Architectural Archives

The Architectural Archive looks after a precious collection comprised of thousands of technical drawings and hundreds of photographs of railway edifices.

The collections hail from the central offices of Ferrovie dello Stato’s “Servizio Lavori e Costruzioni” which managed the planning, creation and maintenance of the company’s infrastructure.

The entire drawing collection (containing over 10.000 transparencies) was previously safeguarded by various department heads over the years. It is mainly made up of station and railway edifice projects and includes technical drawings for the construction of industrial buildings such as engine and maintenance depots. It also includes the so-called typological designs used by FS as a template for its projects.

These collections are grouped by author and are in chronological order, as is the case for the Narducci, Mazzoni and Perilli archival collections.

The Narducci Collection was moreover enriched by the architect’s son Carlo Alberto Narducci who donated further documentation to the Foundation in 2014.

The group of drawings which form the Manzoni Collection significantly expands on the material housed in the Trento and Rovereto’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (in its 1900s Archive) and consists of, as the architect himself noted, the body of work (studies and projects) that remained at Villa Patrizi, home to the FS’s head offices.

The criteria for cataloguing other collections has remained unchanged from how they were originally ordered by their commissioning offices such as the Architectural Group Collection and other material regarding more recent projects archived in the 1970s and 1980s.

The founding of the FS Foundation in 2013 created the right conditions in which to valorize this vast graphical heritage and a place where academics and professionals can consult material for research and scientific purposes and where FS group personnel can access material for operational necessities.