Italy was missing a national photography museum. Now it has one, in Florence, named after the Fratelli Alinari, the world-famous Florentine atelier. The formal name is in fact MNAF, Museo Nazionale Alinari della Fotografia, and it will be inaugurated on October - 28 - 2006.
Situated in Piazza Santa Maria Novella in the historic Leopoldine complex, organised into 7 sections overflowing with rare images, instruments and precious period objects, the museum will also feature an amazing scientific innovation: photography that is ‘visible' to the blind. The inaugural exhibition is Views of Italy 1841-1941: Masters of Italian Photography in the Alinari Collections, the first of many thematic shows that will periodically animate the life of the museum.
The new museum will make Florence one of the world's capitals of photography and generate a new category of cultural tourism for the city. The architectural project is by Armando Biondo (Studio Arktre), the installation by Luigi Cupellini, and the scenographic concept by the Oscar-winning director, Giuseppe Tornatore.
There are two exhibition areas: the first for temporary shows (for which an exciting calendar is already planned); the other for the permanent collection, conceived as a journey between history and the present, with instructional and technical material drawn from the exceptionally rich Alinari collections.
The journey begins in 1839, the year of the earliest daguerrotypes, and finishes with the digital imagery of our own day. A fascinating journey that traverses the era of the pioneers, the revelation of the mechanically reproducible image that revolutionised the limits of knowing and seeing, the boom years, the incredible technological advances that created a market accessible to everyone, the process of refinement of the language of photography that led to its becoming a true art, the infinite variations and accessories. Hundreds of rare images, vintage objects, equipment from the past and present.
One of the feathers in the cap of the MNAF is the programme for the visually impaired, a museum within the museum consisting in a collection of 20 photographs recreated in relief so as to be ‘viewed' through touch. Realised in collaboration with the Stamperia Braille of the Region of Tuscany, this is the first time such an experiment has ever been tried.

The seven sections of the museum

The origins of photography
(1839-1860) The first images on silver plates, daguerrotypes, created after Daguerre's announcement of the photography's invention (January 7, 1839) and the nearly coeval invention of the first photographic prints from paper negatives (calotypes), onward through a selection of works divided by genre, landscape and monument views, portraits, artistic compositions, works by some of the great names of the new invention's pioneering era.

The golden age of photography
(1860-1920) The decades in which technique and technology evolve, studios spring up all over Europe and photography establishes itself as an autonomous art form. Landscape views and reproductions of artworks respond to a demand for souvenirs on the part of travellers taking the Grand Tour, while portraiture satisfied the locals. Along with the 20th century came experimentation with new technologies and expressive languages, and photography's encounter with the major trends in other media.

The advent of the avantgarde
(1920-2000) By now emancipated, photography no longer leans on painting for support but becomes over the course of the century an increasingly autonomous and self-reflexive language, one of the main forms of contemporary art. A selection of works from the great protagonists of the 20th century, those who enriched visual culture with veritable icons of our time.

Transparent images
From paper negatives to glass plates with various techniques of sensitisation, from autochromes and hand-coloured glass lantern slides to the films of the later half of the century, a rich variety of original transparent media for a full understanding of theses important vehicles of photography.

Photo albums
A rare collection of albums of every size, shape, material and type of workmanship. Albums created to assemble and conserve images, thereby underscoring their value and importance. The pages within contain a universe of photography and decoration, each with a unique and unrepeatable story behind it.
Step by step: photography equipment from 1839 to 2000, curated by Maurizio Rebuzzini

An unprecedented journey through the history of photo-
graphic equipment
from the earliest rudimentary cameras to the more sophisticated machines of the Kodak revolution and the mass diffusion of digital photography. Eight thematic chapters and nine monographic ones recount this significant part of the evolutionary history of photographic technology.

Beyond photography
An unusual subject, but nonetheless a rich one, this section features a collection of items that show the ways in which photography has been used: stationery, documents, postcards and advertising, as well as ceramics, glassware, fabrics, jewellery, furniture, and frames, which together tell the story of how photographers have marketed and sold their skills and products and the uses made of their images.