Bernardo Cennini

Hearing of the new process of printing by moveable type, and seeing some printed books, Cennini puzzled out the procedure for himself, cast his own type font and, working with his sons Pietro, a humanist poet and manuscript illuminator, and Domenico, produced the first of the incunabula printed at Florence, starting in 1471. The book was the commentary of Virgil, In Tria Virgilii Opera Expositio by the late fourth-century grammarian Maurus Servius Honoratus. In the first page of the book, Cennini commemorates his own invention, and at the conclusion is the triumphant Florentine boast: "Florentinis ingeniis nil ardui est," and the date 9 October 1471. The classical content was characteristic of the Florentine incunabula: "Early Florentine printing, in particular, shows a large output of classical texts and grammars and other humanistic works as opposed to the religious works that most other Italian cities of the time were producing." ("Florentine Printing of the Fifteenth Century" 2003).

The partly thirteenth-century Palazzo Cennini in via Faenza, the family's power center, is now largely rebuilt as a hotel. Via Faenza remained for a long period the locus for Florence's printers' shops. Bernardo Cennini is buried in the south transept of the basilica of San Lorenzo.