If there is the genius of happy, curious and adventurous publishing, at the same time wise and unscrupulous, in the continuous search for novelty and quality, this genius has gone through the short life of Maddalena Winspeare, for me a friend and companion of projects and long work the span of many years. She was an art historian of excellent training, she was from Livorno with a proud spirit of identity and was beautiful, Maddalena, with a snappy and melodious beauty like that of the thoroughbred horses she loved. On every occasion, in meetings with friends, as in official meetings in the Municipality, in the Region or at the Ministry, he wore as high as a trophy, as a medal of merit, the name of Sillabe, his publishing house.
Maddalena, together with her brothers Renzo and Franco Ruggeri, was, at the end of the last century, a founding member of “Opera Musei Fiorentini”, the temporary association of companies that had as its objective the fulfillment of what were then called “additional services in museums “. In practice, it was a question of guaranteeing all the Florentine state museums, which at the time were confined to a single pole, setting up and managing ticket offices and reservations, managing the flow of visitors, an adequate editorial and educational offer (exhibition catalogs, guides, postcards , objects of various kinds) in the bookstores and in the stores specially set up within each museum. The offer of services guaranteed by the Society of which Maddalena Winspeare was a decisive part was so happy and fruitful that the contractual terms established by the tender won in 1998 were subsequently replicated without variations by the Central Administration of Cultural Heritage up to the present day. All the more was Magdalene’s commitment destined to grow when, following a further tender, “Firenze Musei” took over the management of additional services in the Vatican Museums. It was 2008, I had recently been hired as director of the Pope’s Museums and I must say that the things that most fascinated and amused me during the period were the guides that, edited by Sillabe, I wanted to dedicate to the “Raphael’s Rooms” , at the “Gallery of Geographical Maps”, at the “Sistine Chapel”.
It was nice to work with Maddalena because she was fast, intuitive, pragmatic, attentive to the needs of the authors as well as to the expectations of the public, an inflexible guardian, always, of editorial quality. One of the first books published by Sillabe was my “Diary of a Minister Superintendent”. It was the account (a little naive, a little presumptuous, just to remember) of my almost two years (1995-96) spent in the direction of Cultural Heritage, technical minister of the Dini government. Since then, the catalog of “Sillabe” has grown like the mustard seed of the Gospel parable and today covers, with hundreds of titles, much of the scientific and didactic activity carried out in the last thirty years by Florentine museums. Now that Maddalena is no longer there and is looking at us from the paradise of art historians, I hope that her workshop in Livorno, an industrious hive entirely strictly female, will continue to distill wisdom and beauty for us.
April 30, 2021 | 16:50
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