Testimoni dell'eccellenza. Archivi personali presso La Sapienza

The Sapienza University can boast an immense documentary heritage right on the University of Rome campus. The scope of this patrimony goes well beyond the holdings in the Historical Archive of the University and extends to the individual faculties, departments, libraries and museums, where, over time, archives have been set up by staffs of professors and researchers. For example, the Department of Physics now hosts the archives of physicists who made crucial contributions to the history of the discipline. Other archives documenting the history of Italian biomedicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were donated to the History of Medicine Library. Still others can be found in the humanities libraries, where they provide important documentation of the genesis and evolution of the humanities as studied at the Sapienza. This article aims to illustrate how the archives of the various conservation hubs intersect and intertwine with the University’s main Historical Archive, tracing a history of research and discovery and the men and women who have built and rebuilt Italian culture over the last eighty years, and even earlier.