The Museum – La Stampa

From its foundation until today, this gallery explores the essential events in the newspaper’s history, particularly focusing on the succession of founders and presidents, the sites where it was based and the most important innovations that occurred. This brief overview helps us grasp the full value of a journalistic tradition built up over decades, often anticipating changes in society and means of communication.

Long distances hamper the need to get a news item to the newsroom, where it is edited in order to take its proper place in the latest issue. The display case tells the story of the developments that – with the evolution of new technology – have marked the constant efforts made by La Stampa since its foundation to organise efficient telecommunications systems, capable of shortening distances and beating the clock.

Journalism doesn’t write history but the front pages of a newspaper can bear witness to the spirit and experiences of an era, above and beyond the simple reporting of an event. Leafing through La Stampa’s most important front pages, enhanced with multimedia content, we can review facts in their historical context and understand the meaning a news item had for a reader who lived at the time those events occurred.

This gallery has a more educational approach, accompanying visitors in an exploration of the industry’s terminology, read so often when leafing through the pages of a newspaper: the roles, a typical day in the newsroom, the jargon used to name the front page’s different sections. At the centre of this area, an interactive game allows you to play editor-in-chief and decide the importance and position of news items in the layout.

The spirit of a great newspaper is also mirrored in its prominent figures who, thanks to their unusual acumen and writing abilities, offer readers interesting food for thought. In our idealised reconstruction of the editor-in-chief’s office, set between the 1950s and 60s, rare artefacts and original eyewitness accounts reveal new aspects of the person and glimpses of daily life in a newspaper office.

The twentieth century saw the most astounding acceleration in technical research and scientific development and the intense evolution of different means of communication. The many typesetting systems used to produce newspaper pages provide clear evidence of the crucial leap from the printing press descended from Gutenberg, which culminated in the use of linotype, to digital technology and increasingly sophisticated and rapid layout systems.

One large wall symbolically summarises the extreme complexity of the enormous printing machines that every night allow us to produce tens of thousands of copies after the paper has been finally put to bed, right up to the early hours of dawn. This is the history of the printing press, from the first early rotary printing presses to offset machines with multiple rollers and the impressive figures of Turin’s printing plant.

Today La Stampa is available in all the different formats used to reach its readers every day – print, online, smartphone and tablet editions – with a description of their particular features.
A virtual window provides us with a first glimpse of the place where all this information is analysed and reworked in its final form: the newsroom.

Heads of state, artists, intellectuals and sportsmen: these are just some of the celebrities who have wished to pay tribute to La Stampa over the decades, often to mark the launch of important editorial projects.