The Art of Type
On a recent visit to Naples, the studio stopped at Tipografia Museo, the smaller of two locations tucked into the city's historic center. For anyone fascinated by typography and letterpress printing, it is a privilege to see so much history up close: cases of hand-set type, a Heidelberg press, and beside it a Linotype, the machine that once composed entire newspapers line by line before modern typesetting made it obsolete.
On the narrower stretch of Via dell'Anticaglia, a 16th-century church holds more presses. Santa Maria della Vittoria e Santissima Trinità all'Anticaglia had sat empty for decades until Carmine Cervone, a typographer from the area whose family has worked in the trade for generations, asked the Archdiocese for permission to restore it. Not as a church, but as a letterpress museum dedicated to the craft.
Cervone's work seems especially important, since craft and its history are more significant to us than ever.
Nowness recently filmed Carmine Cervone.
