Venturi Music Collection
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The Venturi Music Collection (Italian: Fondo musicale Venturi, or Fondo Venturi) is a collection of musical documents housed at the Public Library in Montecatini Terme, Italy.[1] It conserves many handwritten copies by composers who were active in the second half of the 1700s; for example, there are autographs, which are one of a kind, of composers from the Pistoia and Florence area.[2]
The Collection began with the private collection of the Sermolli family, a Tuscan nobile family that had bought musical manuscripts until the 1700s.[1] In 1933, Antonio Venturi (1905-1981), teacher at Montecatini High School, musician, and collectionist, convinced Alessandro Pichi-Sermolli, who was on the verge of selling all of his belongings, to entrust him with the management of the musical documents.[3] Venturi united the Sermolli manuscripts with his own personal paper collection, bought from ragmen, originating from the Distanti Academy, running in Pistoia and Gavinana (San Marcello Pistoiese).[1] For fifty years, Venturi was the only curator of the entire collection, to which over time he added many materials, even some of which are multimedia.[2] Aware that the musical manuscripts represent the most precious items of his collection, in 1958, he allowed an inventory to be completed by Raymond Meylan,[4] a musicologist and flautist from Switzerland, and who was Venturi's colleague in the summer season orchestra of the Giglio Theater in Lucca.[3] When Venturi died in 1981, his daughter donated everything to the Public Library in Montecatini, which in 1989 carried out a complete cataloguing on the collection.[3] In 2016, the musical manuscripts were restored thanks to a grant given by the Tuscan Region, and inserted in the OPAC for the Documentary Network of the Pistoia Province (Rete documentaria della provincia di Pistoia: REDOP)[5] and National Library Service. For the on-line recataloguing, the Center of Tuscan Musical Documentation (Centro della Documentazione Musicale Toscana: CeDoMus) collaborated.[1]