| Abstrakt: |
The huge collection of the Museo di Roma comprising plans, panoramas and topographical views of the city, for the most part printed, was formed gradually over the years in pursuit of the task initially assigned to the museum of documenting and recording the many urban transformations that have taken place in Rome, especially from a topographical point of view. The article takes as its starting point the Mostra di topografia Romana, the exhibition mounted by the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele II in 1903; this was in many respects a pioneering event that reviewed in images the main stages in the topographical development of the city. The article continues with an analysis of another important topographical exhibition with exactly the same title, held in the Castel Sant'Angelo as part of the Esposizione Internazionale of 1911 and celebrating the anniversary of the unification of Italy. Even before its official inauguration (21 April 1930), the fledgling Museo di Roma had participated in this growing interest in the topographical development of the city. It thus contributed to the Mostra Retrospettiva di Topografia Romana held in 1929, even if only in the form of a series of modern copies and photographic reproductions of famous historic plans of the city. It was from that moment onwards that the history of the creation of the Museo di Roma collection began, with the aim of documenting the changing appearance of the city during the various periods. Yet it was not until 1941, shortly before Italy's entry into the war, that the museum's collection really began to expand thanks to its purchase from the Landini bookshop of a huge collection of 7000 prints with drawings devoted to topographical views of the city and its environs. This acquisition (together with the small initial endowment dating back to 1930) formed the largest nucleus of material from which the Gabinetto Comunale delle Stampe of the Museo di Roma derived its origin. An historical reconstruction of this important purchase is furnished here for the first time, also through the publication of the sale document and related archival material relating to it. These documents show that this collection, placed on sale by Landini, consisted in the main, of prints and drawings amassed by an antiquarian, bookseller called Pietro Piere, who had begun to assemble it some fifty years earlier. The author attempts a reconstruction of the personality of this Italian bookseller: she shows that Pieri was among the first, if not the first, to have 'the sense and passion for the documentary print' and that, thanks to his intelligence and cultural sensibility, he helped to introduce it into the antiquarian circuit. After the war, when the Museo di Roma moved to its historic seat in the Palazzo Braschi, the history of the collection confirmed its own original mission through a succession of new acquisitions and donations, which intensified from the early 1950s to the present day. That mission was to preserve for the collective memory the many ever-changing portraits of Rome which, if placed alongside each other, would furnish a dynamic representation of a city that is never the same but that continues to be transformed, or to disappear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
