Meravigliosa Biblioteca

Busseto has seven thousand inhabitants. Everyone knows each other at the bar.

But inside a 16th-century palazzo in the centre of town, there's a library that holds things most museums would never be able to acquire.

A 1493 book with wooden covers and blank pages left at the end, for history that hadn't happened yet. A copy of what's considered the most beautiful printed book of the Renaissance, one of the few in the world that escaped censorship. A book made entirely of tin. Another held together by industrial bolts, so dangerous its author said to rest it on a cushion.

And a fortepiano where a very young Giuseppe Verdi fell in love.

That's what this place is. Hidden in a small town in Emilia, quietly holding five centuries of human thought.

I was commissioned by Kreativehouse and Fondazione Cariparma to make a short film about it. Two versions: one for social, one projected inside the library itself. The challenge wasn't finding what to show. It was deciding what to leave out.

The film is built around three ideas: what endures, what remains, what you never expect to find.