MiBACT, national archives and libraries tell their stories

The State Archives ofFlorence, theState Archives of Bologna, and the National Central Libraries of Rome and Florence tell their daily stories by joining the #iorestoacasa campaign: the fonds, the collections, the constant work of the staff that restores, draws up inventories, continues research and digitizes, with the common goal of making the immense heritage of knowledge consultable and available for study. These four important institutions are narrated in short videos posted on MiBACT’s Youtube channel.

In the halls of theFlorence State Archives, a school trains professional archivists: they guarantee research and photo-reproduction services and make possible the documentation of the history of Florence and Tuscany from the 8th century to the present, checking the state of preservation of the documents on a daily basis and expanding SIAS, the State Archives Information System with detailed descriptions of the fonds.

TheState Archives of Bologna is showing The restoration of illuminated parchments, the subject of which are those of the Vallombrosian nuns, as well as the painstaking work of recovering the medieval fragments of lost Hebrew books, that is, those manuscripts that ended up as material for the binding of printed books and that are evidence, among religious and medical-scientific writings, of the history of the Jewish community and the city of Bologna.

The National Central Library in Rome is, one of the country’s national libraries tasked with collecting and preserving all Italian publications. The director, Andrea De Pasquale, tells about the Spaces of the Twentieth Century project. Central focus of the latter is the Grazia Deledda collection: the concept of literature becomes an educational space with acquisition of the writer’s archive and physical reconstruction of her environments.

Finally, in the Central Library of Florence, one learns to Travel with Books: many of the most important illustrators, draughtsmen and nature painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while drawing from life, did not stray from their studies and had experience in botany and zoology by frequenting the parks and preserved animal collections of wealthy English aristocrats.

Pictured is the National Central Library in Rome.

MiBACT, national archives and libraries tell their stories

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