Biographical overview
1983: Alberto Prandi (approximately 500 works, including monographs, pamphlets, and periodicals published between 1964 and 1975 by alternative publishing houses)
Alberto Prandi (Bolzano 1948 – Venice 2016) graduated in architecture from the Iuav University of Venice. He worked as a graphic designer and was a scholar and lecturer in the history of photography, on which he published historical essays, with particular attention to photographers from the Veneto and to early photography.
From 1995 to 2016 he directed the Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione and the Museum of Type and Typography in Cornuda (Treviso).
From 1970 he served for a decade as director of the Cluva publishing bookshop, the cooperative bookshop founded in the early 1960s at the Institute of Architecture in Venice, which for many years was one of the principal Italian reference bookshops for students, architects, and urban planners.
From 1995 to 2005 he held the course in Graphics and subsequently in History of Visual Communication at the Faculty of Design and Arts of the Iuav University of Venice. From 2002 to 2016 he held the course in History and Technique of Photography at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Verona, and from 2004 he also held courses in History of Photography at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Acquisition
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Politics and Sociology Section
The first part of the collection was donated to the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in 1983 by Alberto Prandi and was catalogued in the National Library Service (SBN) in 2001.
Extent and composition
This section comprises approximately 500 works, including monographs, pamphlets, and periodicals published between 1964 and 1975 by publishing houses associated with movements and parties of the Italian extra-parliamentary and revolutionary left.
Alongside pamphlets addressing the urgent and controversial issues of those years—such as the Piazza Fontana bombing, political violence, the Pinelli case, and, in the Venetian context, the struggles of Porto Marghera—the collection includes congress theses documenting the dissolution or reorganisation of extra-parliamentary left-wing parties and movements in Italy.
Of particular significance are the numerous leaflets produced by student collectives, factory councils, and struggle committees active in factories, schools, and universities in the Venice area.
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Photography and Graphics Section
The second part of the collection was donated by Prandi in 2013. It has been fully catalogued in SBN and is available for consultation.
Extent and composition
This section comprises approximately 1,500 works relating to photography, the history of typography and graphic design, and art history (with particular reference to photography). The collection offers a broad overview of photography from its origins to the present day, both in terms of technical developments and changes in artistic sensibility.
Of particular documentary value are numerous works—some rare and now out of print—containing images of people, landscapes, and urban settings from around the mid-nineteenth century onwards.
The section also includes a substantial body of minor material (brochures, exhibition catalogues) testifying to the vitality of artistic experimentation in the field of photography.
Finally, an important component consists of Italian and foreign publications on typography, considered both from a historical perspective and in relation to experimentation with new forms (advertising, children’s books, etc.).
Fully catalogued in SBN