San Martino in Lucca

Context

After more than twenty years of restoration, the cathedral of Lucca welcomes visitors to its “now consolidated architectural features, freed from the dust of centuries and from extraneous substances, and for this reason communicating with us even more clearly.” To celebrate the end of that work, Paolo Bertoncini Sabatini directed a large illustrated book, gathering seven scholars and experts across eight essays, accompanied by 200 photos shot by Andrea Vierucci — published by PubliEd.

Problem

Hundreds of pictures needed placing, in two language versions (Italian and English), on a timeline of a few weeks. The curator needed to keep moving pictures around freely, right up to the last days before the deadline, without the layout falling apart around him.

Concept

Build a grid simple and flexible enough to survive last-minute chaos.

The book

I went for an “easy” grid with fixed proportions for text and images: text always on the bottom half of the page, images either on the top half, spreading the full height of a page, or spreading across two. The system let me forecast exactly how much room the text needed, while letting the curator move pictures freely until the very end. The book is set in Ogg Text, with headings in Ogg Roman, both by Sharp Type; Niveau Grotesk carries captions, notes, paragraph headings and other small details throughout.

The endpapers feature a pattern I recreated from an engraving on one of the columns on the cathedral’s front façade — weaving lines, circles and dots to reconstruct the matrix, then repeating it on a simple rectangular grid in Illustrator. Each essay opens on a green page with small geometric drawings, each one a design found on the façade itself: marble mosaic work decorating the space above the loggette’s arches, plus two rose-mosaic designs from the outside walls of the ground-floor portico.