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On September 5, 1993, Emperor Akihito of Japan visited St. Mark’s Basilica in Florence as part of a diplomatic tour of Europe. A press squad followed him as he admired the church’s Renaissance paintings: the archangel Gabriel, the dramatic Vision of San Tommaso d’Aquino. Among them was Fabrizio Giovannozzi, a young Florentine photojournalist. He saw an opportunity to take photographs and asked the Emperor to get closer to the works of art. “You could have heard a pin drop,” Giovannozzi recalls with a smile. “Everyone in the church was petrified, stupefied; you’re not supposed to talk to the Emperor.” But he got the injection.
Today, Giovannozzi presides over an enormous archive of historical moments in Florence’s photographic history: Torrini Photogiornalism. The collection was founded in 1944 by Giulio Torrini, a renowned Associated Press photojournalist, and is housed in the 13th-century Sacchetti tower, just steps from the Duomo.
Through the window of the ground-floor store, where the aristocratic Sacchetti family once housed their horses, you can see black-and-white photographs and stacks of boxes annotated in half-faded handwriting sitting on floor-to-ceiling shelves. On a small desk is a slide viewer. “There are more than two million slides,” says Giovannozzi.
Among the photographs adorning the walls (from €20) are significant scenes from Florentine history: the liberation of the city from Nazi occupation; newly launched Fiat 500s paraded down Piazzale Michelangelo alongside smiling women in sleeveless white dresses in 1958; the Arno flood of 1966, in which 101 people died and millions of works of art were lost; protesters in Piazza Santissima Annunziata campaigning for Italy’s divorce referendum in 1974; feminists walking the streets in miniskirts.
There is no shortage of famous faces: Sophia Loren on the set of the 1955 film The miller’s beautiful wife; Brigitte Bardot at the San Michele hotel in Fiesole in 1962; Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor during their trip to Tuscany. But there are also simple scenes of everyday life: young women lounging under the city’s colonnades, men in suits sunbathing or reading the newspaper in the cafes of the Piazza della Signoria. Real life, but the images still look like something out of a Fellini film (although he rarely filmed in Florence).
Whoever manages to convince Giovannozzi will be able to hire his services to obtain new passport photographs (for 15 euros). But he seems more enthusiastic about digitizing Torrini’s archive (carefully numbered, dated and annotated) than about taking new photographs. He believes digital cameras have made photography worse. “In the analog era, there was only time to take two or three photographs. Your eye, your build and your skill were of utmost importance.”
The archive also serves to document people and scenes that otherwise would not have been recorded. A client recognized his father in a photo: a young soccer fan leaning out of the window of a train, returning from a Fiorentina match in Milan. Another realized that a traffic guard on horseback in the 1950s was his father. A returning Florentine, seeing a photograph of a family enjoying a day on the banks of the Arno River in the 1960s, recognized her entire family, most of whom were already deceased at the time of her visit. She also saw a little boy playing with sand in the photo. “It was her,” Giovannozzi remembers. “When she told me, she had tears in her eyes.”
Torrini Fotogiornalismo, Via della Condotta, 20/rosso, 50122 Florence FI; torrinifotogiornalismo.it