Casa Ricordi already had the material. Nine historical periods running from Giovanni Ricordi’s 1808 print shop to the present. Full essays on the archive, on the copyright battles of the 1800s, on the Art Nouveau posters that effectively invented Italian advertising graphics. Some of those essays run past three thousand words.

Someone scrolling the timeline wants the shape of two centuries in a couple of minutes. Someone researching Ricordi as a theatrical impresario will read for twenty. The site had to hold both without one of them getting in the way of the other.

Every story starts short, with an archive film next to it. That much gives you the era. If you want the rest, it expands in place. No new page, no scroll position lost, nothing filed behind a menu.

The timeline runs on the same principle at smaller scale: a date range, a title, one line, an image.

A timeline is read in one direction and loses its meaning the moment you break it into chapters. The whole history sits on a single surface, with the long material folded inside it instead of moved elsewhere.