A glorious time capsule of Tuscan life

On 5 September 1993, Emperor Akihito of Japan visited the Basilica of San Marco in Florence as part of a diplomatic European tour. A squadron of press followed him as he admired the church’s renaissance paintings – the archangel Gabriel, the dramatic Visione di San Tommaso d’Aquino. Among them was Fabrizio Giovannozzi, a young Florentine photojournalist. He saw a photo opportunity and asked the Emperor to move closer to the artworks. “You could have heard a pin drop,” Giovannozzi recalls with a smile. “Everyone in the church was petrified, dumbfounded – you’re not supposed to speak to the Emperor.” But he got the shot.

Today, Giovannozzi presides over a huge archive of such historic moments in Florence’s photographic history: Torrini Fotogiornalismo. The collection was founded in 1944 by Giulio Torrini, a well-regarded photo reporter for Associated Press, and is housed in the 13th-century Sacchetti tower, a short stroll from the Duomo. 

Through the window of the ground-floor shop, where the aristocratic Sacchetti family once housed their horses, you can see black-and-white photos and piles of boxes annotated in half-faded handwriting sitting on floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. On a small desk sits a slide viewer. “There are more than two million slides,” Giovannozzi says. 

Among the photographs that line the walls (from €20) are significant scenes from Florentine history: the city’s liberation from Nazi occupation; newly launched Fiat 500s paraded around Piazzale Michelangelo by smiling women in sleeveless white dresses in 1958; the 1966 Arno flood in which 101 people died and millions of artworks were lost; protestors in Piazza Santissima Annunziata campaigning for Italy’s 1974 divorce referendum; feminists walking the streets wearing miniskirts.

It’s real life – but the images still look like they are from a Fellini film

There’s no shortage of famous faces: Sophia Loren on set of the 1955 film The Miller’s Beautiful Wife; Brigitte Bardot at the San Michele hotel in Fiesole in 1962; Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor during their trip to Tuscany. But there are also simple scenes of daily life: young women lazing under the city’s colonnades, men in suits basking in the sun or reading the newspaper at cafés in Piazza della Signoria. Real life, but the images still look like they are from a Fellini film (though he very rarely filmed in Florence).

Those who manage to persuade Giovannozzi can book his services for new passport photos (for €15). But he seems more excited about digitising Torrini’s archive – painstakingly numbered, dated and annotated – than about taking new photographs. He believes digital cameras have changed photography for the worse. “In the analogue days, you only really had time to take two or three photos. Your eye, your frame and your dexterity were of paramount importance.” 

The archive also serves to document people and scenes that might otherwise have gone unrecorded. One customer recognised her father in a photo: a young football fan leaning out of a train window, returning from a Fiorentina match in Milan. Another realised that a traffic warden on horseback in the 1950s was his father. A returning Florentine, seeing a photograph of a family enjoying a day out on the Arno riverbank in the 1960s, recognised her whole family – mostly all deceased by the time of her visit. She also saw a small child playing with sand in the photo. “It was her,” Giovannozzi remembers. “When she told me, she had tears in her eyes.” 

Torrini Fotogiornalismo, Via della Condotta, 20/rosso, 50122 Firenze FI; torrinifotogiornalismo.it