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Index First editions Manzoni's collections Bibliophile's works Letters and photographs
Next to the rich and precious library, the Parenti Fund has a rich collection of letters and photographs.
The epistolary consists of over 25,000 pieces: Parenti, "a man with a hundred flavors", according to the definition of his friend Orio Vergani, interwoven relationships with a vast cultural milieu: writers, musicians, scholars, painters, bibliophiles, publishers, collectors, politicians, intellectuals. The most important corpus consists of correspondence with Giovanni Gentile, thanks to which Parenti obtained an important role in the Milanese center of Studi Manzoniani and the establishment of contacts with the Florentine publishing house Sansoni with whom he then collaborated for a long time (under the direction of Gentile's son, Federico). Also important are the relations of the Parenti bibliofilo with Luigi Einaudi and Luigi Firpo, which are the basis of the related correspondence.
Among the correspondents we find, just to make some of the most famous names, Umberto Fracchia (founder of the Literary Fair), the poet Elio Filippo Accrocca, Orio Vergani, Massimo Bontempelli, Riccardo Bacchelli, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Emilio Cecchi, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Corrado Alvaro, Ada Negri among the writers: also included a letter by Thomas Mann. Among the artists and art historians, personalities such as Umberto Apollonio, Giorgio Nicodemi, Giulio Carlo Argan, Gino Severini, Lamberto Vitali, Leo Longanesi and Anton Giulio Bragaglia. Exchanges of letters also document relationships with musicians and musicologists such as Gino Roncaglia, Carlo Maria Giulini and Ildebrando Pizzetti (author of the soundtrack of the film about the Betrothed produced by Lux in 1940). There are also correspondence with theatre players such as Annibale Ninchi (founder of a well-known family of actors) and Gino Cervi, and with men of culture with whom he collaborated over the years for the radio column L'Approdo, such as Adriano Seroni, Giovan Battista Angioletti, Leone Piccioni and the poet Carlo Betocchi.
The photographic sector of the Parenti Fund is also very interesting: it contains remarkable materials, in particular portraits and views of the Milanese Luigi Sacchi (1805-1861), famous engraver and illustrator dedicated to photography in the mid-1840s (in the calotypical version released by Talbot), as well as the first illustrated edition of the Promessi Sposi's manager. Sacchi traveled all over Italy photographing monuments and views of our country and collecting the material in the total files of the Monuments, views and costumes of Italy (1852-55).
In the photographic section of the Parenti Fund there is also an anonymous album that describes an ideal journey from Turin to Florence touching Genoa, La Spezia and Pisa, dating back to the 1870s, and others related to the last decades of the same century that document trips to Egypt (with 136 photos of Bonfils, Zangaki and Legekian), Tunisia (with 36 photos almost all of Garrigues) and South Africa at the time of the Anglo-Boer conflict.
