The 7th International Conference on Watermarks in Digital Databases was held in Verona, Italy, this year, and on the last day of the conference, we went to a paper mill in Toscolano-Maderno, near Lake Garda. The paper mill is situated in a narrow valley with a river that feeds into in the south-west corner of the lake. In the valley, called valle delle cartiere (paper mill valley), paper was produced in dozens of mills between the second half of the fourteenth century and 1962. The valley’s “golden age” was during the Venetian domination from 1426 until 1797. A document from 1608, for example, mentions 160 mill wheels and ca. 500 workers.
A museum was established in the mill of Maina Inferiore, where the production of both handmade and machine-made paper is explained with original and reconstructed equipment. The troughs for retting[1], for example, are original, including remnants of the perforated tiles at the bottom of the troughs. A paper maker shows how handmade paper was made, and we also had the possibility to try ourselves.
The museum houses an archive, which was of particular interest to us paper historians, not least because a lot of paper from the area was used for the documents. In some documents we saw wrapping paper used for endleaves, and couched pasteboard as boards in bindings. A watermark that is typical for writing paper from the Toscolano area is the lion. Hopefully, the watermarks found in the archive will be added to digital databases soon!
Further reading:
Paper museum Toscolano: https://www.valledellecartiere.it/en/
Programme and abstracts of the 7th International Conference on Watermarks in Digital Collections: https://www.paperhistory.org/News/#bernstein7
[1] Rags, to which water and lime are added, are left to rot until the fibres begin to break down.