Ragtime in Amalfi

Long ago, the eunuch Ts’ai Lun, counsellor to the Emperor of China, annoyed that his bamboo tablet stubbornly resisted the ink on his brush, stormed from his veranda into a palace courtyard, where a stout washer-woman with a large paddle had just finished pummelling a quantity of soiled clothing in a wooden tub of water. Ts’ai Lun paused to compose himself beside the tub, musing on how threadbare his robes and linen trousers had become recently, when he suddenly realized the leftover water in the tub was completely obscured by a floating layer of cloth fibres. Ts’ai Lun stared at the washtub with a wild surmise …

Yes, I know. It’s only a legend. Still, history does credit Ts’ai Lun with the invention of paper. He developed techniques for extracting fibres from rags and scraps, and for pressing, drying, and consolidating the paper with animal glue. His invention was one of the most important in history. Paper became the best, most efficient vehicle for spreading knowledge, literature, and culture around the world, replacing stone tablets, clay tablets, wax tablets, silk cloth, papyrus, parchment, and vellum, among many other things. And, bearing the dubious promises of various governments, it even served as a lightweight and portable medium of exchange – paper money.

*Wooden pistons with claw-like hammers are driven by a giant water-powered wheel*

The knowledge of papermaking techniques spread within China, and eventually, paper mills appeared in Korea, and then in Japan (brought from Korea by a Buddhist monk). By the 7th century papermaking had been established in India. Arabs were producing paper by the 8th century. Italy’s maritime republics – Amalfi, Genoa, Pisa and Venice – traded extensively with the Arabs, and by the late 12th century, paper mills began to appear in Italy.

Amalfi, it seems, soon produced a particularly fine paper called Carta Bambagina, a name perhaps suggested by bambagia, Italian for cotton wool. Production of Carta Bambagina certainly began before 1231, because that was when Emperor Frederick II banned its use for state documents – he preferred animal-skin vellum. However, Amalfi paper became the standard of quality in much of Europe, with the Vatican as a regular customer, as well as later rulers in southern Italy, such as the house of Anjou, the Bourbons, and the Spanish Viceroys of Sicily and Naples.

*Water from the tumbling Canneto River powers the mill*

When the arts of papermaking first arrived in southern Italy, Amalfi enjoyed an advantage over other locales – the Canneto River tumbles down noisily from the mountains above the town. (In Italian, it’s called the Torrente Canneto.) By that time, large-scale production of paper required lots of clean water, and plenty more to power the mill machinery. The Canneto was up to the task – it powered as many as 20 mills in the 18th century. Even as late as the 20th century, 16 mills were still active; but in 1954, the river swept away, in hours, what it had helped create over centuries. A disastrous flood destroyed 13 of the mills. Today only the Amatruda mill still produces fine Amalfi hand-made paper, albeit with modern equipment.

But there is another mill, whose last modernization was – well, a long, long time ago. It’s still in working order though – the ancient machines and techniques live on in the Museo della Carta, an intact 13th century mill. Nicolo Milano, whose family operated it until the 1954 flood, decided to preserve the historic mill and all its machinery; he founded the Fondazione Museo della Carta in 1969, to which he donated the mill in 1971.

Via delle Cartiere (Paper Mill Street), lined with towering grey cliffs, leads to the museum. The constant sound of rushing water announces the Canneto’s unseen presence. The museum’s small entrance building is built snugly against the cliffs; but passing through it with our guide Maddalena, we entered a series of great rough-hewn, cave-like rooms carved into the cliffs, where the Nibelungen would have been right at home.

There was a giant stone basin lined with majolica tiles, filled with a sort of grey-green soup. Nearby, a row of giant wooden pistons, with metal teeth at their business ends, were attached to a huge wooden camshaft turned by a waterwheel. It seems that great piles of used fabrics – linen, cotton, hemp, jute – were recycled here, torn and beaten literally to a pulp in a water-filled channel by the remorseless pounding of these hammers.

*Lifting a screen-full of fiber from the slurry*

I was chosen to assist the demonstration by rolling up my sleeves and dipping a metal screen, in a wooden frame, deep into the basin of ice-cold slurry soup; but as soon as I started to lift it out, the frame began to twist like a live thing, trying to shrug the fibre from the screen. Having landed the creature, I then had to carefully roll the fibre onto a layer of wool felt. (In production, hundreds of soggy alternate layers of fibre and felt were sandwiched together before the water was squeezed out of them in a screw press, and the fibre sheets hung up to dry).

*Transferring the fiber from screen to wool-felt sheet*

We viewed a later machine from 1735, featuring a drum-like roller whose blades chopped the rags to bits rather than smashing them, and another drum wrapped with a screen that, churning through a river of slurry, picked up the fibres and dropped them onto felt sheets. I was pleased to know that my services were no longer required.

After our tour, we stopped at a shop specializing in Amalfi-paper note cards, stationery, prints and such. I picked up an empty letter-sized sheet. It was deckle-edged, its surface was smooth but subtly pebbled, its colour was like fresh cream. Well done, Amalfi, I thought. Ts’ai Lun would be pleased.