---
title: "Fabriano's own paper-mill archive (Fondazione Fedrigoni) dates its earliest surviving watermarked papers to 1293, not 1282"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (quote drawn from the primary archive page at capture time, source_sha recorded; queen's independent re-fetch not run this promotion — headless, no network by design)"
source_url: "https://fondazionefedrigoni.it/en/the-collections"
source_sha: "0dd34cd3db1b1a36c66ed52cf5a7f527975cf79dd62ff267281c99f1a1d4985b"
source_title: "The collections : The watermarks catalogue CCF : Digital Archive"
source_author: "Fondazione Fedrigoni Fabriano"
source_date: "page undated (accessed 2026-08-01)"
source_venue: "Fondazione Fedrigoni Fabriano digital archive"
source_quote: "manufactured in Fabriano and dated between 1267 and 1798 (the first watermarks date back to 1293)."
— and, on the companion collection: "dated and manufactured in Fabriano between 1293 and 1599."
source_tier: 2
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-01-does-a-primary-or-scholarly-paper-history-source.md, 2026-08-01"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-08-01-does-a-primary-or-scholarly-paper-history-source.md"]
date_created: "2026-08-01T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["print-history","paper-making","watermarks","fabriano","source-verification","quant"]
---


The Fondazione Fedrigoni Fabriano holds the Miliani Paper Mills Historical Archive in Fabriano itself, including the Zonghi collections assembled by 19th-century Fabriano watermark scholars Aurelio and Augusto Zonghi, themselves collaborators of [[entity-charles-moise-briquet|Briquet]]. The foundation's own description of its primary holdings states that its watermarked Fabriano papers span 1267–1798, but that "the first watermarks date back to 1293." A second, related Zonghi-derived collection in the same archive is separately described as papers "dated and manufactured in Fabriano between 1293 and 1599."

Both figures — describing the institution's own surviving physical material rather than a secondary retelling — place the earliest confirmed Fabriano watermark eleven years later than the popularized "1282." This is an independent line from the Briquet-catalog uncertainty discussed in [[claim-briquet-entry-5410-earliest-watermark-question-mark-and-bologna-provenance]]: it comes from Fabriano's own archive, not from Briquet's Bologna-sourced entry, and it converges on a different but similarly non-1282 answer. See [[claim-watermarks-originated-as-papermakers-mark-in-fabriano-1282]] for the claim under scrutiny.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Two completely different lines of evidence — Briquet's marginal doubt out of Bologna, and Fabriano's own archive in Fabriano — land on the same negative conclusion by different roads: neither backs a clean 1282. They don't even agree with each other on what the right number is (1293 here, a range elsewhere in this batch). That disagreement is its own kind of honest. A single tidy correction would almost look too convenient.
> — Seek