Bodoni’s birthplace. The plaque reads “Giovanni Batt’ Bodoni born in this house on 26 February 1740 died in Parma 30 November 1813.”
Saluzzo with Monviso in the background.
1
Saluzzo
PICTURE HIM! He is a vivacious child with wavy, light brown hair, and hazel eyes. Like other boys of his generation, he wears a long frock coat with large cuffs, breeches to the knee, stockings, and square-toed, buckled shoes. Diligent of hand and quick of wit, he soon reveals what the future holds for him. His toys are his grandfather’s punches and matrices, and under his father’s tutelage, he learns the rudiments of printing and takes to it with astonishing facility, often working with type when his schoolmates are at play. At school he rises to the top of the class and displays his passion for words, soon producing reams of prose and verse. He is well liked by his teachers and fellow students, many of whom grow up to be famous in their own right, in politics, the church, science, and academia. These fellow students have one particularly vivid memory of their childhood friend. During a religious festival with illuminations in Saluzzo, Giambattista created moving figures, representing scenes from the New Testament, on one of the exterior walls of his home.3
This early precursor to Italian moviemaking took place some time before his twelfth birthday, and is one of the few actual incidents on record from Bodoni’s childhood. However, a glance at his hometown, his family, the institutions and patterns of the age, (and the food he ate) go far to reveal the boy’s background and his destiny.
Saluzzo! Even the word sounds salutary, like a blessing for a sneeze. Bodoni’s birthplace is notched into a foothill of the Cottian Alps, close to Italy’s western border with France; its air is bracing and its view is wide. The cobbled streets rise sharply to the fourteenth-century castle that dominates the historic center, while lofty, snow-covered Monviso, which the Romans called Vesulus, lords it over the entire region. The house where Bodoni was born still stands at the start of a road now aptly named Via Bodoni, but the plaque on the front wall celebrating his life is today outshone by strident signs declaring “Lavasecco” and “Tintoria.” The ground floor is now a dry cleaning and dyeing establishment.
According to the register in Saluzzo’s Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta and San Chiaffredo (Saluzzo’s patron saint), Bodoni was born on 26 February 1740 and baptized Giovanni Battista by his uncle Carlo, a young priest. Dates of birth, so dear to the heart of biographers, are notoriously slippery. Even though Bodoni’s biographer, Giuseppe De Lama, presumably getting it straight from the horse’s widow’s mouth, holds firm for 16 February, the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani states firmly “Naque a Saluzzo il 26 (non il 16) febbr. 1740.”
The Bodoni family had moved to Saluzzo from Asti (of Asti Spumante fame) in the seventeenth century, and Bodoni himself tells this story about his grandfather, Gian Domenico:
. . . types were cut and cast in Saluzzo, in the workshop of my grandfather Gian Domenico Bodoni. When he was young, during the pontificate of Innocent XI [1676-89], he went to Rome and stayed there some years as a compositor in the Stamperia Camerale. He made friends with an engraver whose name I do not know, and learned punchcutting. When he returned home he spent his fortune and even sold a vineyard to support his passion for cutting punches and casting type. My father told me more than once that he had seen types being cast for a Garamone [sic] body, and I myself found a furnace set up on the gallery of our house, and moulds, counterpunches, a few punches and several matrices of little value.4 (See Appendices I, II and III for printing terms and an explanation of the printing process.)
Gian Domenico Bodoni married into a printing family when he wed Francesca Benedetta, the daughter of the printer Nicolà Valauri, an only child who inherited her father’s printing business. Unfortunately, Gian Domenico died in 1723 and the boy never had a chance to meet his grandfather in person; it would be a mistake, however, to underestimate the influence of being able to play with his grandfather’s printing equipment. The printing business was in turn inherited by Bodoni’s father, Francesco Agostino Bodoni, who improved and enlarged it. According to Stephan Füssel, Francesco Bodoni specialized in popular writings on cheap paper at affordable prices and “. . . all production stages were vertically integrated; not even the formes were bought from suppliers but were developed and cast in-house.”5 Bodoni’s mother, Paola Margarita Giolitti, came from a well-known family in Cavallermaggiore, about 80 miles from Saluzzo. She was said (perhaps wishfully) to have been descended from the famous Giolito family, illustrious Piedmontese printers of the sixteenth century who made their fortune in Venice and Monferrato.
Examples of printing by Bodoni’s grandfather (left) and father (right).
Giovanni Battista (whose name later became Giambattista) was the seventh child and fourth son of eleven children. Three died in infancy before his birth and one died shortly after, but he was robust and navigated the dangerous shoals of childhood with vigor, even though he was probably premature. His closest sibling in age, Angela Maria Rosalia, was born and died in May 1739; Bodoni arrived in the following February, a mere nine months later.6
Millennia before the Bodonis lived and died there, Saluzzo was a tribal city-state, inhabited by the mountain tribes of the Vagienni and the Salluvii. The Vagienni proved to be an irritant to Rome and were summarily annihilated in the third century B.C. As for the Salluvii, when they descended from the Alps and floated down the Durance to prey on Marseilles around 125 B.C., the Roman consul, Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, retaliated by marching into Saluzzo and taking control. At that point the Salluvii vanished into the mists of history, leaving nothing behind but a wisp of memory that survives in the word Saluzzo.
After the fall of Rome and the Dark Ages, Saluzzo became the site of territorial tugs-of-war, but during the relatively settled era of the marquisates from 1142 to 1548, the town burst into flower. Its altitude, good air, and abundance of food from nearby fertile plains provided a bulwark against decline. The marquises of Saluzzo left a legacy of impressive buildings, art, and chivalric romance. One of their most astonishing engineering feats, the first transalpine tunnel, was completed in 1481 during the marquisate of Ludovico II. This tunnel, affectionately known as Buco di Viso [Viso’s Hole], is 75 meters long, 2.5 meters wide, and 2 meters high; it burrows under Monviso at 2,882 meters above sea level and links Italy with France. The tunnel provided a necessary and effective trade route for the transportation of salt from Provence, as well as fabric, furniture, horses, and other livestock. In return, Italy exported rice, wool, and leather to France.7 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the tunnel had suffered many internal rock falls, so it is unlikely that the young Bodoni or his friends ever made the journey through it. Since then the tunnel has been repeatedly cleared and reopened.
Monviso, at 3,841 meters, is the highest mountain in the Cottian Alps. It is the site of the three sources of the Po, a river that persistently seeks out the East, rising near Italy’s border with France, flowing past Saluzzo and then across the entire north of Italy, finally mouthing its way into the Adriatic south of Venice.
In the late fourteenth century, the Marquis Tommaso III propelled Saluzzo onto the world scene with Le Chevalier Errant, his rambling, allegorical, chivalric “novel,” written in French, in both prose and poetry, and full of fables, legends, and peculiar science. It traces the travels and adventures of a dissolute but, of course, ultimately redeemed knight, and the concomitant dangers of earthly love. As contemporary portraits attest, the tale spawned generations of boys who rushed around on hobbyhorses, waving wooden