museum occupies the vaults of the Rocca dei Borgia and documents the work of two German clerics who arrived in 1465.

Why it matters

In 1465, while printing was still a novelty north of the Alps, two German clerics, Arnold Pannartz and Konrad Sweynheym, carried a movable-type press into the abbey of Santa Scolastica at Subiaco and taught the valley the art of casting and composing characters. The valley tourism portal's account gives the scale of the beginning: some three hundred copies of a Latin grammar, and two hundred and seventy-five each of Lactantius, Cicero's De Oratore and Augustine's De Civitate Dei — among the first books printed on Italian soil. The two men also cut a rounder, regular typeface inspired by Latin letterforms, called the Subiaco, and with it the first Italian typography was born. The M.A.C.S. preserves and narrates that legacy, together with the paper-making industry that kept Subiaco among Italy's printing capitals for centuries.

What to notice

The museum presents the history of written communication from medieval script to industrial print. Full-scale reproductions of early presses and workshop tools stand beside machinery from the period when paper production spread through the valley. The galleries occupy the underground rooms of the Rocca dei Borgia, whose vaulted spaces once served as storerooms and prisons.

Context and history

Printing and paper made modern Subiaco. After Pannartz and Sweynheym demonstrated the craft at the abbey, the town became one of the most important printing and paper centres in Italy, and the industry gradually spread to other towns of the Aniene valley, as the portal notes, reaching as far as Tivoli. Water drove the mills, the abbey provided the scholars, and the gorge supplied the power: the same geography that had drawn Benedict's monks sustained the factories. The museum presents this history from the 1465 press to the machinery of the industrial age, reflecting Subiaco's place in the history of Italian printing.