Paper Museum of Pescia

The mission of the Pescia Paper Museum is to preserve and pass on six centuries of tradition, spreading the culture and knowledge of one of the oldest communication tools: paper. The museum is housed in the eighteenth-century Le Carte paper mill and is one of the most important monuments of industrial archeology in Italy and, both for its state of conservation and for the presence of all the eighteenth-nineteenth-century production plants, it can be considered one of the most significant examples of successful conservation at an international level. The building has the typical structure of the so-called “Genoese-Tuscan” paper model: the ground floor, with cross vaults, dedicated to the preparation of the mixture and the creation of the sheets of paper; the first floor occupied by the "workshop" for the finishing phases and by the homes of the families of the paper makers; the top floor, with large windows equipped with adjustable closures, the so-called "spreader", reserved for drying the sheets.

The Museum holds about 7,000 pieces which include paper shapes, filigree waxes, punches, metal sheets and stamps. And 700 linear meters of documents from the historic business archive of the Ancient Paper Mills Magnani of Pescia is one of the most important in Italy, both in terms of size and quantity and quality of papers conserved. It is a complete archive, with documents ranging from the eighteenth century to the early years of the twenty-first, which allows us to reconstruct the economic activity of the paper mill and, through it, the links with a large part of Italian industry and many foreign operators and states .