The Generali Historical Archive will be one of more than 400 archives from Italy and abroad represented in Archivissima, with special opening hours on the evening of 7 June to mark the Notte degli Archivi (“Archives Night”) and the associated Giornata Internazionale degli Archivi (“International Archives Day”).

This year’s theme of the Italian festival dedicated to promoting and celebrating historical archives is “passions”, in a weekend full of live and online initiatives that include social networks, digital platforms, museums, theatres, and city streets: each location, whether physical or virtual, will be part of the bigger story that Archivissima weaves each year from archival histories throughout Italy.

In this framework, on Friday 7 June the Generali Historical Archive is organising three special guided tours related to the theme, including a walk around some of the most stunning buildings in the city centre and a special evening opening of Palazzo Berlam, the home of the Archive. The event is in collaboration with tour guide Francesca Pitacco and actor Lorenzo Zuffi.

The visit begins in Trieste’s iconic Piazza Unità d’Italia, where visitors will be able to appreciate the variety of architectural styles and the history of the buildings that surround the largest seafront square in Europe. From there, they will make their way to the Canal Grande and Palazzo Berlam, where they will be invited into the Generali Archives. Neoclassical, eclectic, modernist — the remarkable buildings of the Free Port of Trieste tell the story of the creation of a new city, starting in 1719. This city is bourgeois and cosmopolitan, attracting the best and brightest not only from across the Habsburg Empire, but also from as far afield as northern Europe and the Levant.

Generali itself has a spirit as cosmopolitan as the city of its birth in 1831. Underwriting its articles of incorporation in Trieste are entrepreneurs from different languages, ethnicities, and religions, united by an ambitious project that made Generali one of the city’s first truly modern enterprises: a shareholder company with extensive capital that worked throughout the Habsburg empire and beyond to insure against a range of different risks that went beyond those common at the time, mostly linked to maritime traffic, and building a vibrant and constantly developing network of people, traffic and knowledge. Generali was the dream and the passion of Giuseppe Lazzaro Morpurgo, who brought years of experience in the insurance industry to the founders’ group.

The event organisers explain: “Explosive, kaleidoscopic, all-consuming, often destructive, for centuries, passions have been at the heart of self-affirmation and a powerful bridge between individuals, private relationships and public life, a powerful engine for transforming society. […] Exploring them is a way to give space to the ideas that have changed the world, to the utopian ideals that motivated the people, the beauty of interactions, the freedom of thought […] to contribute to the creation of a new catalogue of passions, a new atlas available to everyone”.

Among the passions that warm the heart is the desire for peace. The Generali Historical Archive celebrates this initiative with a remarkable document preserved in the personal file of the secretary general at the time: a statute for a “Union of European States” (Europäischer Staatenbund). A booklet, put together in Vienna in 1914, that anticipates by half a century the spirit of the European Community, intended as an antidote to war. Peace, welfare, economic progress, the free circulation of goods and a single direct tax are among the founding principles of this association of citizens that was supposed to rise up across Europe to pressure governments and convince them to step back from the spiralling arms race that was driving Europe to the brink of the First World War.

A prophetic document, written by Edmondo Richetti, a vastly experienced executive of Generali, who by 1914 had already retired, in the days of Nobel and the first peace movements, which sought to entrust conflict resolution between states to international judicial systems rather than to militaries. An insurance broker, visionary entrepreneur, one of the few in the middle class to be awarded a title of nobility, connected to Sigmund Freud and James Joyce, Richetti is a fascinating figure, the epitome of Mitteleuropa, and a man full of practical ideals. # Passioni.

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To book: Registration only by signing up using this link.

Times available: 18:30 – 19:30 – 20:30

Duration of the visit: 1,5 h

Meeting place: piazza Unità – palazzo Stratti

Maximum group size of 20 for each time slot