Museo Civico della Stampa - Liber

Mondovì has a rare claim in Italian printing history: the first dated book printed in Piedmont was produced here in 1472. The Civic Printing Museum, reopened in January 2022 inside the renewed Orfane complex, presents five centuries of type, presses, linotypes and the transition from lead to digital printing.

Why it matters

The museum preserves a collection of printing machines and equipment. Printing is closely connected with Mondovì's history, from the incunable presses of the fifteenth century to the twentieth-century print shops that served the Monregalese territory. The museum is the ground-floor engine of the wider Liber project (Polo Culturale delle Orfane), a book-themed cultural redevelopment supported significantly by Fondazione CRC. The Liber scheme reads the whole building as a single ascent — from the 'full' rhombus of metal type at ground level, through the printed page on the first floor, to the 'empty' space reserved for digital creation at the top, a deliberate architecture of subtracted weight.

What to notice

Six ground-floor rooms cover typographic printing, movable type, mechanical type production and composition, developments in printing, artistic printing and image reproduction, and the transition from lead to digital. Two teaching workshops extend the museum's account of the trade. The collection includes historical and screw presses, linotypes, cases of movable lead type and a reconstruction of a family-run print shop.

The exhibition combines recordings of presses, audiovisual material and 3D graphics explaining how the machines worked. Its mascot, Type, accompanies interpretation for younger audiences. Upstairs the Liber project continues under the names Liber Carta and Liber Aria: the Sala Belloni, a graphics workshop, and spaces destined for the Civic Library's historical collection and cultural events.

Context and history

The museum occupies the former Collegio delle Orfane, a seventeenth-century complex that served the Discalced Carmelites and functioned from 1802 to 1927 as an orphanage college. Its conversion into a museum and cultural pole returned a substantial historic building to public use, with the reopening of the renovated museum in January 2022.

The choice of subject is rooted in the city's past: in 1472, printers working in Mondovì produced the first book printed in Piedmont bearing a date, a milestone in the city's history. Five centuries later the museum closes the circle by narrating the passage from lead type to digital and multimedia communication — a technology story told in the city where the region's printed book began.