Franco Maria Ricci has a deep connection with Genoa, the city of his ancestors, which his family left after the Unification of Italy to move to Parma: this exhibition project in the Capital of Books therefore also represents a return to the origins.

Not only a publisher, but also a graphic designer and collector, Franco Maria Ricci gave life to the most prestigious brand in modern publishing and conceived the largest bamboo labyrinth in the world, at the heart of which are both the editorial office of the publishing house and the his vast art collection. A lover of beauty and master of style, Ricci was a point of reference for Italian and international taste; his aesthetic choices as an editor and designer gave life to a "manner" that still remains today among the indelible signs of visual culture.

The exhibition itinerary develops in seven rooms which are structured like a dead end, so that the first and last coincide, as in the most ancient labyrinths. The entrance room itself, set up to resemble one of the historic bookshops that Ricci had disseminated throughout the world, hosts a selection of works dedicated to Genoa and Liguria, a tribute to the city and the publisher's origins. The subsequent rooms are dedicated to the main series published by Ricci, reconstructing the career of the great publisher through the works on display: the precious volumes of his master typographer Giambattista Bodoni and the Encyclopédie degl'Illuministi, the works of art that come from the Ricci collection (from Luca Cambiaso to Antonio Ligabue) and the history of the FMR magazine, defined by Federico Fellini not by chance as "the black pearl of Italian publishing".

Visitors can also admire the important graphic works created by Ricci in the Sixties and Seventies, among which the logos for Poste Italiane, Cariparma, Alitalia, Smeg stand out, then the covers of famous series such as I signs of man, bound in silk with the gold impressions, The Library of Babel, with the portraits of the writers drawn by the pencil of Tullio Pericoli, and The blue library, with its characteristic sugar-paper blue colour. And again, an entire room will be dedicated to the FMR magazine, with its iconic covers and "the invention of black" which, unexpectedly for the time, envelops the images creating unpredictable contrasts with them, also by virtue of their perfect contouring .

The staging of the exhibition, curated by Maddalena Casalis, with a strong scenographic impact, is enriched by unpublished videos and images that tell of the meetings, turning points and crucial moments in the publisher's life as well as his unmistakable stylistic trait.