Presenting l'Aura: the new virtual study roomThe Historical Archives of the Bank of Italy in the age of mechanical reproduction

15 february 2021

The Historical Archives of the Bank of Italy are now (also) virtual. How did we do it? It's very simple: last summer we created l’Aura, a remote study room giving ubiquitous access via the Asbi-Web application. Visit l'Aura to consult the digital images (and archival records) that are such an important part of the Bank of Italy's historical and documentary patrimony.

Several scholars have already recognized the usefulness of this new service. Complete the procedures for identification, install the App on your smartphone, and you are ready to access Asbi-Web from any computer. You can now consult our extensive collection of digitized papers (25 million pages) without needing to go to the Bank's headquarters on Via Nazionale (where we are looking forward to welcoming you back in person as soon as it is safe to do so).

For decades, the reproduction of historical documents, once available only in their original format, has been a strategic activity of the Historical Archives. The new facility, whose creation was accelerated by the COVID-19 emergency, is a novelty that brings the mechanical reproduction of documents to a whole new level. Up until now, we had created documents that could circulate, but we had never before liberated them so completely.

To fully comprehend the extent of this innovation, it is important to recognize its cultural implications.

The notion of 'mechanical reproduction' recalls the work of German philosopher, Walter Benjamin, and his book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which explored it in relation to art. The first edition of the book was published in 1936. This was then extensively revised and two new editions were released in the three years that followed. It is a brilliant work when one considers how, at a time when this technology was still in its infancy, it anticipated several themes that today are considered to be of fundamental importance.

Benjamin observed how the possibility of photographing a work or of filming it on camera eliminated the aura that surrounds works of art, through which we observe their unicity, their material irreproducibility, and which can only be approached by visiting the locations where the work is preserved. He wrote that 'even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be'.

So something is lost in the mechanical reproduction of a work of art: the physicality that confers uniqueness, authenticity and originality, which imbues it with authority, which exalts its nature as a palpable historical testimony. Ultimately, something not dissimilar happens to the documents preserved in historical archives. As the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, observed in The Savage Mind: 'The virtues of archives is to put us in contact with pure historicity. As I have already said about myths concerning the origin of totemic appellations, their value does not lie in the intrinsic significance of the events evoked: these can be insignificant or even entirely absent, if what is in question is a few lines of autograph or a signature out of context. But think of the value of Johann Sebastian Bach's signature to one who cannot hear a bar of his music without a quickening of his pulse'.

Lévi-Strauss is referring here to something that is very similar to the aura to which Benjamin draws our attention. Something is added to the information channelled by the documents; an addition that lends material tangibility to our sense of history. Of course, we could say that the aura is not essential in order to know our history, to reconstruct events and interpret stories. And yet? What happens when a document from the past is consulted thanks to digital mediation? Benjamin would say that it loses its aura. Yet he would add that it acquires something new along the way: greater visibility, the possibility of transitioning from the here and now to the wherever and forever, the opportunity of making access to cultural goods more democratic and its use more effective.

With the new virtual study room the aura is, therefore, lost.  But, by calling it l’Aura, we have decided to preserve it in name.

It is enlightening to compare the mechanical reproduction of a work of art to that of the papers preserved in historical archives. We are reminded of a handwritten note by Paolo Baffi in the margins of a letter to Giorgio Mortara or Federico Caffè; or of the slanting signature of Mussolini in a peremptory note to Bonaldo Stringer. With digitization, we undoubtedly lose the patina of time, breaking into bits this inextricable complex of cellulose, inks, powder and odours on which we know these historical figures once rested their wrists and fingertips. Digitization extracts the informational content of a document: it is its distillation. Indeed, it is the even more radical, and inevitable, change that awaits us in the future. While the paper-based originals of the old documents that are now digitized remain in any event available, if we wished to consult them or display them in an exhibition, the original digital documents that we would produce today are distillations from birth, they will never be the support on which the wrists and fingertips of those who made them rested. They may be born without an aura but they have one major advantage: they can be circulated, they can spread the knowledge they incorporate.

It is time that digital historical documents were given free rein. At such a difficult juncture as the present one, when research venues like archives and libraries are so hard to access, we believe that the decision to open the new virtual study room for our Historical Archives marks an important contribution to the life of a precious cultural asset, both today and for many years to come. As often happens, from dramatic events comes a seed of optimism, a path forward, which in no way cancels the hardship of the context from which it has sprung.