www.alinari.it

It was a sunny day in Florence in the year 1890. A man dressed in black slowly walked up the stairs of the tower in order to enjoy the unique panorama over the city and the Cathedral from on high. There is something universal in this period ‘snapshot’: the anonymous human presence ‘captured’ in all its simplicity; the urban landscape-painting theme; the effect of the eternal dynamicity of the individual that is the vital nectar of every great photographer.
One is tempted to make a rash comparison with the Cyclist of Hyères by Henri Cartier-Bresson, even if almost half a century, different techniques, and different visual cultures inevitably divide the two historic moments. However, the intuition is the same: to document life, to grab the moment, to stop history. In the end, it is not very important whether that was truly the moment décisif, to put it in the words of the great French photographer.
That image of the city in the late 19th century, of a Florence that still flaunted the recent glories of being the capital of Italy, belongs to the large repertory of the Fratelli Alinari of Florence, the oldest firm in the world operating in the field of photography. It was founded in 1852 by Leopoldo Alinari, who set up his small photographic studio in Via Cornina in Florence (today it is called Via del Trebbio). The Fratelli Alinari trademark was born after only two years, when Leopold’s brothers, Giuseppe and Romualdo, entered the firm. Together, they would soon ‘conquer’ with their lens not only their ‘monumental’ Florence, but also the entire world.
They were to do this by immortalising squares and railway stations, streets and churches, carriages and ox carts; rivers of landscapes, a myriad of human faces. Their unmistakable sepia-toned black-and-white photos courageously challenged the sunlight, perhaps seeking in the luminosity almost a natural encouragement to the silence, to the melancholy of perfect snapshots in the geometric vision of the forms, in the construction of a limpid image, a clever mixture of art and artisan technique that has conditioned the history of modern photography.
When visiting the old laboratories-cum-print-shop in Largo Alinari in Florence, the firm’s headquarters since 1863 – and in admiring the glass plates in 21x27 format, the drying room with the ancient heavy pegs, the rinsing basins, the machines for reproducing the print in ‘collotype’ that still function – one should not be amazed at the great success that Alinari photos have enjoyed in the international field for more than 160 years. This is because the Alinari product offered to the public has always been characterised by unique care, perfection and identity.
Today, the Fratelli Alinari firm is under the guidance of the entrepreneur Claudio de Polo Saibanti, who has formed a joint venture with the ‘Il Sole 24 Ore’ group for the exploitation and digitalisation of its historic-artistic patrimony and its photographic archives, which are among the most important in the world. They number more than four and a half million between positives, vintage prints, negatives, and colour photographs and slides, which completely document the history of the 19th and 20th centuries, with more than 6100 albums. The firm is modern and attached to its historic Florentine roots, but its objective is always pointed 360° at the commercial universe.
The Artistic Printing Shop [Stamperia D’Arte], the sole atelier of its kind in the world,   continues to produce stupendous reproductions by means of the 19th-century historic printing method called ‘collotype’. The publishing house is qualified as a specific publisher of books and multimedia works of photography, for which it is a leader in the sector, between books, CD, exhibitions in Italy and abroad, multivision, and posters.
The primary vocation is perhaps that of working within an archival perspective that is revisited in a modern key. In the past, this vocation was perhaps lacking to the Alinari Brothers, unwitting custodians of a precious treasure trove of documents, of a patrimony that now lends itself to becoming the on-line patrimony of humanity.
The “Fratelli Alinari. Fondazione per la Storia della Fotografia [Alinari Brothers Foundation for the History of Photography]” manages the MNAF, Alinari National Museum of Photography, which since October 2006 has had its headquarters in Piazza Santa Maria Novella, in the complex of the former Leopoldine and of  AIM, the “Alinari Image Museum”, which will be inaugurated at Trieste in the spring of 2008. The Museum, which is the first one in Italy and one of sixteen in the whole world  (its first headquarters in Via della Vigna were inaugurated in 1985 by the President of the Italian Republic at that time, Sandro Pertini), today includes the Malandrini, Palazzoli, Gabba, Reteuna, Zannier, and Favrod “collections” and works of the 19th and 20th centuries by Alinari, Anderson, Brogi, Caneva, Nunes Vais, Primoli, Puccini, Ponti, Naya, Wulz, Mollino, among others. Important collaborations have also been established with the Fox Talbot Museum, the Royal Collections at Windsor Castle, the National Portrait Gallery,  the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television and the Barbican Centre in England; the Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the George Eastman House in Rochester, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the Public Library of Chicago, the Roger-Viollet archives, and the National Geographic Magazine.
Visitors arrive in Florence from all corners of the globe in order to visit these ‘cult places’: students, researchers, or simple photography enthusiasts. Outside, the silence of carts pulled by oxen is interrupted by cars and scooters, and people roam the streets dressed in clothes that are definitely different. But whoever decides, on a sunny day, to climb the steps of a tower, deluding him or herself that they will discover a new Florence, which is so beautiful when viewed from above, may realise in the end that they have performed a gesture that is out-of-date, démodé. The Alinari Brothers have already taken care of eternalising history!