Today, the backlit screens of our phones are our eyes on the world: a simple gesture of the finger is enough to scroll through the latest news, from politics to gossip. But even before the advent of smartphones and tablets, a similar gesture was enough to change the subject: turning the pages of newspapers, periodicals, tabloids and magazines was our window on the world. And this very word, ‘World’,  was chosen by Mario Pannunzio for his periodical.

Pannunzio meticulously collected and selected photographs for publication, often for pure aesthetic taste rather than a direct correlation with the articles. The Pannunzio Fund, now kept at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, counts about 20,000 photographic prints by famous authors such as Robert Capa, Lisetta Carmi, Robert Frank, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Enzo Sellerio and many others.

Centrica had the honour of participating in a major digitisation and preservation project of this extraordinary archive, producing very high resolution acquisitions of around 400 photographic prints, front and back. The gigapixel images allow us to appreciate the most minute details of the compositions and to dwell on the beauty of the film grain, an element that is now lost in digital photography.

But the project did not stop at digitisation: Centrica also dealt with the reconditioning of the Pannunzio Fund. The technical term for this activity is ‘rehousing’, a fundamental process for archives, which consists of securing objects by placing them in containers suitable for their preservation.

A fortuitous meeting made the project even more fascinating: on a train to Florence, our photographer met the librarian who, years earlier, had taken care of the arrangement of the Pannunzio Fund. This professional had divided the prints into thematic sections according to the organisation desired by Pannunzio, using craft materials to protect them as best he could. However, time spares nothing, and a new intervention with today’s knowledge and materials was necessary.

Thanks to the collaboration of restorer Giulia Fraticelli and restoration technician Eugenia Di Rocco, Centrica reconditioned the Pannunzio Fund by meticulously dusting the prints, interleaving them with tissue paper and placing them in conservation cards, which in turn were placed in archival envelopes and finally arranged in 152 boxes. This was done by replicating the original organisation and using PAT-certified materials suitable for photographic preservation. During the process, photographs in a poor state of preservation were also flagged for future intervention.

Special thanks go to the staff of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, the librarians, restorers and interns who made this project possible. The Pannunzio Fund continues to be a precious witness of Italian photographic and journalistic history, now protected for the future thanks to modern technology.

Stay tuned: very soon the images will also be available in our Gallery!

The project ‘Il mondo contemporaneo. Conservazione dell’archivio fotografico della rivista di Mario Pannunzio’ has been realised by the National Central Library of Florence and is the winner of the Bando Strategia Fotografia 2023 in the field of Conservation and Valorisation. The project is supported by the PAC2024 – Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea, promosso dalla Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura.