Amid reports of financial crisis, the world’s oldest photographic agency is selling off its Florence headquarters and moving its vast archive into storage, while the Tuscan government deliberates over whether to save it for the Italian nation.
Fratelli Alinari, established in 1852 by the brothers Leopoldo, Giuseppe and Romualdo Alinari, won renown for capturing post-Unification Italy’s monuments, works of art, ruling classes and street life through the pioneering medium of photography. The firm’s collection today holds more than five million items from early daguerreotypes to modern digital images, including 220,000 glass-plate negatives, a library of more than 26,000 volumes and over 1,000 cameras. By comparison, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which began acquiring photographs in 1852, owns around 800,000 items.
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