Gambettola and Stampa a Ruggine: A Living Tradition

On Via Verdi in Gambettola, a workshop founded in 1826 still opens onto the ordinary life of a Romagna town.

Inside Stamperia Pascucci, shelves hold thousands of carved wooden blocks. Old photographs and tools sit alongside newer designs. The workshop has accumulated the traces of seven generations, but it is not arranged as a museum. The work continues. The air carries the smell of vinegar.

In 2026, Pascucci is marking its bicentenary. Two hundred years is an extraordinary amount of time for any family business, but the anniversary is perhaps most interesting for what it reveals about the present. The workshop has changed its products, its customers and parts of its visual repertoire while remaining recognisably what it has always been: a place where cloth is printed by hand.

A few streets away, Stamperia Bertozzi tells a different story. Founded in 1920 by Luigi Bertozzi, an ebanista and woodworker, it brought the knowledge of carving and working wood into the world of textile printing. More than a century later, the workshop continues to combine traditional printing with contemporary design.

The two stamperie are different in age and character. Together, they make Gambettola one of the few places in Romagna where this particular textile tradition can still be encountered as working craft rather than simply as heritage.

A town built around making

Gambettola has long had a practical relationship with materials.

The town is associated with workshops, repair and the recovery and reuse of iron and other materials. Hemp belongs to an older rural economy, while the annual Antica Fiera della Canapa continues to bring elements of that material culture into public life.

Stampa a ruggine belongs naturally within this setting. Its early history is tied to the domestic and agricultural world of Romagna: hemp and linen, household textiles, decorated cattle blankets and the fairs where rural life was displayed and celebrated.

The textile tradition was never entirely separate from the place around it. It developed within a landscape where materials were worked, reused and given new purposes, and where a workshop was part of everyday economic life rather than an attraction created for visitors.

That background is still useful when walking through Gambettola today. The printed cloth may now appear in contemporary interiors or in homes far beyond Romagna, but its connection with the town remains remarkably concrete.

Two hundred years of Pascucci

At Pascucci, the most revealing part of the history may be found on the shelves rather than in the dates.

More than 6,000 hand-carved pear-wood blocks form an extraordinary physical archive. Some carry traditional designs; others belong to a more recent repertoire. They have accumulated over generations as the workshop has responded to changing tastes and uses.

There is something almost geological about such a collection. One generation leaves something behind; the next adds to it. The layers remain visible.

The designs that were retained, those that were adapted, those created for a new moment: the history of Pascucci can be followed through those changes. The workshop printed fabrics for rural households and cattle blankets before finding new uses for its textiles as Romagna changed. In the twentieth century, its production reached the growing seaside resorts of the Adriatic, including the beach tents that became part of the visual culture of the Riviera.

More recently, the workshop has worked with artists and designers, turning contemporary drawings into printing blocks and adding new designs to the existing repertoire.

The archive keeps growing.

That is what makes the bicentenary more than a celebration of age. There is no final collection of Pascucci designs because the collection is still being made.

An archive in use

The distinction between an old workshop and a museum is easy to make once the objects are seen in context.

The wooden blocks at Pascucci are historic objects, but they have not been separated from the work that gives them their purpose. Some continue to be used. New ones have joined them.

The same is true of the workshop’s older equipment. The original wooden mangano, associated with the early history of the business, remains part of the material memory of the place. Around it, the business has developed in directions that would have been difficult to imagine in 1826.

Collaborations with contemporary artists have been particularly important in that process. They have allowed the workshop’s visual language to expand without requiring the older repertoire to disappear.

The result is visible in the archive itself: old motifs and recent designs occupy the same history.

Bertozzi and the other Gambettola story

Bertozzi arrived at textile printing by another route.

Luigi Bertozzi was an ebanista. His understanding of wood became the starting point for a workshop established in the early 1920s, where hand printing on hemp became part of the family’s work.

The connection between woodworking and textile printing is still apparent in the character of the workshop. Traditional blocks remain part of its repertoire, while later generations have introduced new colours, materials and designs.

The business also moved early into the world of modern design. In the 1930s, Luigi Bertozzi presented his work at the Triennale di Milano, bringing a craft rooted in Romagna into contact with a very different cultural environment.

Later, the workshop continued to develop its design language and reach markets beyond Italy.

Its history is therefore not simply one of preservation. It is also a history of movement: from wood to cloth, from a local rural market towards design, and from Gambettola towards an international audience.

That makes Bertozzi a useful counterpoint to Pascucci. The two families have followed different paths, but neither has treated tradition as something that could survive only by standing still.

From the fields to the Riviera

The story of the printed textile becomes even more interesting when it leaves the countryside.

Early rust-printed fabrics belonged to a world of homes, agricultural work and local fairs. Cattle blankets, household textiles and other everyday objects carried the patterns of that world.

Then Romagna changed.

The Adriatic coast developed into one of Italy’s great holiday destinations, and the textile workshops changed with the new economy around them. Pascucci’s beach tents are an especially vivid example. A craft associated with rural life found a new setting on the Riviera, where printed cloth became part of the landscape of summer tourism.

The same region contained both the agricultural hinterland and the expanding coast. Gambettola sat between them, close enough to the rural economy from which the craft had emerged and connected to the new markets developing along the Adriatic.

The textile travelled because the people using it travelled, and because the town around the workshops changed.

What passes from one generation to the next

A workshop can preserve its blocks, its recipes and its equipment. Those things are tangible. What is harder to see is the knowledge that accumulates around them.

Some of it is practical judgement learned over years of work. Some belongs to the recognition of an old design or an old tool. Some comes simply from growing up around the workshop and understanding its rhythms before ever formally learning the trade.

This is one reason family continuity matters so much in a craft such as this. A younger generation does not inherit only an archive of objects. It inherits a place in which those objects already have meaning.

At Pascucci, that inheritance now spans seven generations. At Bertozzi, more than a century of family history links the original woodworking background with a contemporary design practice.

The workshops have changed. So has the world around them. What remains is the decision, made repeatedly by different generations, to keep the work going.

Gambettola today

The two Gambettola stamperie are part of a wider network of workshops that still practise traditional Romagna textile printing. The Associazione Stampatori Tele Romagnole brings together makers across the provinces of Forlì-Cesena, Ravenna and Rimini, reflecting a tradition that extends beyond any single town.

Gambettola nevertheless occupies a distinctive position within that network. Two historic workshops continue to operate here, while the town’s connection with hemp, fairs and material crafts provides a broader setting for the textiles.

In 2026, the Pascucci bicentenary has brought many of these connections into view through exhibitions and public initiatives. Historic fabrics and tools can be seen alongside contemporary work, making the passage from one generation to another unusually visible.

For visitors, the workshops can still be encountered as working places rather than historical reconstructions. Pascucci, for example, receives visitors by arrangement, offering a chance to see the archive and the workshop where the tradition continues.

There is no need for Gambettola to recreate its past. Much of it is still there, in use.

The workshop is still open

A printed textile can travel a long way from the place where it was made. A tablecloth can cross a border; a blanket can end up in a home hundreds or thousands of kilometres away; a contemporary design can begin with a drawing made far from Romagna.

So does the workshop on Via Verdi, with its shelves, old tools, newer designs and the smell of vinegar in the air.

Two hundred years after the Pascucci family began printing textiles, another piece of cloth can still be laid out on the worktable, ready to receive a pattern that began as a block carved by hand.

Outside, Gambettola goes on with its ordinary day.