Open-access resources
Audiovisual archives
An important part of Istituto Luce Cinecittà, the Luce Historical Archive is one of the richest in the world, and continues to grow to become the audiovisual memory of 20th-century Italy and the Mediterranean region. A time span covering the entire 20th century. Newsreels, documentaries, stock footage, photographs – an archive of contemporary history. It is divided into two sections: the film archive and the photographic archive.
Founded in 1947 by Luigi Comencini and Alberto Lattuada, Cineteca Milano is the oldest film archive in Italy. Active in the field of film conservation, restoration and promotion, the Cineteca is one of the five film archives supported by the National Film Fund. Over 500 films that have shaped the history of cinema are available to stream online free of charge, and new films are uploaded to the platform every week. All you need to do to access them is register.
Photo archives
Digitised photographic collection of approximately 700,000 images from the Carbone Photographic Archive in Naples.
Website of the Alinari Foundation for Photography, which promotes the enhancement, conservation and management of the Alinari collection. The vast Alinari photographic archive was acquired by the Region of Tuscany in 2020.
Portal of the Ministry of Culture that provides access to photographic collections on Italian artistic heritage and Italian photographers. Most of the images have been catalogued by the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione (Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation).
Databases
The SPRIAC database – Sguardi Postcoloniali sulle Riviste Italiane d’Arte Contemporanea (Postcolonial Perspectives on Italian Contemporary Art Magazines) – compiles the results of a targeted review of the magazines “Flash Art”, “Juliet” and “Tema Celeste” (to which “Segno” will also be added) for mentions of non-European and non-North American artists. It contains texts and images relating to articles, reviews, mentions and advertisements relevant to the search criteria, from issues published within the chronological period in question, with bibliographic details, the geographical origins of the artists, the terminology used, the illustrations reproduced, as well as some macro-categories around which the analysis was organised.
Cultural heritage collection
An ongoing portal that catalogues the heritage of the Catholic Church in Italy, with 226 dioceses, 2,444 cultural institutes, 15,322,656 catalogued items, 47,157 families, individuals and organisations, 481 glossary entries and 90 thematic itineraries.
Online catalogue containing information and images relating to Italian cultural heritage.
Digital access to material relating to Europe’s cultural heritage, organised by theme.
Online catalogue of cultural heritage in the Veneto region, with descriptive entries and images of all types of cultural heritage, from architectural heritage to numismatics, recorded by the region.
Digital resource based on Berenson’s publication of the same name. This search tool allows you to search for any of the drawings listed in the three editions of the work (1903 and 1938 in English; 1961 in Italian).
Platform for the digital collections of the New York Public Library.
Digital library collections
Alphabetica is an advanced bibliographic portal that retrieves information and materials within a digital ecosystem that connects different databases. The portal provides users with materials from the ICCU’s historical databases: OPAC SBN, Manus Online, EDIT16, SBN Teca, and Digitalised Historical Catalogues. With a view to increasingly broad participation in the promotion of culture, the portal has been developed to also integrate external databases. To date, Alphabetica users can, for example, consult the holdings listed in the IMAGO Digital Union Catalogue of the Emilia-Romagna Region.
The Lombardy Digital Library allows you to browse the digital collections of many Lombardy institutions, including archival documents, graphic designs, drawings, manuscripts, music and maps.
Digital library of the European Library of Information and Culture in Milan.
Portal providing free access to the digitised resources of the National Central Library of Rome (books, periodicals, collections, manuscripts, music). Some restrictions apply to copyrighted materials. The portal hosts over 21 million images from the Library’s most important and valuable collections.
Repository containing the digitised collections of various Italian organisations and institutions: volumes from the University of Turin and the Einaudi Foundation, periodicals from the Fiat Group, the Turin Chamber of Commerce and the Turin Automobile Museum, art books, old books, etc. The subject coverage is mainly social sciences and economics.
A platform that allows you to browse thousands of images of manuscripts and rare books from the University of Cambridge.
Portal providing access to documents digitised by the library of the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art. These are the historical collections of the Bibliothèque d’art et d’archéologie (BAA) and the Bibliothèque centrale des musées nationaux (BCMN).
Portal of the Luigi Chiarini Digital Library, which provides online access to rare film periodicals and valuable books in PDF format – not printable by remote users.
The Portal brings together the digitised versions of the historical and rare collections of the Polytechnic Libraries and texts digitised as part of projects carried out jointly with the libraries of the City of Turin.
Here you can access the full-text electronic collection, which includes over 150,000 specialist journals and around 3,800 databases (bibliographies, full texts, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, etc.), as well as digital resources provided in Open Access.
A platform that allows you to browse thousands of images of manuscripts and rare books from the University of Oxford, organised into collections.
Free access to the digitised collections of the Vatican Library: manuscripts, incunabula, archival materials and inventories, as well as graphic materials, coins and medals, and printed materials (special projects).
Platform for consulting digitised early printed books held in Swiss institutions.
Digital platform of the Estense Library in Ferrara.
FrancoAngeli Open Access offers an extensive catalogue of e-books and academic articles, mainly in PDF format, which can be downloaded free of charge and consulted online or offline on various devices.
Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and its partners, offering access to several million documents.
An open-access, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing articles on industrial design, visual communication design, animation and game design, architectural design, urban design and more.
A non-profit digital library consisting of websites and other cultural artefacts in digital format, whose mission is to ensure universal access to all knowledge. Like a physical library, it provides free access to all users.
Catalogues and digital collections of Italian libraries.
Virtual exhibition of Renaissance architecture books from the collections of the University Library of Padua.
Portal of the Library of Congress, with access to all its catalogues and free-access digital sections.
A platform that provides open access to 662 periodicals, including Studi di Estetica, Film Journal, Photographica, Perspective, etc.
An Internet Archive project that aims to catalogue all existing books. It contains links to purchase works that are still in print and allows you to read them directly and free of charge through digital lending or to download the full text of works in the public domain.
The Periodici Italiani Digitalizzati (Digitised Italian Periodicals) app provides online access to a database of 117 titles, comprising a total of 785,321 images, held by the Library and published between the 18th century and the first decades of the 20th century.
Platform for the management and long-term storage of digital collections of the University of Padua Library System, which since 2014 has also included Ca’ Foscari University and Iuav University of Venice. It provides access to iconographic, bibliographic and documentary resources.
A library of approximately 75,000 freely accessible ebooks.
The largest Italian collection of audiobooks, with more than 200 titles of novels and short stories.
Digital collections of museums
Digital portal for the collections of the Albertina Museum in Vienna, which comprises approximately 1.2 million works of art from the late Gothic period to the present day.
The Communication Archive provides access to the computerised database of the vast collection of items of historical, artistic and naturalistic interest held in the Civic Museums of Venice. It currently contains almost 50,000 records and is constantly being expanded and updated by the Cataloguing Centre of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.
Digital collections of the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique. You can browse through various categories of documents: manuscripts, rare and valuable printed publications, geographical charts and maps, musical scores, sound recordings, coin collections, medals, drawings and prints.
Platform for searching for rare images of art and architecture from the archives of 80 German and European cultural and scientific institutions.
Website of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which houses the world’s most important collection of decorative arts, organised into chronological sections.
Manus Online: Manuscripts from Italian libraries is a database that includes the description and digitisation (in full and/or in part) of manuscripts held in Italian public, ecclesiastical and private libraries.
The website allows you to explore the activities of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. In current and past exhibitions, in the artists featured and their works, which bear witness to the focus on modern and contemporary art in all its diverse cultural, social, artistic and political expressions.
On the Royal Collection Trust website, you can learn about and explore the Royal Collection, one of the largest art collections in the world, and the royal palaces of the British Crown.
Database of the British Museum’s digital collections, which is being continuously expanded.
Database providing online access to over one million catalogue records and over half a million images of objects from the collections of British museums.
Open Access Portals
Free research database containing abstracts of literature relating to the conservation of tangible cultural heritage. It has been managed and published by the Getty since 1983. The AATA contains over 170,000 records and adds around 4,000 new ones each year through regular updates.
Portal of the Association for Industrial Design. It offers the opportunity to search among projects and designers within ADI’s permanent collection.
Advertising archive.
Archivio Grafica Italiana is the first online archive dedicated to the entire Italian graphic design heritage, conceived and produced by Nicola Matteo Munari.
This is a bibliographic database specialising in painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative and applied arts, photography and contemporary art performance. It contains bibliographic references and abstracts in English and French of articles from journals (both print and electronic), conference proceedings, exhibitions, monographs and theses, from 1975 to 2007.
The new service, produced by the AIB, allows users to perform free searches among all the words contained in the more than 50,000 headings and over 120,000 index entries of the Italian Dewey Classification, making it easier to find the notations that correspond to their interests.
Lexical and iconographic database for the history of fashion from antiquity to the present day.
Search engine and viewer for high-definition images of works of art and cultural heritage that are in the public domain or whose licence permits reuse.
The Exhibitions in Rome 1940-1999 database is freely accessible and brings together data and documents from an ongoing research project on exhibitions in Rome from 1940 to 1999.