Historic collections

500.000 positives from the first half of the 1900s. The archive was begun in the early 1900s, initiated by Corrado Ricci, then Director General (1903–1909). It consists of photographs from various sources, equipped with the practices of office, material for scientific publications and copies received by the Directorship General on the basis of the R.D. 29-3-1923, n. 798 which decreed the obligation, on the part of public or private bodies, to send to the Director two copies of every photograph reproduced of “ movable and immovable things of historic, archaeological, paleo-ethnological, and artistic interest”.

Armoni – Moretti

Collection of 5.000 negatives on glass of Orvieto and province, dating from 1925-30.

The collection consists of material gathered by the Roman collector Carlo Beccarini: 2.500 positives on loose-leaf paper or gathered in 21 albums, 1.800 negatives on glass sheets or film and 1.500 modern prints. Among the subjects mostly widely represented, are Rome and her monuments, and also survey events from the mid 1800s to around 1930.

Acquired by the ICCD in 1995

The collection of 40.000 positives is of notable importance for the knowledge of the history of photography in Italy. Gathered by Piero Becchetti, historic collector and photographer.

Acquired by the GFN in 1971.

Collection of 1.000 images relating to the frescoes of Giotto in the superior church of S. Francesco ad Assisi, also to the architecture and the frescoes of S. Calogero di Civate and the S. Silvestro chapel in the church of S. Croce in Florence from the early 1950s.

gelatine by an unknown maker. It dates to between 1930 and 1935 based on the identification of subjects and considering the changes during the Fascist period to the urban layout and other monuments of Rome.

Donated in 2006 by MariaBoccassino, daughter of Renato Boccassino (1904-1976), ethnologist and Director of the Prehistoric Ethnological “Luigi Pigorini” Museum in Rome. It consists of a conspicuous number of negatives on film and, to a lesser extent, of corresponding positives. These document the Ugandan population of Acioli, with whom Boccassino carried out an ethnological exhibition in 1933-34. The museum also conserves a part of Boccassino’s written autograph, used as a deep study of the images.

Acquired by the GFN between 1971-1993.

A collection of 16.000 images of works which appeared on the antiques market, industrial archaeology, internal architecture, etc. from the first half of the 1900s.

Location: Laboratory for Photography

Acquired in 1976. The collection consists of 109 plates of which 4 are on gelatine film and 105 are on silver bromide gelatine; 106 of the images in the collection are works of a Neapolitan artist Vincenzo Caprile and 2 plates are the work of Tommaso Filippi. The majority of the plates date from between 1880 – 1915. The themes refer to photographic portraits and photographs of paintings of Italian reality, photographs of pictorial works, popular scenes and places in Venice, rural scenes, the production for which Caprile drew from painters of the same type.

The acquisition of this occurred in 2000. This is a collection of 282 plates of silver bromide and colloidal gelatine and were taken between the end of the 1800s and early 1900s. The images in the collection concern events in the public and private lives of the family of Umberto I and Vittorio Emanuele III.

Acquired by the GFN in 1972.

Documentation of works of art of national cultural heritage (1000 in number).

Donated by Mario Chigi to the GFN in 1970. A collection of 1,790 negatives (on glass, film and stereoscopic plates) and 79 auto-chromes. Photographs of mostly family events taken around the end of the 19^th and start of the 20^th centuries by Francesco Chigi (1881-1953).

Location: Laboratory for Photography

Consisting of 70,000 b/w negatives and 100 sheets which were taken and collected by Luigi Ciofi degli Atti between 1960s and 1990s. The prevalent subject matters are Italian localities and the countryside of Eastern Europe such as Russia and Romania.

Acquired in 1999. The archive consists of more than 400 portrait shots of models posing in the studios of decorative artists Eugenio Cisterna and Virginio Monti and about 150 reproductions of works by Virginio Monti. This collection is heterogeneous of types of photographic techniques.

Donation in 1998 – 7 original positives signed by Nunes Vais.

Portrait of the Signora Luisa Molco, representative of the Florentine Jewish middle class circa 1900.

Acquired by the GFN in 1932.

A collection of 4.510 negatives, for the most part plates of colloid in various formats.

Rome and other localities in Lazio from the second half of the 19^th century.

Location: Laboratory for Photography

A collection of postcards donated between 2005 and 2006 by Mr Vittoria Del Vecchio Coen. Made up of more than 5,000 postcards starting from the early 1900s to the second half of the century. The subject matter varies: Italian cities, foreign resorts, publicity, royal families, romantic scenes, etc.

The donation also includes a library collection of 270 volumes, for the most part exhibition catalogues.

Acquired by the ICCD in 1976.

Collection of 7.280 images, partly negatives on plates of gelatine glass or on nitrate film of gelatine cellulose, partly transparencies on plates of glass dating back to between 1905 and 1930. Principally the subjects are the Middle East (Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia) north Africa (Egypt, Tunisia) Europe (France, Greece, Switzerland, Italy).

Acquired by the ICCD in 1986.

Images of the 1930s which constitute rare documentation of the studio of Professors Ferdinando Perez and Anita Garzia on the scientific examination of paintings with the “pinacographic” method using shear light.

Collection donated to the ICCD by Franca Boschetti, wife of Oreste Ferrari (1927-2005) art historian, ex-Director of the ICCD.

Partly this is a photographic archive of the studio of Ferrari (for the most part, reproductions of works relating to his field of research) and partly his library (circa 1,500 volumes and other collections of periodicals).

Acquired by the ICCD in 1988.

A collection of 100.000 postcards, mainly Italian dating from the end of the 1800s to the early 1960s.

633 radiographs, the results of activities carried out by the ICCD from 1966 in collaboration with the Institute for Restoration.

A collection of 20.000 colour photographs regarding the whole national territory and islands, in diverse formats (from 18x24 to 35 mm).

Donation made in 1998. Made up of 343 original positives from the archives of the painter Edoardo Gioja (Rome 1862–London 1957). The photos, taken by Gioja, document many of his pictorial and decorative creations produced in Rome and in London between 1878 and 1913.

Donated to the ICCD in 1977.

A collection of 5.500 photographs of archaeological areas and objects from Asia Minor and Greece.

Donated to the ICCD in 1990.

A collection of 50.000 positive images of Italian central and southern cultural heritage, from the period 1950-60. Photographs are organised according to the Archive's ordination; research is now possible for the Comuni whose name starts with A through L. Negatives of the Fund are the property of the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles (California), to whose collections they belong.

The collection contains 1666 negatives, some on glass and some on film, originating from the National Institute for Archaeology and History of Art (1966). The collection, for the most part, consists of photographs taken by the archaeologist Ugo Monneret de Villard in the course of his expeditions in Egypt between 1921 and 1934.

Location: Laboratory for Photography

Acquired in 2000. The collection is composed of 38 positives on paper, of huge value thanks to the quality of the photography and the subject matter. Taken by Roger Fenton, James Robertson, James Anderson (1813-1877) and Felix Bonfils.

Acquired by the ICCD in 1997 a collection of 1074 stereoscopes on glass, hand coloured.

Photographic images taken partly by Henri Le Lieure (1831-1914) and partly acquired by him on the international market (Claude Marie Ferrier, Charles Soulier, Isaac Levy, Lachenal & Favre)

Documentation for images of cities customs and costumes from 19^th to 20^th centuries.

Donation made in 2001. Photographic archive of the history of the most important art of the 1900s in Italy. It deals with documentation of works of art, fundamentally of various original codes by Francesco Di Giorgio Martini.

A collection of 2.900 negatives and diapositives duplicated from originals by concession from the Michetti heirs in 1970. Photographic material produced by the painter Francesco Paolo Michetti (1851-1929), particularly important for the relationship and comparisons with the artist’s pictorial works.

Location: Laboratory for Photography

Acquired by the GFN in 1971 a few months before the death of the photographer. A collection of 50,000 negatives and 30.000 positives originally taken by Luciano Morpurgo (1886-1971) photographer, editor and writer.

Intentional donation in 1973 by Laura Weil, daughter of Mario Nunes Vais (1856-1932). The archive consists of 20.000 negatives on glass plates of silver salt gelatine. The work of the photographer is characterised by a series of portraits of personalities from the worlds of culture, politics and society between 1800s and 1900s. It also pays testimony to events and daily life.

Location: Laboratory for Photography

Acquisition made in 2005 from Antonietta Volpe, the collection consists of 360 positive prints which, following the end of the First World War, documented the work of reconstructing the Army of “Military Engineers for the renaissance of the liberated lands of the Veneto” as indicated by the inscription of the back of the photographs.

Donated in 2006 to the ICCD by Salvatore, Luciano and Marcello Papa, Sebastiana’s brothers.

The collection consists of the complete photographic archive produced by Sebastiana and consists of 4.200 b/w films, large format exhibited prints, from screen tests contacts and prints on various formats which revolve around three core subject matters, continually revisited over time: India, Israel and nuns.

Acquired by the ICCD in 1974.

Collection of 2.000 images relating to jars as works of art.

These are two of the collector’s original volumes, acquired in 2005 by Gian Luigi Martelli, containing a gallery of portraits. The first contains photographs of ballerinas in costume, work of the photography studio Pagliano and Ricordi of Milan. The second gathers portraits of noted people from the world of theatre and opera taken by various photographic studios fashionable between the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Acquired by the ICCD in 1979.

A collection of 5.000 photographs of works of art from private Venetian and Veneto collections from the first half of the 1900s.

Acquisition made in 2000. a collection of 283 plates of silver bromide gelatine produced at the start of the 1900s. There are images of journeys which the author made in various stages in Italy, France, Switzerland, the Principality of Monaco and England. From an historical and documentary point of view, a series of photographs taken in Paris is particularly relevant.

The collection, belonging to Fausto Salvatore, who worked for the Ministry of the Interior, was given by Emilia Dodi Salvatore and is in the process of formalisation. It consists of 33 positives relating to the Fascist period.

This was acquired by the ICCD in 1985-89.

A collection of 1.000 images documenting urban architecture in Rome.

An acquisition in 2001. the collection consists of 1.765 b/w prints and 99 envelopes containing negative films which are testimony of a photographic campaign from the 1970s and ‘80s conducted in L’Aquila.

Acquired by the GFN in 1906. A collection of 602 calotypes attributed to Ludovico Tuminello (1848-1895), Giacomo Caneva and John Henry Parker.

The collection was made by Ludovico Tuminello comprising of photographic images taken in Rome of antique monuments and works of art.

Location: Archive Museum for Historic Photography

Acquired by theGFNin 1972. the collection of 139 negativesbothcolloidal and silver bromide gelatine, dating back to around 1870, taken by Enrico Valenziani (1842-1908) and featuring Roman subjects.

Location: Laboratory for Photography