The Ferrara Civic Museums Photo Library, now preserved at Palazzo Bonacossi, was established in 1970 as an internal documentation service of the municipal heritage and the protection and enhancement activities implemented by the city’s museum institutions. This photographic collection, through exchanges, specific photographic campaigns, donations and acquisitions, over time reached an important consistency of more than 150,000 negatives, 200,000 prints, 30,000 slides, preserving a vast photographic documentation related, mostly, to Ferrara’s monuments and works of art, but also to the city’s urban and building evolution. The original core of the collection, of great interest for the historical memory of Ferrara and its territory, consists of the so-called Medri fund.

The photographic collection of the historical director of the Civic Museums Gualtiero Medri (1887-1970), donated by his widow Alma in 1971, documents the city in shots ranging from the 1940s to the 1950s. Alongside this initial nucleus, from 1970 to 2000, the so-called Topographical Archive was built up, consisting of almost 50,000 photographic prints collected in over 250 envelopes, aimed at as systematic a collection as possible of documentation relating to Ferrara’s heritage. Significant enrichments have come from purchases, donations and deposits, such as the Vecchi&Graziani Fund, the Bondanelli Fund, and the De Rubeis, Venturelli and Mentessi Funds. Most recently coming to the Photo Library are the so-called “Ufficio Centro Storico”, “Comune di Ferrara”, and “Lavori Pubblici (LLPP)” Funds, which collect shots of great interest for the city’s urban history, documenting the building ferment of the 1930s, the postwar reconstruction, and the rise of new neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s.