Bassiano

From this village of the Lepini mountains, hidden behind a ridge that takes it out of sight of the Pontine plain, comes Aldus Manutius. In 1494 he opened his printing house and within a few years his editions were known throughout Europe as Aldines: he wanted to save Greek literature and philosophy by printing it, and in doing so he changed the object called a book more than anyone else. To him are owed the series begun in 1501 with the first use of italic type, the definitive settling of punctuation — the semicolon included —, the pocket book and the numbering of pages. That is: almost everything we take for granted today on opening any book at all.

The museum dedicated to him, the Museum of Writings, is inside the palace the Caetani built here in the sixteenth century, and one enters through Porta Salamandra, the old town gate. The palace was commissioned by Bonifacio Caetani in 1554 as a refuge from the dangers of the marsh and a place of care for his own poor health, and it absorbed medieval houses and workshops the family had bought round about. Inside, beside the printing presses, a room is preserved with the graffiti left by prisoners at the end of the eighteenth century: the same building holds the writing that went from here to Europe and the writing that stayed carved on the wall of those who could not leave. Bassiano belonged to the Annibaldi from 1240, then from 1297 to the Caetani, until the end of the fiefs.