Heritage Lab Italgas
Italgas' laboratory of experimentation and innovation applied to historical and cultural heritage
Heritage Lab Italgas - Borgo Dora Gas Workshop (early 20th century)Museimpresa
The world of Italgas begins here: it is made up of pipes and meters, valves, the towering structures of gasometers, coal, and extends to LNG, biomethane, electricity and water.
Heritage Lab Italgas - Vanchiglia Gas Workshop, Turin (early 20th century)Museimpresa
At work, a multitude of chemists, physicists, engineers, technicians, workers, blacksmiths, carpenters, lamplighters, meter readers, firemen, and a varying number of clerks, accountants, and managers.
Everything leaves a trace, and everything gets caught in the net of some document which, when properly read and contextualised, can tell us a great deal.
The Italgas Heritage Lab was created to give new life to linear kilometres of documents, thousands of printed texts, and hundreds of technical scientific objects, which are being described, digitised, and photographed.
Italgas Historical Archive - archival fond of Renato Cerutti: detail of the notebooks on the history of illumination (1971)Museimpresa
The challenges are many: for each series of documents, a specific description and digitisation process is developed, from 13th-century parchment documents to all the records produced by gas companies from the 19th century to the present day.
Heritage Lab Italgas - Mines (second quarter of the 20th century)Museimpresa
The stories that emerge from the individual documents, made searchable, often depict very hard work, especially during the 19th century: from coal mining
to managing the production and distribution plants for manufactured gas, which from 1837 spread from Turin to the whole of Italy.
Heritage Lab Italgas - Gas appliances store, Andria (second quarter of the 20th century)Museimpresa
The work of many specialised technicians helped improve the living conditions of an ever-wider section of the population
Heritage Lab preserves this collective history, not only with company documents but also through personal collections donated to the Italgas historical archive.
Heritage Lab is a perfect bridge between the past and the future: it preserves paper documents and develops methods and structures for the conservation and use of digital records. An immense repository of data made available to all.
