22-CF-2022_Turin, Museum of Criminal Anthropology "Cesare Lombroso", Letters volume "28 April 1906"

Facilitated description:

 

The work is a book of letters written by scholars.
The book contains 613 letters written on the occasion of the Fourth International Congress of Criminal Anthropology held in Turin in 1906.
The book is kept at the Lombroso Museum in Turin.
The La Venaria Reale Conservation and Restoration Centre restored the book in 2021-2023.
The restorers carried out a cleaning (cleaning the surface from the dirt deposited over time).
They put the detached pieces together. The digitisation of the letters made in 2021 was very important for this work. 
The restorers then recomposed the volume and stitched the pages.
The leather cover has been cleaned and repaired.
The restorers cleaned the metal decorations of the cover and eliminated the deformations.

 

 

 

 

Abstract of the intervention:

 

Restoration

The volume of letters entitled ‘28 April 1906’ of the Museo Cesare Lombroso in Turin consists of 613 autographs and letters headed by professionals and universities from all over the world, sent or transcribed on the occasion of the ‘VI International Congress of Criminal Anthropology’ (Turin, 1906). The restoration had as its objectives the digitization (2021), the recomposition of the volume and the restoration of the binding.
Scientific analyses have been fundamental to understand the causes and nature of the degradation of the work and to analyze the constituent materials (supports, adhesives).
The intervention was divided into several phases. The letters were cleaned, the fragments were reassembled and the gaps were integrated. At the end of the operations, the letters were digitized and anchored again to the team. The guard cards were also cleaned and sutured of the lacerations present. As regards the structure, the number of constitutive files has been reconstructed and the binding system has been restored. The leather blanket was subjected to cleaning, to supplement the gaps and to chromatic balancing.
Finally, for the restoration of the metal parts applied on the blanket, the collaboration of the laboratory of metals, ceramics and glass was used. The elements were cleaned and the deformations corrected with pressure. At the end of the restoration the volume was placed in a conservative shell box.

The dossier preserves the report of the restoration and scientific analysis (FTIR and paper-based analysis) and the photographic documentation of the different phases of intervention (before, after, ultraviolet fluorescence).