Franco Maria Ricci and Jacqueline Kennedy

The famous Bodonian “Pater Noster”, translated in 155 different languages ​​using 215 typefaces, was published in 1806 to celebrate Pope Pius VII's trip to Paris to attend Napoleon's coronation and reprinted by Franco Maria Ricci in memory of Pope PaulVI's visit to the UN in 1965. Franco Maria Ricci described the process as a work of patience, difficulty and love which took over a year to complete. First, all the letters of the “Papale” alphabet were photographed from the originals kept in the Bodonian Museum, thus reproducing each of these on paper in several hundred copies. With this very rich collection of typefaces available, the pages of the speech were composed by pasting the letters one after another on graph paper. The obtained plates were then photographed and transported on supports for printing.