Panfilo Castaldi
Panfilo Castaldi (c. 1398 – c. 1490) was an Italian physician who is also called a master of printing. Local stories say he invented movable type. He was born in Feltre and spent most of his life in Milan.
The legend says he learned about early Chinese block printing from Marco Polo and, after experiments, created modern type. This tale circulated in Feltre and was popularized in the 19th century by the diplomat Robert Curzon, Baron Zouche. Curzon claimed Castaldi began with glass stamps from Murano and later made wooden blocks used in a Venice press in 1426, several years before Gutenberg’s experiments with metal type in the 1430s. He connected Castaldi to Marco Polo and suggested European printing grew from Chinese methods, a point that has been debated.
Modern scholars have not supported such an early dating or the proposed connections, so the story is mainly a Feltre curiosity. The city still honors Castaldi with a statue, and in 1998, for his 500th anniversary, he was described as “the first inventor of movable type for printing.” By the 1470s Castaldi was a successful printer, with a record of 300 copies of a Cicero epistle printed in 1471. The name Panfilo Castaldi also lives on as the imprint of a Feltre printing house from the 19th and 20th centuries.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 08:10 (CET).