One fact is certain: James M. Bradburne, whose term expires at the end of the year, has undoubtedly been able to give form and substance to the spirit of the “great Brera”, positioning the Pinacoteca di Brera and the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense as the production center of culture and research at the level of the largest museums in the world. And soon one Media library it will join the two institutes by serving as a scientific investigation laboratory around the arts, thanks to the collaboration with Brera Music. An overview is the main feature of making culture in Brera.
In this direction, the concert organized by Brera Musica was held today in the reading room of the Library, “The Last Waltz. Music for the End of an Empire” with pieces by Zemlinsky and Brahms played by Patrick Messina, Robert Cohen and Clive Britton (the concert will be available online from tomorrow on the BreraPlus platform) and reading of a piece by Robert Musil taken from “The man without qualities”. An experience that underlines the spirit of an era, that of the beginning of the twentieth century, which was crossed by an irrepressible desire for modernity.
“The value of a website lies in its desire to be a new and further gateway to the heritage of our library” he says Marzia Pontone, director of the Braidens National LibraryAnd. “Naturally we have a plurality of services in presence, but the digital space increasingly offers an access door for everyone, which overcomes geographical distances and time and which seeks to connect the assets of our institution with all the people who they will have the pleasure and curiosity of virtually visiting our library to find out something. We look forward to strengthening the variety of our services.” Obviously, the Library pursues its institutional mandate through cataloguing, digitization, loan and interlibrary loan services.
On the new website, in the section “collections”, it is possible to access all the Braidense catalogues, and over 50 Library collections, including: the Pertusati Fund, the Jesuit Library Fund, the Haller Fund and the Manzonian Fund. The richness of the library’s heritage passes through the stories of the funds and collections that are the result of research conducted over the years by generations of librarians inside the structure, presented with an attractive graphic design. This is the example of the story of the Fondo Manzoniano, available online, and connected to the “Manzoni online” project external to the Braidense library website, created by the University of Pavia. The exhibition will be inaugurated on May 4th at the Braidense Library “Manzoni 1873-2023. The plague “horrible scourge” between living and writing”.
Among the special projects of the Braidense Library, one of the best known is the Adler Collection for children in Ukrainian. Thanks to the online browse mode, it is possible to scroll through the pages of these precious illustrated books (with Italian translation), acquired last year by the Library. Among other initiatives presented on the site Living Newspaper, a project, which is developed during 15 meetings of about two hours each, from 10 November to May 2023 and which aims to bring attention back to news and information in a creative and participatory way in our times by involving young people who are facing today discover the importance of the media in contemporary society. An important part of the site is dedicated to CIRCI, the International Research Center on Childhood Culture which is committed to defending the competence, imagination, ambition, desires and basic human rights of children. Among the news announced, theopening to the public of the Mediateca Santa Teresa in the autumn of 2023. In the central hall on the ground floor will find a home International Center for Interpretation and Performance in the Arts, entrusted to the artistic supervision of the Brera Musica association, with which a two-year agreement has already been signed. The Media Library will be a showcase for the search for interpretation and the links between the various languages: music, literature and art.