ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus as a lens on the making of Italy’s scientific heritage around 1876

• In Event: Spirit of 1876: The Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus: International Science Museum Links. 1

English Abstract

By the time the Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus was being organised in London in 1876, Italy had been unified for just over a decade. Against this backdrop, this contribution examines how Italy’s participation in the exhibition reflected the emerging ways in which science, technology, and heritage were being defined in the post-unification period. Drawing on the Catalogue of the Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus at the South Kensington Museum and related archival materials, the paper reconstructs which objects—and pictures of objects—were sent to London, by whom, and according to what criteria. Universities, observatories, and technical schools contributed to assembling a composite image of Italian science, reflecting the country’s efforts to construct its scientific identity within an emerging national framework. At the same time, the contribution highlights the problematic condition of scientific heritage between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: often regarded as obsolete and excluded from preservation policies, yet revived for the purpose of representing the nation’s scientific tradition on the international stage. This dual status—between neglect and celebration—reveals how, in late nineteenth-century Italy, the idea of scientific heritage began to take shape through acts of selection, reinterpretation, and display.

Author

• Paola Bernadette Di Lieto, University of Padua