The Gabinetto Viesseux celebrates its bicentennial

The Gabinetto Viesseux is now two hundred years old: in fact, it was born on January 25, 1820 at the behest of the educated and enterprising Geneva merchant Giovan Pietro Viesseux, its founder, in the Palazzo Buondelmonti in Florence. His goal was to create in the cosmopolitan Florence of the time a place dedicated to reading, where one could find Italian periodicals and publications from across the sea and across the mountain, translated to promote their dissemination.

The world’s greatest men of letters met here, from Leopardi to Manzoni to Stendhal to Gide and Dostoevsky: a center of research and study directed by Viesseux himself and later by Eugenio Montale, Alessandro Bonsanti, and Enzo Siciliano.

The institution has an archive of funds with autograph works, letters and documents by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federigo Tozzi, Alberto Savinio, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Giorgio Caproni, and Vasco Pratolini. The Gabinetto Vieusseux today holds in its main offices(Palazzo Strozzi and Palazzo Corsini Suarez) 600,000 volumes and 160 archival fonds, more than 750,000 documents and 2,900 works of art, including paintings, drawings, sculptures: a patrimony that is constantly enriched with papers and books of rare quality. And it is chaired by Alba Donati and directed by Gloria Manghetti.

The MiBACT granted the request to establish the National Committee for the Bicentennial of the Gabinetto Viesseux, chaired by Cosimo Ceccuti, president of the Fondazione Spadolini-Nuova Antologia Firenze.

On the occasion of the institution’s two hundredth anniversary, a rich program of meetings, conferences and events open to the public and free of charge is planned: starting on January 25, 2020, the exhibition Il Vieusseux dei Vieusseux. Books and Readers between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. 1820 - 1923 at Palazzo Corsini Suarez, curated by Laura Desideri.

During 2020, #10Words of Our Time, emblematic of the history of the Gabinetto, will be explored; unpublished correspondence, such as the one that took place for 30 years between Alessandro Bonsanti and Carlo Emilio Gadda, will be published; central authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Friedrich Hölderlin and Ezra Pound, will be discussed; and writers, including Antonio Scurati and Claudia Durastanti will recount contemporary classics. In addition, an Archive of Women Writers of the New Millennium will be set up, making available books and materials ceded by leading contemporary Italian women writers.

The meetings will take place over two years in Florence and will investigate the history of an institution that makes its archive and expertise an opportunity for new proposals for the present and the future.

“Being here today to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Gabinetto Vieusseux makes us particularly proud, having had the honor of collecting a precious legacy, the fruit of the ambitious project of an exemplary witness to the anxieties of the Risorgimento and the potential of a European dimension always present in his thinking, Giovan Pietro Vieusseux. The extraordinary heritage of ideas, manuscripts, books and journals sedimented over two centuries constitutes the heart of the Institute, and it is up to us to make accessible an irreplaceable memory, a link between past and present,” declares Gloria Manghetti, director of the Gabinetto Vieusseux.

“It is fortunate to preside, precisely in the celebration of 200 years, over the Gabinetto Vieusseux. Because it is a moment of turning point, both historical and anthropological, a moment rich in ideas and at the same time in the loss of millenary certainties. And we are here to testify that culture, first, must engage in the work of reworking the past and weaving the future. To be a point of reference for schools and younger people, to involve women writers of today, about today, seems to me a coherent way to continue what Giovan Pietro Vieusseux did 200 years ago,” adds Alba Donati, president of the Gabinetto Vieusseux.

For info: www.viesseux.it

Pictured, Palazzo Buondelmonti, first home of the Gabinetto Viesseux

The Gabinetto Viesseux celebrates its bicentennial

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