Adriano Alpago novello e il Centro Studi e Documentazione della Cultura Armena

In 1967, Adriano Alpago Novello made his first study trip to Armenia; aware of the importance of the medieval cultural heritage of the southern Caucasus, he started storing consistent documentation. That documentation has been the core of decades of activity at the Armenian Culture Studies and Documentation Centre, nowadays located in Venice. In the summer 2021, the personal documentation of Alpago Novello has been brought to Venice, to join the historical collection and create a unified corpus of photos and written documents. The historical collection maintains a focus on the Armenian heritage, while the personal collection covers a wide geographical area with a special focus on byzantine Greece and Russia, Georgia, and Near East Christian heritage. This paper aims to describe the history, the state of conservation, the content, and the potential of this valuable and unknown collection of photos. A project written by the CSDCA and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice aims to promote the mentioned collection to open new research frameworks in the contemporary historical and theoretical context while strengthening and rebuilding the great legacy rooted in Venice in the study of Eastern Christian cultures. The purpose is to collect, digitalize, and catalog Alpago Novello’s photographic documentation, to create an open-source database that will satisfy a broad request for access. The archive gives an overview of the conservation of cultural heritage during the Soviet Period and terms of comparison to look critically at the present-day monuments and landscapes after human or natural transformations have occurred. In addition, the collection shows the point of view of scholars involved in the Italian missions from the Sixties to the Nineties, opening interesting paths through several study fields like art-historical historiography, visual perception between East and West, the history of photography, and Middle Eastern history.