There is a place in Italy called “Piano d’Api” in Acireale, in Sicily - a pleasant, isolated spot, both sunny and ancient, where the master paper manufacturer Franco Conti has kept the magic alive by producing handmade sheets of paper.

He creates paper just like artisans of old, with techniques known to few in the world. In this rural home where his workshop is located amidst machinery, frames and water, surrounded by a patio planted with rows of grapevines and a kitchen garden crossed by a crystal-clear stream, and there stands a shed with sheets of paper left to dry in the sun like washed linen, Franco Conti, artisan and intellectual at the same time, experiences what it is like to re-establish the ancient art of creating paper.
In the ground floor room where he entertains friends, in that workshop that is half home and half breeding ground for artists, he has frescoed a beautiful map of the historical route followed and gradual progress made by paper through history and in the world.

Paper moved from China to Europe, through various stages and centuries - Tun Huang before 150, Loulan about 240, then Niya in 250-300, Samarkand in 751 and Baghdad in 753; then its course turned to Africa, to be precise Cairo, and returned through the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain, France and Germany. Paper reached Sicily in a more privileged manner by diverting from Africa and Cairo, and later reached the coast of Latium by sea and Fabriano in Umbria.
Well, it is really enchanting to watch Franco Conti making paper, processing the raw material and working with intelligence and mastery to produce sheets of paper that are unique, and differ in weight and watermark. He keeps every fibre alive and seals history with every page, which in this case means bringing ancient values back to life. In the paper making process, that is paper manufacturing, the mixture and thickness must be prepared.
The cotton yarn is laid on the frame, which has various sizes and the sheet is then created.
There is also a way of personalizing paper and making various formats, there are consistency and colouring techniques, and various procedures are used here to produce paper as a work of art. And in the hands of certain artists it lacks neither elaborations nor bas-reliefs.
Innumerable famous artists stroll every year through this Sicilian oasis’ rooms, where culture is tangible - Italian and foreign artists intervene on these sheets of paper with their creativity.
I recently followed the work done on Franco Conti’s precious sheets by the Italo-Albanian artist Ibrahim Kodra who developed the topic of the four seasons, a folder completely created with one of my pieces of writing and a series of landscapes depicting Italy’s arbreshe spots from Sicily to Calabria and from Apulia to Molise.
And let us get down to the four seasons painted by Kodra, an artist and leading figure in the international world of art - they are four divinities, four idols who move in nature’s setting, idols who cross history and time, becoming the messengers of seasonal flowers and fruit.
The bond between emotions and time which slips by in Kodra’s paintings recreates myth, the circular ritual of the year, the change of light that settles on everything, the time for dreams and the seasonal ritual myths. Light, with its rhythms and geometric tesserae, adapts to nature’s four phases: first - dawn, spring and birth; second - the zenith, summer, the apotheosis and paradise; third - sunset, autumn, death and elegy; and, fourth: darkness, winter and desolation.
Cézanne’s considerations stress: “the real and wonderful study that must be undertaken is on the variety of nature’s picture”. In a fairy tale-like light and with bright and corporeal colours, the gaze of Kodra’s announcing messengers returns to the origins of the world, where reality expresses its decorative quality and exalts spirituality, but is at the same time petrified in a natural eternity. Kodra’s art has thus found in Franco Conti’s paper’s granular texture the basis and certainty of those shades of light and colour that have always characterized his work.
Once again the land of Sicily reveals a workshop, which hums with a man’s activity and vital creative intelligence, a unique place in Europe, now the crossroads of the most diverse intellectuals.

(translated by interpres sas )