Historical Archive and Heritage Lab
The Historical Archive of Italgas, the result of about two centuries of history, will be entirely digitalized and will enhance the cultural heritage of the company
Reconciling history with innovation, Digital Transformation with the preservation of a great historical heritage: that of Italgas and the country. These are the objectives of the Heritage Lab, a new project, carried out together with the Giorgio Cini Foundation and ARCHiVe, which aims to digitize and renew the vast Italgas Archive and to give life to a new model of the Laboratory Museum. A physical and virtual meeting place that tells, in a totally innovative way, the historical riches of one of the most important companies in our country.
The Italgas Museum will not only be a container of the company's history, where visitors will be able to follow exclusively exhibition itineraries, but it will become a real productive and always active laboratory. A meeting place that will see its hinge in the Data Square: a real "square" located inside the Museum, where the public will have the opportunity to enjoy the contents of digitizations and to interact with them in an innovative and virtual way. Data Square itself, in fact, feeds on the contents of the Italgas Archive and challenges itself to combine and share with the public daily activities, technologies and documents of the past.
History, innovation and digitization. For Italgas and for the territory. For this reason the new Heritage Lab will represent a real digital asset for Italgas.
2019 was an important year for the launch of the project that will lead, during 2020, to the creation of a large laboratory for the digitization of Italgas' cultural heritage, integrated in a new museum itinerary where the company's collections, collections and history will be preserved and better valorized to offer new educational, multimedia, interactive and laboratory paths.
Our cultural heritage includes:
Our library, which opened in 1984, has a collection of around 5,000 Italian and foreign books and magazines on the history and technology of gas, both manufactured and natural, dating from the XVII to the XX century, and numerous texts on chemistry and physics, history and technology of lighting and heating.
The newspaper archives are made up of specialist Italian and international texts and magazines on the gas, oil and methane industry from the 1930s to the 1960s. In addition, there are legal magazines and publications about the city of Turin.
Launched in the early 1980s to make the considerable wealth of documents on Italy’s technological revolution available to historians.
The starter collection was added to over the years to create a heritage of over 1,000 linear metres of documents, 6,000 books, leaflets and magazines, 35,000 prints, photographs and posters, 350 period devices and tools.
The documentation gathered can be divided into five categories:
- Main collection, composed of documents issued by the corporate bodies (Board of Directors, Board of Statutory Auditors, Supervisory Committees, Administrative and Management Committees) of Italgas and most of its subsidiaries and associated companies.
- Administrative documents, relating to Shareholders' Meetings and documents from the secretariats of the chief executive officers, chairmen and deputy chairmen that can now be consulted. The documentation, occasionally incomplete, dates from the end of the 1940s to the 1990s.
- Senior managers archive, composed of documents produced by chairmen, deputy chairmen and chief executive officers as part of their work activities for the company.
- Sales archive, composed of documents of the engineer Mario Sales (1910-2006), one of the company’s historic executives known for his considerable commitment and strong professionalism in making the Technical Division one of the key areas of the operating activities.
- Photographic, audio-visual and drawings archive, paying tribute through photographs, graphic art and audio-visual materials to the workshops, working methods, office buildings, gasometers and a variety of celebratory events.
The Italgas Heritage Lab project
Italgas, in partnership with the Foundation Giorgio Cini The Group's Museum and Historical Archive of Turin has been transformed into a laboratory equipped with the most advanced technologies for the 2D and 3D digitization of the historical, industrial, artistic and cultural heritage that the Group has collected and preserved during its almost two centuries of history.
Italgas, in partnership con la Fondazione Giorgio Cini, trasforma il suo Museo e Archivio Storico di Torino in un laboratorio dotato delle più avanzate tecnologie per la digitalizzazione in 2D e in 3D del patrimonio storico, industriale, artistico e culturale che il Gruppo ha raccolto e custodito nel corso dei suoi quasi due secoli di storia.
Find out more about Italgas Heritage Lab

ultimo aggiornamento 08 August 2020 05:33 UTC