At Home with Marchese Malaspina · Part 2 of 4

The family's history in the Palazzo Malaspina archive

In Bobbio, Marchese Malaspina invited us into the family's historic archive. It is not the usual route to a wine, but it turned out to be one of the best.

The archive room with tall wooden cabinets marked Archivio, lettered drawers and an open cabinet full of documents — The archive room in Palazzo Malaspina.

Besides the town, Currado suggested a visit to the family's historic archive, followed by the wine cellar and a tasting. The reason was simple: the family's wines are bound up with the family's history. Most producers show you their steel tanks first. Here we began with paper.

In Palazzo Malaspina, Marquis Obizzo Malaspina, Currado's father, receives us and shows us through the archive. Here are documents and books reaching far back, to the people and the land behind today's producer.

A map that brings us closer to the land

During the visit a large spread with a drawn map is opened. A river runs through the landscape, the plots are numbered, and roads and buildings help the eye find its way. Marquis Obizzo shows how the map should be read, and suddenly it is no longer an old sheet of paper but a description of land.

Opened hand-drawn map with numbered plots and a river — The map shown during the visit. The year 1772 is visible on the sheet.

The sheet bears the year 1772, the same year the family counts as the start of its winegrowing tradition. On its website Marchese Malaspina describes a large cabreo from 1772 – an inventory in which the estates were recorded in map sheets drawn by the engineer Antonio Maria Losio.

The map makes the land concrete. Boundaries and numbered plots immediately raise the question of what the landscape looked like then and what remains today. With the map open in front of you, you can ask, point and follow the answer further. That is harder to do with a website.

A library with pages nearly five hundred years old

In the archive room stand tall wooden cabinets full of documents. Bundles lie close together on the shelves, from a time when every record was written by hand and stored so that it could be found again. The order is older than the ring binder, and more reliable than many folders on a desktop.

Next door is the family's historic library. According to the heritage organisation FAI it holds around 1,300 volumes, all published before 1830. Among them are about a hundred books from the sixteenth century and one printed in 1497.

Richly decorated title page with the text Venetiis and the year 1547 — Title page with “Venetiis” and “1547” – Venice, 1547.

We are shown a large volume with a richly decorated title page: Venetiis, 1547. Venice, that is. Ornaments, figures and text in red and black. Four and a half centuries are hard to imagine in numbers. It becomes much easier when the page lies in front of you.

The family names a diploma dated 29 September 1164 as the archive's oldest document. It was issued by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and confirms the Malaspina possessions – more than six hundred years before the map of 1772. Seen that way, the winegrowing tradition is almost news.

A hospitality that begins before arrival

The welcome had begun before we arrived. The accommodation was arranged, breakfast planned, and Currado offered to book a table for dinner. He wanted to know when we would arrive so the day could be planned accordingly. The archive had a natural place in the programme, because it explains the family behind the wines.

The palazzo's salon with red armchairs, a large rug and a portrait in an oval frame, and a dog walking across the rug — The salon in Palazzo Malaspina.

In the drawing room red armchairs stand beneath the portraits, and a dog crosses the rug, entirely unbothered at being surrounded by family history. The rooms are shown by those who live with them, not by a guide with a script.

From the map and the title page, the way then leads down, to the cellar beneath the palace.