The ironer

In the old Marchi printing house in Via C. Battisti 15, since 1633, a traditional working ironer is still kept. It is a large wooden vertical wheel with a diameter of six meters, made to rotate by the force of one or two men walking inside. The movement of the wheel allows the forward and backward movement of a large boulder sliding on wooden rollers called beams. Around the beams is wrapped of the canvas that the passage of the stone stretches, making it smooth and compact for printing. Particular attention deserves the printing on canvas practiced in the historical shop of Via Battisti: it is performed, with a centuries-old expertise, using hand-engraved wooden molds that reproduce, for the most part, the iconography of the Romagna tradition, the most ancient date back to 1400-500, and constitute a valuable heritage of popular decorative art of Romagna.