In Osnago, between Milan and the Alps, there is a house with a courtyard, a vegetable garden, and a bunch of grazing chickens. It is the home of Alberto Casiraghy and PulcinoElefante, a small publishing house specializing in little art books created out of love for typography, words, and human beings.
Everything revolves around the Super Audax Nebiolo monotype machine that sits in the heart of the house and prints Bodoni characters from wood-case typographic cliches carved by Adriano Porazzi.
Objects of art and culture, all the small books printed by Alberto Casiraghy have the same structure: two sheets of fine ivory colored hahnmuehle paper produced in Germany, folded and sewn by hand on the back for a total of 8 pages.
Each book is home to words that freely follow the train of thought and become aphorisms, poems, small and yet mind-blowing reflections. The name of the publishing house, PulcinoElefante (literally “the chick and the elephant”) is inspired by a nursery rhyme by Gianni Rodari, an Italian poet who wrote several children’s books using language with a freedom that only rarely accessible to grown-ups. Alberto Casiraghy embraces this freedom and pours it into his small artist's books, putting it at the service of his daily encounters with poets, philosophers, and artists like Maurizio Cattelan, Emilio Isgrò, Franco Loi, Fernanda Pivano and, above all, Alda Merini, Milan’s late and much loved poet, whose human and artistic partnership with Alberto Casiraghy lasted for many years.