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14:30 ADI Design Museum   What does it mean today to deal with the ancient craft of movable type printing?   The first obstacle is to build a laboratory. Unless we are children of art, recovering tools, materials and characters related to a technique that has almost disappeared requires skills that go far beyond the graphic arts: becoming designers, typographers, compositors, researchers, merchants of discarded materials, movers and, sometimes, even mechanics. In fifteen years of research and adventures, chasing materials from old printers on sale in every corner of Italy, I have built an important archive. The extraordinary variety of alphabets found — many of them without name, author or documentation — has opened a question: how much do we really know about the Italian typographic culture of the twentieth century?   Italian Modernist Alphabets, a research project dedicated to the production of movable type between the 1930s and 1940s, is my answer to an intuition born from my field investigation. A research to reconstruct the historical, aesthetic and manufacturing context, registering the production of original Italian alphabets, relating it to the international scene and, at the same time, deepening its territorial specificities. What emerges is a much more complex, rich and varied heritage than hitherto known.