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FAI’s digital collections: a heritage within a heritage

3 May 2024

A new online catalogue reveals the heritage held within the Beni: paintings, furniture and objects are now just a click away.

THE FAI HERITAGE

FAI’s heritage consists of its 72 properties, but many of the properties themselves guard and contain a heritage consisting of a total of 30,000 works of art, furniture and various objects, 40,000 books and 17,700 square metres of decorated surfaces.

Some are true art collections, but many are objects – from clocks to musical instruments, from crockery to agricultural tools – that are part of the history and life of those places.

And yet, for dutiful conservation requirements, the FAI has since its inception isolated – albeit virtually – every single object, filing them in a catalogue drawn up according to criteria established by the ministerial bodies in charge.

CATALOGUING AND DIGITISATION

The cataloguing and progressive digitisation of this heritage, financed by the Lombardy Region and the Associazione Amici del FAI, are due over the years to the work of curators, scholars and archivists aided by increasingly sophisticated technological means.

The website www.faicollezioni.it (in Italian) is a digital catalogue that is constantly being updated and increased, allowing visitors to discover a selection of the most important and curious objects from FAI’s heritage. The objective is to further enhance this extraordinary ensemble as a whole, in terms of the quantity and quality of the pieces, and to offer experts and the curious free access to in-depth, detailed, and perhaps transversal, chronological or thematic knowledge. There are, in fact, many paths that this digital tool will allow and that FAI itself imagines developing over time to promote a particular knowledge of its properties, but also to offer evocative and curious insights into the history of art, furniture or customs over the centuries.

FAI Collections

A digital catalogue, with photos and descriptive cards, which allows visitors to discover a selection of the most important and curious objects of FAI’s heritage and which is constantly updated and implemented thanks to professional cataloguing and photographic campaigns.

DISCOVER THE CATALOGUE

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