110,000 Documents on Saving Venice After the 1966 Flood to Be Digitised
On the flood's 60th anniversary, UNESCO and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini begin a two-year project to open the archive to everyone.
Sixty years after the devastating *acqua granda* flood of 4 November 1966, UNESCO and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini have announced a joint project to digitise the archives documenting the international effort to protect and restore Venice.
What will be digitised
- About 110,000 documents from UNESCO's International Campaign for Venice and its work safeguarding the city.
- About 6,000 photographs and audiovisual items, covering 1970 to 2017.
- A two-year digitisation effort carried out at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini's Digital Centre.
Documents will be added gradually to AtoM, an archival description system, while the photographs and audiovisual material will be published on UNESCO's Archives platform, opening them to researchers, students and curious readers anywhere.
Why it matters
The archives record how governments, experts and volunteers around the world worked together to restore the city's buildings and artworks after the flood, and how that work continued for decades. Putting it online preserves fragile paper records and makes the lessons of long-term heritage protection widely available.
"Archives are living entities and essential tools for understanding the present," said Gianfelice Rocca, president of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini.
What's next
The project will also fund scholarships to train a new generation of archive-digitisation professionals, and documentation of major Venice restoration projects is to be reused in new artistic and narrative works. UNESCO Venice director Magdalena Landry noted that the archives do more than record past work.
The digitisation is only beginning, so the full collection will not be available immediately. Venice, meanwhile, still faces flooding and climate pressures, which makes understanding past rescue efforts all the more relevant.
