This portal collects digitized versions of the rare books and the historical collections of Politecnico di Torinoâs Libraries in addition to the texts digitized for projects shared with the libraries of the City of Turin. Digit aims to enhance, preserve and make accessible rare and valuable volumes: we respect national and international guidelines and standards for digitization in order to make our texts recoverable through Internet search engines and to offer scholars the opportunity to enjoy the historical and cultural heritage of Politecnico di Torino.
The attention and involvement for the local problems of the city and the surrounding area, attested by the essays herein published: from the debate on the Mole Antonelliana to the one on innovative transport means, from Turin urbanistic documents to Piedmontese historical cartography, from monographic issues dedicated to national and international congresses to the biographic ones focused on the figure and works of the scholars who contributed to in-depth studies on sciences and techniques applied to engineering and architecture.
Publishing on-line the historical yearbooks of the Politecnico di Torino is one of the rare examples among European Universities. This way, the main source of knowledge is made available about the memory of people and activities of our University.
Go to the Yearbooks
The Poliscriptorium Project started in 2002, as an initiative by prof. Marchis, director of CEMED (now Museum of Politecnico). Its goal was to digitize textual, iconographic and multimedia materials, which were in danger of being completely lost, due to the physical decay of the medium they were stored on (acid paper, magnetic materials, etc.). The Project aimed to maintain digital formats always in line with the evolution of both hardware and software, and focused mainly, but not exclusively, on the preservation of documents related to technology development and "polytechnical culture" in general.
The collection includes books in first edition, illustrations, magazines and documents testifying the origin of science fiction, starting from the first half of '800 until the first half of the twentieth century.
The project arises from the collaboration between the MUFANT - Museolab del Fantastico e della Fantascienza and the Progetto bibliotecario urbano sul pubblico dominio (Urban library project on public domain, by the Università di Torino, Città di Torino - Biblioteche civiche torinesi, Politecnico di Torino). It digitizes and makes them available online, documents belonging to the "Riccardo Valla" collection, now physically preserved by the MuFant in a room dedicated to the proto-science fiction.
Politecnico di Torino's libraries joined this collaboration with enthusiasm, given the undoubted relation between science fiction and science and technology. Nobody can deny that some technologies have foreseen realities of nowadays: mobile phones, radar, robots, videophones are just a few of the "scientific acquisitions" from science fiction movies and novels.
The analysis of the photographic collection owned by the Main Library of Engineering (especially the hints provided by the stamps on the pictures' positives) made it possible to reconstruct an ancient and forgotten asset already present in its original core at the Scuola di Applicazione per gli Ingegneri: the one of the Gabinetto di Architettura Antica e Tecnica degli Stili.
The e-book is the catalogue of an exhibition that was held at the Politecnico in 2015. The exhibition showed the photographic, books and documents collections once owned by the Gabinetto di Architettura, a laboratory active in the period from 1885 to about the Thirties of the Twentieth Century.
The work contains essays framing the shown collections into the didactics of the Scuola di Applicazione per gli Ingegneri before, and lately of the Regio Politecnico.
In 1902, 1903 and 1904 the Associazione Elettrotecnica Italiana AEI (Italian Electrotechnical Association) published all the works by Galileo Ferraris in a precious collection composed of 3 monographs, which are a thorough way to know and study his writings and his main outcomes. The first volume contains an interestingpreface by Guido Grassi.
L'Arte di Fabbricare, encyclopedic work by Giovanni Curioni, professor at Scuola di applicazione per gli ingegneri since 1862, was written in 6 volumes and 6 appendices from 1864 through 1884.
Besides the scientific contribute to the profession, to the teaching and to the needs of the contemporary society, the importance of the publications by Curioni lies especially in having outlined a cross section of the technical and theoretical changes of his epoch, hanging between innovation and tradition, and even more in having made clear the role and the disciplinary field of the new-born construction science. In addition to providing the academic and professional readers with a huge amount of notions, regulations, postulates and formulas supporting science and practice of building, the single editions, published by Augusto Federico Negro, are supplied with an extraordinary quantity of graphic material (plates, schemas and drawings), in order to ease the usage of the work and, by using practical examples, the comprehension of the statements included in the texts, or the problems existing between theory and practice.
La rivista "Arte Italiana Decorativa e Industriale" (AIDI) viene pubblicata dal 1890 al 1911 per complessive 20 annate sotto la direzione di Camillo Boito.
La rivista è lo strumento di divulgazione di una didattica istituzionale che ha per focus specifico il mondo della produzione artistica nell'era della rivoluzione industriale, ed è il più eclatante prodotto della Commissione Centrale per l'insegnamento artistico industriale (1884-1908), organo ministeriale composto dalle principali autorità in campo artistico e architettonico, che per un quarto di secolo provvede a un riesame complessivo dell'eredità artistica e culturale del paese costruendo una "grammatica dell'ornato italiano".
![[feed]](/style/images/feed-icon-14x14.png){kind=icon}