Market day in Narni

Buying handmade paper

On the way home from Mass today, we popped into the centro to see if the medieval market was on, and sure enough. I thought you’d like to see:

The market is divided between people who make more or less modern things - or things that can be used in a modern context - and actual medieval re-enactor things, like the clothes and headdresses they wear, in case you want to join in. Quite a few were just there to show how things were made back in the day, like the chap doing medieval egg tempera paintings. He and I had a lively chat. Fun to talk shop in (my broken) Italian.

Most of the people setting up stalls in the main piazza - that sell handmade leather and cloth goods, pottery, wooden toy swords, bows and arrows, drums, flutes, paper, jewellery, soap etc - are not from Narni, but have going around a circuit of Umbria and Le Marche medieval festas as their summer job. Narni’s medieval festa only has a market for one day of its two weeks, but there’s a bigger festa in Bevagna where the market is on for a week or more in June:

It’s a festival of medieval crafts, games, music, sports and plays. And I really want to go this year.

I splashed out 50 Euros on a hand-made watercolour sketchbook, with beautiful 100% cotton hand made 300gsm watercolour paper in a leather case and three full sheets of the same paper in a roll. I think it was probably his biggest sale today, because he threw in a little envelope of lovely postcard size pieces of the same paper.

Last year I bought a few sheets of his lower gsm writing paper (he also makes high quality sheep and kid parchment) and it was beautiful. Last year I also had a long chat with him, and he recommended coming to the Bevagna Mercato delle Gaite, and also visiting the town he lives in, Fabriano, where high quality paper for art and archival record-keeping has been made since the 15th century.

He told me that for paper-nerds, Fabriano is the place to go. They have a paper museum, full of cool old medieval technology things. One of the world’s last water-driven wooden hammer mills is still in use there, used to pulverise the cotton fabric for making the paper.

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